top | item 8969303

(no title)

Maybe you don't like programming? Or you did once, but you've grown bored with it now that it's not as challenging?

In my opinion, a programming language is good if it enables the programmer to move from a concept to correct and maintainable implementation with minimal friction. I don't expect a programming language to entertain me.

The burden is then on me to find projects that I believe in and will enjoy implementing. This is, of course, easier said then done.

discuss

u84six|11 years ago

No, I actually do like programming. And I agree with you that there's more to choosing a language than having fun with it. I've had to make that decision for 2 decades. :) But my idea of fun is when I find a language that does a lot with less code, easy to apply patterns, doesn't have a lot of boilerplate, doesn't take a lot of tooling, simple, sleek, and allows any style of programming (e.g. oop, functional, procedural). Like I said, I've tried Go and it just didn't feel like that. It felt like, well, Java. The language I used to build apps in the 90s.

gcv|11 years ago

Any modern Lisp gets you there. The three leading dialects, namely Common Lisp, Racket, and Clojure, are all excellent. Each makes different trade-offs in what it offers. As a former Java programmer, you will probably like Clojure's near-perfect Java interop and excellent performance. Racket is probably the best batteries-included language and environment available today. Common Lisp is a bit grandfatherly, but it's the kind of grandfather who teaches you to fly his aerobatics plane. Its condition system, in particular, should be required study to anyone who purports to design languages and runtimes.

I read up and played with Rust earlier this week. It's also excellent, and while it's too young and has been too volatile for libraries to solidify, that will change in the next few months. The tooling (as far as Emacs modes and the dependency/build system, Cargo, are concerned) looks solid. Performance is already decent, and has the potential to eventually match C. To be honest, Rust feels like what Go would have been had its authors understood Lisp and Haskell.

srpeck|11 years ago

You might enjoy Lua (http://www.lua.org/) or k (http://kparc.com/k.txt).

billsimpson|11 years ago

That does sound fun. Let me know if you find it.