I feel proponents of any programming language put a lot of spin around what isolated aspects it is good for, but fail to illustrate what a programmer in even one target domain gains from using it.
Are there programming language implementations unlike what is described above, that you feel back up their marketing?
Of course, Python. Just look at the TIOBE language popularity index. The top languages all have some rational for use. Not so popular have less reasons to use or just narrower application range. See https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ .
Python is easy to learn. C and C++ when Python is too slow. I often find Python slow.
Probably rust for the later these days
Python is slow often 1% of the speed of a fully parallelized and vectorized C app compiled specifically for your architecture. There are ways to improve speed like libraries, PyPy, numba, etc of course but often theٌse are application specific and do not always give the performance you might think. I love Python, but for speed it is not the best.
Interesting. What is useful in Python other than the effort put into the bindings to fast libraries? I thought alternatives like Go, Julia and Ruby are appreciated over Python for programming utility.
There are many easy-to-learn languages, and others actually have useful software development ideas (immutable by default, for example). I understand if expectations are lower, though, from the language talk, and if any language with the required libraries is fine.
Inane features a language happens to have, like object-orientation, are marketed that are not backed up by any argument or example beyond homework-level code.
What language features do users say helped them? Existence of libraries didn’t make C a good language, and providing a binding to those libraries does not make Python a good language. Hard work must go into bindings, whether for Python or for Ruby or for Lua, but Ruby and Lua make convincing cases for themselves.
Hm, except in the way that being able to call into library functions “relatively easily” from the base language was a good way for others to create a bajillion handy libraries.
And once you’ve got those available to extend your language in any direction you want, you’re well on your way to ubiquitousness.
I used Lua as a scripting language directly tied to C. It is useful for allowing scripts to interact directly with compiled code. The compiled code is still the focus, but the scripts allow changes without a recompile.
I used to like C#, but dotnet didn’t become as portable as I hoped it would.
I use C (embedded), C++ (everything), Python (data manipulation), PowerShell (pipelines) and bash (pipelines).
I hope you can find a non-homework job to use whatever skillset you are developing.