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What's the most fun programming language to learn? (piefed.ca)

submitted 2 days ago by ageedizzle@piefed.ca to c/learn_programming@programming.dev

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I don't need something practical. I just need something fun to keep me motivated.

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[–] DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I find modern C++ with templates and constexpr to be quite fun, mainly from the perspective of trying to do as much at compile-time as possible. Most of the resulting code is nearly incomprehensible and never gets used for anything outside of a godbolt demo, but trying to do complex tasks within the limited and unintuitive world of compile-time evaluation is something I've never really been able to find in any other language.

~~i don't want to hear about rust, const generics are almost useless and you know it, specialization isn't really a thing and nothing like variadic templates exists yet~~

[–] ageedizzle@piefed.ca 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

~~i don’t want to hear about rust, const generics are almost useless and you know it, specialization isn’t really a thing and nothing like variadic templates exists yet~~

What is your honest opinion about Rust? I'm curious

[–] DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Rust has a lot of cool ideas (I love the borrow checker), but in its current state I don't think it can replace C++ for the things I'd be interested in using it for. 99% of the time when I reach for a natively compiled language it's because I need to do some performance-critical loop I can't reasonably implement in the language my business logic is written in (normally Java), and I end up in a situation where most of Rust's advantages (and C++'s footguns) aren't really relevant (lifetimes don't matter if I'm just writing some SIMD code which reads/writes into externally allocated memory segments). So for my purposes, Rust is mostly just a worse version of C++ in that it's missing a bunch of features I want (my main gripes already listed above) and has a bunch of cool features that I don't care about.

If I were writing an entire program from scratch I'd probably opt for Rust over C++, at least for the bulk of the business logic, but I don't think Rust has quite achieved its ideal of "zero-cost abstraction" for many performance-critical use cases, and certainly not most of the ones I actually have.

[–] orclev@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

You should check out Zig's macro system, I think you'll find it really interesting.