When I was a kid, I was really into fantasy books and online text-based RPGs. I met some friends through one of those games, and they needed some changes made to their website and forum. Somehow, I ended up working on it. Then I asked my parents to get me a PHP5 book for Christmas. I think I was around 13-14 then. This was one of few programming books I've read thoroughly, although I don't remember anything from it now.
After that I started creating websites, learning HTML and JavaScript. At some point I've found Clojure and functional programming and, immediately, decided it's better than anything else, so I started to learn it.
Mostly, I learned by trying to make something, looking through the internet to find help, and joining some online communities. My parents didn't care much if I was focused on school or not, as long as I was doing something, so I had a lot of time to learn by myself.
In high school programming was one of the leading subjects in my class. There I realized I'm already quite proficient at it. I was not the best in math or physics, but was easily the best in programming.
And so it goes on for about 20 years now. I still mostly learn by doing. I read some programming books, but rarely as thoroughly as my first PHP book.
Clojure is widely used, opinionated, promotes immutability, has lots of libraries and lively community. It is overall great language, really nicely designed, 100% worth using.
If you want the best performance and need to build executables without JVM then SBCL is a better choice, although probably takes longer to learn.
I wrote my fair share of Clojure, SBCL just had a look at.
>Zig, meanwhile, just shrugs and says, "You break it, you fix it."<
Exactly. That’s what Rust defends us from. It makes breaking things way harder. Rust forces you to think differently, you cannot just do what you want, but that’s it’s selling point. The article focuses mainly on feelings not facts and that’s ok, but I don’t feel exhausted writing Rust. I like that it’s safe and I’m happy to sacrifice some freedom if I get safety in return.
That’s a weird article. Rust wanted to be safe systems language and it is. Where’s the issue? Zig has different goals. That’s ok. What are actually discussing here?
After that I started creating websites, learning HTML and JavaScript. At some point I've found Clojure and functional programming and, immediately, decided it's better than anything else, so I started to learn it. Mostly, I learned by trying to make something, looking through the internet to find help, and joining some online communities. My parents didn't care much if I was focused on school or not, as long as I was doing something, so I had a lot of time to learn by myself.
In high school programming was one of the leading subjects in my class. There I realized I'm already quite proficient at it. I was not the best in math or physics, but was easily the best in programming.
And so it goes on for about 20 years now. I still mostly learn by doing. I read some programming books, but rarely as thoroughly as my first PHP book.