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Of the ones you mentioned, Zig is the only one that has explicit memory management. > Is it worth learning Languages are easy to pick up once you understand f

Of the ones you mentioned, Zig is the only one that has explicit memory management. > Is it worth learning Languages are easy to pick up once you understand fundamentals. The borrow checker is intuitive if you have an understanding of stack frames, heap/data segment, references, moved types, shared memory. You then should be asking "Is it worth using?", then evaluate use cases.. pros/cons.. etc. For CLI, Rust is likely the easiest given it's macros, but if you struggle with the borrow checker then it won't be. You will be fighting the compiler instead of developing something. Depending what your CLI program is doing, you might want to evaluate what libraries are available, how they handle I/O, and parallelism. JavaScript has incredibly easy and fast concurrent I/O thanks to libuv and v8.

travisgriggs 4y ago
>> Is it worth learning > Languages are easy to pick up once you understand fundamentals. The borrow checker is intuitive if you have an understanding of stack frames, heap/data segment, references, moved types, shared memory. I see this sentiment often. In the last 10 years, I have come up a level in raw C, learned Kotlin, Swift, Python, Elixir/Erlang, and a smattering of JavaScript, all coming from a background that included Fortran and Smalltalk. My problem with the dialogue is what is meant by “learn.” I have architected, implemented, and maintain different components of our products in all these languages currently. I think that demonstrates I have “learned” these languages, at least at this level of “picked up.” But I can’t write Python the way Brett Canon does. Or Elixir the way Jose Valium does. Or any of their peers. And in that regard I still very much feel I have not “learned”. I spent a couple days playing with Zig a month or so ago. I became familiar with the way it worked. I could spend another month or so in that phase, and then could probably comfortably accomplish things with it. But I don’t think I’d feel like I’d “learned” it. It reminds me of my experience learning Norwegian. I lived in Norway for 2 years and did my best to speak as much Norwegian as I could. At six months I could definitely get by. At 13 months, as I embraced the northern dialect, I was beginning to surprise Norwegians that I was from the states. I started dreaming in Norwegian at some point after that. But even at 24 months, able to carry on a fluid conversation, I realized I still could “learn” the language better than I currently knew it. So I guess, it always seems there needs to be more context, from both the asker and the answerer, when this “should I learn X” discussion is had. Learning is not a merit badge.

travisgriggs 4y ago

>> Is it worth learning > Languages are easy to pick up once you understand fundamentals. The borrow checker is intuitive if you have an understanding of stack frames, heap/data segment, references, moved types, shared memory. I see this sentiment often. In the last 10 years, I have come up a level in raw C, learned Kotlin, Swift, Python, Elixir/Erlang, and a smattering of JavaScript, all coming from a background that included Fortran and Smalltalk. My problem with the dialogue is what is meant by “learn.” I have architected, implemented, and maintain different components of our products in all these languages currently. I think that demonstrates I have “learned” these languages, at least at this level of “picked up.” But I can’t write Python the way Brett Canon does. Or Elixir the way Jose Valium does. Or any of their peers. And in that regard I still very much feel I have not “learned”. I spent a couple days playing with Zig a month or so ago. I became familiar with the way it worked. I could spend another month or so in that phase, and then could probably comfortably accomplish things with it. But I don’t think I’d feel like I’d “learned” it. It reminds me of my experience learning Norwegian. I lived in Norway for 2 years and did my best to speak as much Norwegian as I could. At six months I could definitely get by. At 13 months, as I embraced the northern dialect, I was beginning to surprise Norwegians that I was from the states. I started dreaming in Norwegian at some point after that. But even at 24 months, able to carry on a fluid conversation, I realized I still could “learn” the language better than I currently knew it. So I guess, it always seems there needs to be more context, from both the asker and the answerer, when this “should I learn X” discussion is had. Learning is not a merit badge.