Back in the day, you had limited choices in how you wanted to program your computer. Not so much now.
If you had a computer it had an interpreter or some kind, and that was it. You might have BASIC, you certainly had machine code (or the language of the machine) and you might not have very much more than that. Perhaps Assembly language and an Assembler (compiler).
The point is – choices were limited.
Now we have so much choice. It’s simple to install things. There is software and software development kits and compilers and interpreters everywhere we look. Whether you work on a PC, a Mac, on Linux on a Chromebook – you can install a software development environment and start building stuff.
But what? And how?
The choice makes us weak. It certainly makes me weak.
Thankfully, I’ve made a decision. I’ve finally ticked off a couple of boxes that I’ve been looking forward to ticking. I’ve compiled a go program for the first time, and I’ve compiled a rust program for the first time.
Why? Well because I want to know what all the fuss is about. And secondly, I want to actually build something and I’d been looking for options.
Often we make unilateral or emotional decisions about technology choices. It’s as good a metric as anything – and if you want to learn something, why not?
Principles are principles after all. If you know enough programming paradigms already, a new language won’t offer that much of a challenge in terms of syntax. Forget about the options, start to have some fun.
Being an old-school C++ hacker, I’m intrigued by rust. Plus I really like the build system immediately – I’m not a fan of Makefiles (who is?) so the cargo package management and build system looks great.
Go is undoubtedly great too. So I’m going to get going and report back in a few weeks. I might even have some code to share with you.
What am I going to build? It doesn’t matter.
The question I have for you is – what are you going to build?