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So much of language opinion is based on people's progression of languages. My progression (of serious professional usage) looked like this: Java -> Python -> C

So much of language opinion is based on people's progression of languages. My progression (of serious professional usage) looked like this: Java -> Python -> C++ -> Rust -> Go I have to say, given this progression going to Rust from C++ was wonderful, and going to Go from Rust was disappointing. I run into serious language issues almost daily. The one I ran into yesterday was that defer's function arguments are evaluated immediately (even if the underlying type is a reference!). https://go.dev/play/p/zEQ77TIP8Iy https://go.dev/play/p/zEQ77TIP8Iy Perhaps with a progression Java -> Go -> Rust moving to rust could feel slow and painful.

62951413 2y ago
I'm curious how one ends up with such ahistorical sequence. I'd expect it to be more aligned with the actual PL history. Mainstream PLs have had a fairly logical progression with each generation solving well understood problems from the previous one. And building on top of the previous generation's abstractions. Turbo Pascal for education, C as professional lingua franca in mid-90s (manual memory management). C++ was all the rage in late 90s (OOP,STL) . Java got hot around 2003 (GC, canonical concurrency library and memory model). Scala grew in popularity around 2010-2012 (FP for the masses, much less verbosity, mainstream ADTs and pattern matching). Kotlin was cobbled together to have the Scala syntactic sugar without the Haskell-on-the-JVM complexity later. And then they came up with golang which completely broke with any intellectual tradition and went back to before the Java heyday. Rust feels like a Scala with pointers so the "C++ => Rust" transition looks analogous to the "Java => Scala" one.
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  >I'm curious how one ends up with such ahistorical sequence. they are all actively in-use.. if gp is earlier in their career, it could all be in last 10 years.
guappa 2y ago
I learnt QuickBasic, VisualBasic, Java, C, Python, Go, C++ in that order. I'd never do a project in go. Go suitable for networking? Really? With no packed structs and no way to set the endianness?

62951413 2y ago

I'm curious how one ends up with such ahistorical sequence. I'd expect it to be more aligned with the actual PL history. Mainstream PLs have had a fairly logical progression with each generation solving well understood problems from the previous one. And building on top of the previous generation's abstractions. Turbo Pascal for education, C as professional lingua franca in mid-90s (manual memory management). C++ was all the rage in late 90s (OOP,STL) . Java got hot around 2003 (GC, canonical concurrency library and memory model). Scala grew in popularity around 2010-2012 (FP for the masses, much less verbosity, mainstream ADTs and pattern matching). Kotlin was cobbled together to have the Scala syntactic sugar without the Haskell-on-the-JVM complexity later. And then they came up with golang which completely broke with any intellectual tradition and went back to before the Java heyday. Rust feels like a Scala with pointers so the "C++ => Rust" transition looks analogous to the "Java => Scala" one.

aaronblohowiak 2y ago
>I'm curious how one ends up with such ahistorical sequence. they are all actively in-use.. if gp is earlier in their career, it could all be in last 10 years.

guappa 2y ago

I learnt QuickBasic, VisualBasic, Java, C, Python, Go, C++ in that order. I'd never do a project in go. Go suitable for networking? Really? With no packed structs and no way to set the endianness?