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Re: "Help me find my second language"
Personally I am quite glad I learned some python, it’s a really rewarding language with a quick learning curve. I wrote a lot of NodeJS before that and honestly it sucked.
I also learned a bit of CPP to work on Arduino stuff but I switched over to micropython instead.
I am only a hobbyist but friends “in the know” seem to go for Rust and Zig. I personally wonder about learning Go and Lua. Both seem interesting: interestingly a lot of Gemini stuff was made in Go, and Lua seems to be popular for retro gaming these days.
Apr 17 · 4 months ago
🦀 jeang3nie · May 07 at 18:44:
I haven't messed much with Go beyond some basics, but Lua is definitely a nice little language. It's really fast to learn if you've done any other programming. I feel like it's very comparable to Python when it comes to learning curve, but it's hampered by being seen as just something that you embed into something else and doesn't have the massive community behind it that Python does.
let me also mention pascal, and its implementation: freepascal.
it is a compiler which is independent from gcc or glibc. the code it generates has no dependencies other than kernel. it links statically necessary rtl, and it contains very effigient memory manager which supports cow strings etc.
still the resulting executabre size (static) is about 100k. which is unheard of. statically linked c minimal executabre built by gcc is about 800k in size.
in the compiler benchmark game measurements fpc is always exceptionally good in its memory usage, and the welr known research on energy efficiency also confirmed it is one of the best there.
it has strong community, they developed lots of libraries.
🦀 jeang3nie · May 08 at 01:47:
Pascal is a worthy shout-out. That said, there are other languages that can give it a run for its money on executable sizes if that's something that you're concerned with. Zig has lazy evaluation and only builds the parts of the standard library that you're actually using, giving it the ability to produce nice compact executables. And the figures you mentioned for C are due to Glibc, not C itself. Static linking with Musl on Linux produces much smaller binaries, and the BSD operating systems also have great and efficient libc implementations.
Frankly, Glibc is hot garbage. Nobody seems to be talking about it but Glibc's indirect function call interface was a major component of the XZ backdoor, which couldn't have worked without it. It's part of the reason that Glibc is so bloated to begin with and it's a potential security nightmare as well. That's a tangent for sure, but it's worth saying.
Help me find my second language — Background I am a data analyst/scientist doing spatial and temporal ecology stuff. I only use R because...that is what I..know ? I was never a programmer before I switched from env. engineering and recently was thinking to diversify a bit to Julia. I have quote a lot of freedom in my current job to program in whatever I want. Occasionally I have to do it in python for the GIS people downstream. The people downstream complain a lot about Python being slow in...