this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming

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[โ€“] fubo@lemmy.world 130 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (18 children)

Until you know a few very different languages, you don't know what a good language is, so just relax on having opinions about which languages are better. You don't need those opinions. They just get in your way.

Don't even worry about what your first language is. The CS snobs used to say BASIC causes brain damage and that us '80s microcomputer kids were permanently ruined ... but that was wrong. JavaScript is fine, C# is fine ... as long as you don't stop there.

(One of my first programming languages after BASIC was ZZT-OOP, the scripting language for Tim Sweeney's first published game, back when Epic Games was called Potomac Computer Systems. It doesn't have numbers. If you want to count something, you can move objects around on the game board to count it. If ZZT-OOP doesn't cause brain damage, no language will.)


Please don't say the new language you're being asked to learn is "unintuitive". That's just a rude word for "not yet familiar to me". So what if the first language you used required curly braces, and the next one you learn doesn't? So what if type inference means that you don't have to write int on your ints? You'll get used to it.

You learned how to use curly braces, and you'll learn how to use something else too. You're smart. You can cope with indentation rules or significant capitalization or funny punctuation. The idea that some features are "unintuitive" rather than merely temporarily unfamiliar is just getting in your way.

[โ€“] ace@lemmy.ananace.dev 4 points 2 years ago

ZZT-OOP is fun to work with though, definitely not meant for doing anything more complex than light gameplay, and yet people have done ridiculous things with it.

Though I personally did most of my coding in that vein in MegaZeux with their Robotic language, which is basically ZZT-OOP++.

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