I have been thinking of learning some programming recently, but I don’t feel confident enough. Is there any point in beginning with something like Zig or Go, and switching to something more serious later?

  • Zak@lemmy.world
    1·
    12 days ago

    Some people want to learn programming to get a job, though perhaps not as many in 2026. Some people want to do a project that happens to requiring programming. Some actually want to understand programming and get good at it. The last group will benefit from learning Lisp and Haskell even if they don’t end up using those languages much. I thought my first comment explained why and I think Corngood elaborated on it, but I’ll add more.

    The reason to use programming languages instead of machine/assembly languages is that they add abstractions, and allow the programmer to add more abstractions. An abstraction is a name and implementation for a repeated pattern in code, which documents the programmer’s intent when it is used, allows all invocations to be modified in one place, and substantially shortens programs. In most languages, there’s a distinction between abstractions the language designer can add and those the programmer can; in Lisp, there is not.

    If most languages didn’t have if or class, you couldn’t add them in a library; you’d have to modify the interpreter or compiler. Here’s if defined in a Lisp-like language I’m working on:

    (defmacro if (test then else)
  `(cond ~test ~then true ~else))

    This is possible because Lisp code is made of Lisp data structures which it can easily manipulate, and because it has the ability to control when evaluation occurs. Here, we need to splice three blocks of code into a cond expression, which is a more generalized form of conditional evaluation that takes an unlimited number of test/then pairs. We must also prevent the premature evaluation of the branch not chosen, which is why if and cond can’t be regular functions. In Common Lisp, the entire object system can be implemented as a library.

    Haskell and similar languages also offer significant power for abstraction with its sophisticated type system and lazy evaluation, but the more important lesson they can teach is the gurantees they can make at compile time. Once a Haskell program compiles, it has a much greater chance to work as expected than any other language I’ve used.

    SQL teaches thinking in data. Most programs exist to store and manipulate data, so that’s pretty relevant.