Neurodivergent devs: what languages actually *click* for your brain?

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@gooba42 I've been trying to pick a language that doesn't fight with me. I really enjoy Rust but it's hard to learn. I just found Odin and it's interesting. C/C++ looks too complicated for me.

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@gooba42 Also: I love C# syntax but the ecosystem weight worries me. How's your experience with that?

[gooba42@mastodon.social]

@dylanisaiah My history is mainly self-taught everything.

I learned C# one weekend because work changed their minds on something they thought would be Java.

I do my hobby stuff at home with JetBrains and VSCode on NixOS Linux but work is all in on Windows. I can't say as I've felt much difference from the ecosystem but I don't care for the Visual Studio IDE.

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@gooba42 I am self-taught everything. Though I don't learn like everyone else and learning is actually quiet difficult for me. I started with Java -> C# -> Rust and now I am trying Odin. Though I toyed with other languages Python/GDScript (Godot) and Go.

[gooba42@mastodon.social]

@dylanisaiah I think part of C/C++ that makes it so unfriendly is the overbearing noise about memory management. It's difficult when you get into the weeds but not every project actually needs to get into the weeds that way.

It's much easier to learn something when you actually have a need for it though. If you don't jump right into the deep end, you can soften the learning curve considerably.

That said, there's a lot of power in the "fancy" parts too.

[josejfernandez@todon.eu]

@dylanisaiah @gooba42 I do C# a lot and loving the language. What do you mean with "the ecosystem weight"?

[gooba42@mastodon.social]

@dylanisaiah I haven't clicked with rust though I've been poking at it and trying a little. It's just hard once you have *a* language that works to justify going deep on another thing. It really needs to offer something special that's actually relevant to my personal project to make it worth switching things up

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@gooba42 I haven't tried C/C++, though memory management really isn't something I want to think about, let alone tackle. I mostly just don't like the syntax. stdin/stdout etc. it all looks very... confusing to be honest.

[nours@eldritch.cafe]

@dylanisaiah
Python or Rust

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@josejfernandez @gooba42 IDE weight mostly — Visual Studio/Rider feel heavy compared to lightweight editors I use for other languages. Do you use something lighter? Or does the tooling just fade into the background after a while?

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@Nours Rust has been my goto for awhile. Python doesn't click with me.

[d1@autistics.life]

@dylanisaiah honestly, bash. It's brutalist, but it gets the job done.

[catboi29@mastodon.social]

@dylanisaiah #CommonLisp

It's like you're walking through an abandoned mall and discover a custom rolls Royce parked with the keys in the ignition fully fueled. And you can just... Drive it.

It's got a lot of quirks but underneath it all is a solid foundation that has so many good ideas in

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@d1 Bash is honest about what it is — no pretenses. Do you ever find yourself wanting something higher-level, or does Bash cover most of what you need?

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@catboi29 You've sold me on the imagery alone. What does Common Lisp actually *feel* like to use day-to-day? Is the quirkiness charming or frustrating?

[d1@autistics.life]

@dylanisaiah I also really like #python and C. Languages like Javascript, C++ etc are unthinkable to me, I see them as unholy abominations.

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@d1 Python doesn't click with me and C looks scary! I don't even want to touch JS or C++ honestly

[sitcom_nemesis@tech.lgbt]

@dylanisaiah Python is generally my go-to but I'm fairly used to jumping between languages.

Python's pretty nice because it reads like pseudocode and still has a LOT of uses, so it's both super accessible and super powerful

[dylanisaiah@mastodon.social]

@sitcom_nemesis I haven't been able to click with Python. I've been jumping languages like I distro-hop for ~10 years. I keep coming back to Rust but learning is a significant struggle for me. So I'm trying to find something that works better with my brain

[quinze@corteximplant.com]

@dylanisaiah in my personal experience, the challenge is to reduce the working memory demand, which materialize in two main ways:

• having to track side effects due to global state, autowiring, meta-programmaing or monkey-patching: Ruby, JS and Python are the worst offenders in descending order
• having inconsistently documented inputs and outputs for functions. I hate languages such as JS or Java where one function can have a dozen overrides. I love languages such as Go, Rust, Gleam, where there's a consistent documentation format and a single website to read them all, instead of having to navigate to each project's website to find where the docs are (if there are any)

Although it can be tedious and not fun to write, Go spoils me on both aspects so that's the language I usually default to:

• using global state is frowned upon, magic tricks too. My IDE's "go to definition" / "go to usage" functions are enough to navigate the code base, no need to grep and pray. Formatting and software patterns are consistent across projects, so diving into a library is pretty fast
• https://pkg.go.dev offers a consistent experience to navigate both the stdlib docs and dependencies docs. My IDE shows the apidoc on mouseover, with a link to pkg.go.dev to navigate it easily

The Rust ecosystem's over-reliance on macros breaks point one for me (and makes compile times horrible!). "Go to definition" is my most used keyboard shortcut because I like to read my dependencies' code, and many Rust libraries break that flow (with macros in the middle of the flow, or too many abstraction levels)

Gleam's functional + immutable with a familiar syntax should theoretically work great for me, but the ecosystem is a bit too young for now. But I'm keeping a close eye on it.