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@sos yeah I find zig baffling. manual resource management in a time when we have solved resource management with automatic reference counting is, well, certainly a decision in 2024. it is something i find offputting about hare too

@sos they took that from Perl/Ruby actually, not C++

@sos if you're looking at C-likes have you checked out odin? i've been meaning to look into it properly after using C for a bit and wanting smth that can deal with strings and arrays better lol

@sos @jazz you should look at Go next, it's the punching bag of web development (other than the one-we-never-mention, PHP)

@sos @jazz Don't skip out on Pony! https://www.ponylang.io/

@sos Like, I'm assuming you're doing a bit here. Esp tagging the respective languages. But this sure comes across as gleeful ignorance of some interesting languages & paradigms

@sos oooh! I started writing a programming language! Roast my syntax. https://konascript.org/

@sos @Kowfm I don't know if this is on purpose but I found it quite funny that the example has Element.new("Karl") but karl means male in Icelandic, and kona means female.

@sos what they made a turbo pascal with emojis? This is exactly what I've been looking for!

@sos this is just rust. whose syntax still scares me.

@sos the nim guy is an unhinged right wing bigot so that's probably enough of a reason to pass on that one https://peoplemaking.games/@eniko/110652598034999459

@sos I wouldn't call Crystal simple but it is a joy to use
It has convenience functions for almost everything and the checking is so strict that if your program compiles it probably works

@sos #C would require way more steps than that, and it would snuck some kind of undefined behavour in the process

@sos and already you are playing with fire
printf load a gun to the most important data structure in your program… just to write out some log lines

Meanwhile the #nim version is memory safe, like almost everything outside of #c land

@sos and that for loop is anything but readable for anyone without #c braiinrot

@sos@mastodon.gamedev.place @docRekd@hachyderm.io if we do the same thing you did to zig here:
- typdef struct? Why not just struct?
- Why is the struct named Person twice?
- char\* vs a string in nim is... not simple or intuitive
- why are the [] after the identifier instead of with the type?
- why do fields need a .? What does the dot mean?
- p++?? Why are we incrementing a person?

I don't disagree with your initial assesment but C is not a simple language.

@sos I find it reasonable and readable. I’ve seen much much worse

@sos

As a not-really-programmer, Nim is the best that I've seen with easy syntax that still offers performance and flexibility (so I can agree on the other languages not being simple in this same way). Simple in the higher-level stuff it gives you, allowing multiple/easier ways do things. I know this is a different type of simple than you probably mean, which is the language itself being smaller (less concepts to know and less to go wrong, but more manual work). But with Nim you don't need to know everything to work at a script-like level (and nimscript is even a subset of the language) and memory management can be tweaked or disabled if you know what you're doing.

Though Nim is somewhat niche (lacking community), I can see why some things like whitespace and other choices may be polarizing (though I like them), and I don't disagree with the point that @eniko made (that also caused a big contributor to quit, the creator of Nim's package manager, so that made the bus factor worse).

Sidenote, I didn't fully implement it but here is some of my Nim code for loading a polygon from a text file (format example) (readability note: instead of something like float32(i) I could've done i.float32). Though this is via for Raylib bindings, I know that using libraries like this probably makes language differences a bit more trivial, and maybe there are people who can write more-readable C this way.

@sos Funny thing is that I've never seen zig and I'm pretty sure I get everything there, though adopting rubyish pipe-delimited lambda arguments is definitely not something I'd do for a new lang

@sos nobody remembers how Ruby worked out for Twitter

@jack @sos I was there... I remember.

@sos Well, there are many ways to understand the word "simple". In this case it means a minimal language you can pick up quickly and little to no magic behind the curtain. Zig is certainly simpler than C if you don't count that always explicit allocator. What it gives you and takes away from you is debatable. In this case, you could write a simpler code example in C++ for sure, but that doesn't mean that C++ is simpler than Zig, so I don't think you are being really objective here.

@sos @mfranc Well, it is "no hidden HEAP memory allocation". Allocations on the stack do not use a dynamic memory allocator. It isn't really about the variable size here. It would crash but the compiler blindly accepts to allocate a 1GB variable in the stack if you ask for it.

@sos YOU MEAN ZIG ISNT THE C KILLER

@sos the thing most new "simple" language don't seems to get is that C has pretty much everything a simple programming language should have. It's not perfect and has some lacking.... But sincerely it has everything you need.
On top of my head I can think about Lua as another simple language that get's "simple" and it's another "old" language.

@sos We definitely need more languages and frameworks to make trivial programs easier and easy programs harder.