languages of choice

C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and

most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are

also popular in small but influential communities.

There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers

with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice.

They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other

hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel").

Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or

appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and

a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems

programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific

programming.

Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and

Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered

necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language),

and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL

or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and

unmitigated loss.

[Jargon File]