I always miss python's built-in doc strings when working in other languages. I know this may seem odd, but it allows me to cut down significantly on excess comments while still providing a clean description of my code and any interfaces therein.
What Language Feature Can You Just Not Live Without?
If someone were building a new language and they asked you what one feature they absolutely must include, what would it be?
This is getting kind of long, so I figured I'd do my best to summarize:
Paraphrased to be language agnostic. If you know of a language which uses something mentioned, please at it in the parenthesis to the right of the feature. And if you have a better format for this list, by all means try it out (if it doesn't seem to work, I'll just roll back).
Regular Expressions ~ torial (Perl)
Garbage Collection ~ SaaS Developer (Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, .NET)
Anonymous Functions ~ Vinko Vrsalovic (Lisp, Python)
Arithmetic Operators ~ Jeremy Ross (Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, C#, Visual Basic, C, C++, Pascal, Smalltalk, etc.)
Exception Handling ~ torial (Python, Java, .NET)
Pass By Reference ~ Chris (Python)
Unified String Format WalloWizard (C#)
Generics ~ torial (Python, Java, C#)
Integrated Query Equivalent to LINQ ~ Vyrotek (C#)
Namespacing ~ Garry Shutler ()
Short Circuit Logic ~ Adam Bellaire ()
