… They are wrong. Most programming languages are very very similar. And learning one means you learned almost all. i learned new languages on the regular pre - llms and it required barely any effort. Most company interviews are also language agnostic for this reason. Because languages are so trivial to learn once you "get" how to program.
Original discussionWhy Nim?226 source comments · at importThe notion that we need to all program in the top 10 popular programming languages seems dead with the advent of LLMs. I program a lot in Nim including professionally and strongly prefer it over Rust or even Zig. Primarily because I just really enjoy programming in Nim and getting things done I wouldn’t have otherwise or be capable of doing. For example recently I needed to automate a GUI app. I tried the Python libraries but found they kinda sucked. Despite pulling in opencv they were slow at finding buttons in a screenshot. Then the one I tried also broke on hidpi displays. Instead I got Claude to write me up a Nim library to find images in a screenshot. Then had Claude add SIMD to it. It’s far faster than the python libraries, supports hidpi, and is far easier to install and use. I still use a small Python app as a server to take the screenshots but it’s a nice balance. > I guess a lo…
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If those 10 languages were good, why there are 10 of them? Shouldn't they kill each other? In the end there will be only one.
Full original> Most programming languages are very very similar. For the most part, yes. I'd add the caveat of needing to differentiate significantly between imperative and functional programming, though. I've used Python, Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, and a TINY bit of Perl (Enough to know it's a terrible language -- seriously, why would anybody want to use a language that people refer to as "write-only" because it's so hard to read?), and Haskell just makes no damn sense to me. It seems its only use is to show off how Quicksort can be written in two lines with it, or to start fights over whatever the hell a Monad is. Also, if you've only ever written in memory-safe languages like Python, Java, and C#, then switching to an unsafe language like C or C++ will probably result in writing a ton of memory leaks, buffer overflows, and segfaults.
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