Do you maybe know some Rust? I'm also not that experienced with FP languages, but Gleam felt familiar enough, due to some Rust-isms, to allow me to focus more on the concepts rather than the syntax. Granted, I spent a few afternoons with it, but if I were to pick a FP language again to wrestle my brain into submission, I'd probably go with Gleam due to familiarity.
I read it as finding a happy medium between analog and digital i.e. people will love the big screen if they still have physical buttons for all the functions they use often while driving. If you force them to fiddle around with touch screen for everything, they'll hate the big screen alltogether because the experience frustrates them.
I didn't understand him that way. It's more that it helps if people can more easily pick up a foreign language, or solidify their skills, along the way through media. Doubly so when it's a lingua franca like English.
Though for you, I understand you might have been peeved if people kept switching to English when you just wanted to practice Dutch.
The approach feels like a natural extension of Zig's philosophy about explicitness around low-level operations (no hidden control flow, no hidden memory allocations, etc.). Your function can be blocking? Communicate that through the function signature! Very in style for the language.
Obviously, I/O as an interface is the headliner here, but there are lots of other goodies to pay attention to, such as the "juicy main".
Small integers auto coercing into floats is a nice gift to game devs. It's nice that game dev is acknowledged as one of the niches Zig can target as I believe it could really thrive there due to how easily it can integrate with C & C++. Or, rather, more easily than the alternatives.
It's the dark horse of this release as CLI parsing can also be more easily built on top of it. There's a couple of proposals floating around now, so I hope we get something soon-ish (maybe in 0.18 since a short cyle is planned for 0.17).
It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to migrate from C, building a C project is just so much nicer with Zig than fiddling around with CMake. You got people using it as a build system even for Go projects, especially if they're relying on CGo.
However, if you were entertaining the idea of slowly switching to Zig, the build system would be the place to start. Moving away from CMake is worth it even if you don't push it further.
But yeah, the C-Zig interop story is so good it's a no brainer if you want to "modernize" your C codebase, and you can do so incrementally instead of stopping the world for a rewrite.