@vwbusguy@mastodon.online zig
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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@vwbusguy@mastodon.online I only picked python because out of the the listed it's the only one in familiar with.
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online the "Modern C" is C23, all of those are too high level to really compare.
@raptor85 I was thinking about that. C was high level but over time has been considered more and more low with so many other languages abstracting on top of C. You could argue in favor of Python in the sense because it's the most high level here.
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online C is still "high level" in that it doesn't 1:1 produce specific instructions like low level languages like assembly do, but yeah the abstractions are a lot more intense in stuff like python. Personally I'd say python is more the modern "perl" than the modern C though. Rust and go are dlang's more popular younger brothers
@raptor85@mastodon.gamedev.place Python is BASIC and C had a baby.
@raptor85@mastodon.gamedev.place Perl is a cat that got ahold of C's yarn and now there's bits of string everywhere.
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online python is just verbose lua made by someone allergic to punctuation and formatting.
@raptor85 It's kind of the opposite, IMO, since Python was older and Lua was trying to fit somewhere in the space around Python, Perl, and Ruby.
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online
A. You missed Zig from the equation (technically nearest one)
B. None from the list; thinking about these language as kind of C descendant is wrong mentality, neither correct idiomatic Go nor Rust are close to C
Why Python? Completely out of league...
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online
I've heard it argued that Python is "modern COBOL"... 😅
@TerryHancock I'm guessing whoever said that has never actually programmed in COBOL. The only correlation I can think of is they were both designed to be human friendly to read/write, but the implementation of that concept is extremely different between the two.
Cucumber/Gherkin would be modern COBOL, IMO.
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online
I think they were talking more about its social role -- a "good enough" language trundling along while trends come and go, used mostly by institutions who aren't primarily about software development.
Not the design of the language itself.
@TerryHancock You also just described php, perl, rust, javascript, Java, and a whole range of others with that. There are some things where python isn't frankly just "good enough" and plenty of software focused shops use it. Ansible, Jupyter, AI, Instagram - it's a massive list.
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online choices are kind of limited. Maybe consider including a "none of the above" option next time?
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online #harelang
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online Zig and C3 are the modern C-likes - minimal spec, light-weight languages.
Except Go, which I'm not that much a fan of, other languages deviate from C-like similarity.
If Rust is "close" to C, then I prefer Vale instead.
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online I think the question itself is more problematic or complicated than you might have thought.
Since I can't vote in my own poll, my opinion is that the argument can be made any of them, but Go is the most on the nose, both in terms of language design and that it shares a co-author with C (Ken Thompson).
Python is more a modern BASIC (usually) implemented in C. It's BASIC and C had a baby.
Rust should be on this list because of how many legacy C things are getting ported to rust due to memory and thread safety, etc.
If you start from C and get less pedantic, you get python. If you get more pedantic, you get rust. If you stay similarly pedantic, you get golang.