What is the best language to learn?

[whileTRUEpass]

@doxr

@Coder100

only problem is it’s kind of for programmers who have programmed before.

I don’t count (lol) but why is that?

Not true. People are scared by C because its power means you cannot get away with rubbish code like in JS and expect it will not crash eventually

[Coder100]

Well, I don’t think anyone should learn rust as their first programming language

[whileTRUEpass]

Why? I think they should not learn languages creating bad habits (including python and JS)

[doxr]

Does that mean that Node.js is a no-go?

[whileTRUEpass]

node.js is a framework not a language. Learn it if what you want to do is use JS for making front and back end of web apps and alike

[MattDESTROYER]

@whileTRUEpass

bad habits

Could you define bad habits?

[doxr]

Alright, so does that mean that JavaScript in general is not something I should learn?

[Coder100]

I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘bad habits’ what bad habits are in js and python?

I think it’s better you learn from bugs and mistakes rather than making ‘perfect code’ but not understanding fully how it works

[dragonhunter1]

@doxr

versatile (It can start a web server, or it can have CLI. Or anything a versatile language can do)

Nim

@doxr

easy to understand (not too hard but not too simple like Scratch code)

Nim

@doxr

useful (Not too useful because if something is too useful, it’s too hard. There is no point in a language being too useless, though. This is why I don’t want to do Kaboom or something like that: making a game isn’t useful in my opinion)

Nim

@doxr

somewhat readable (like a book. HTML is readable, for example.)

Nim is very readable

@doxr

fast (I think a good language should be very fast (which is why I like fastify instead of express in node.js))

Nim is also insanely fast, probably even a sucky designed nim program will be way faster then a very good python or js one.

[whileTRUEpass]

for i in range(10):
  if something is true:
   break
if i<9:
  print("did not finish the loop")

Or letting js do magic type conversions.
Or

a = 10
a = ["ciao", 123]

[MattDESTROYER]

That’s Python? I understand the second, but still Python lol…

[Coder100]

why is that a bad thing? If you are verbose about everything, it actually becomes harder to reason about code, take Java for example.

[whileTRUEpass]

Python also bring some bad habits.
The memory leak people like to use is a bad habit as it breaks scope and also it generates serious performance issues when the for is looping large data sets by value (and you do not delete the variable after the loop)

[whileTRUEpass]

I do not like Java, but it is a very good first language.

[Coder100]

Not sure what you mean here

variables are defined based on function scope, and there’s a garbage collector to destroy unused variables

deleting variables is not a ‘good habit’, wouldn’t it help with carelessness if you try to access it again after you delete it?

[whileTRUEpass]

in python the variable created by the for loop is NOT destroyed after the for loop. This is the memory leak and scope violation of python. It gets used … except by who used other languages and does not expect this behaviour (but the performance issue is still there)

Anyhow, I would say Java is great as first language. But I dislike it

[MattDESTROYER]

I didn’t even know that memory leak was a thing lol, that is weird, why wouldn’t they fix that?

[doxr]

OK, I’ll admit this: I don’t know what you all were even talking about. What I will do is not learn Python as the best language. I’ll still keep Node.js closeby though.

[whileTRUEpass]

What do you want to do? I mean program, node’s is just javascript

[doxr]

Lol, that’s what I just asked!

Python: too weird and feels clunky as you guys just talked about
Java: You need some software which my Chromebook don’t do (but replit does)
JavaScript: Other than allowing mistakes to happen (which is fine IMO) I can’t think of anything
Rust: Need experience
C and C++: IMO looks waaaaaaaay too complicated and I don’t think it’s the best language
Just looking at this…

but none of them have been ruled as the BEST. If I was going to code with this and only this, then it has to be useful, right?