So, you want to code. Congratulations. You are getting into a rabbit hole that you probably won’t ever be able to leave. There is no coming back from this.
Prerequisites
Accessibility
If you do not have a powerful computer, luck is on your side. There are online services that will let you run a text editor, namely Visual Studio Code, a very popular development environment free of charge in your browser. One of the best is a site called Gitpod. They have a generous free plan.
After a few years of avoiding C like the plague I have discovered a love for it. While I would be better served using a language like Go in most cases, C is just a lot more fun to me personally. Live, laugh, unsafe.
Background
When I started programming a few years ago I began the journey with Python. After realizing that I hated it I decided to switch to C. Initially, I was having a great time making discord bots with the Orca, now Concord, library. I was absolutely flying but eventually, I got skill issued. I just could not wrap my head around pointers and memory management. I ended up moving onto Java, Go, Rust, and Rust.
After 5 years of programming I have come to the conclusion that usually OOP is not great. This may sound shocking considering that 2 out of 5 posts on this blog are me raving about C# and Java but I have been reformed.
Background
For around a year I was infatuated with C# and Java. Initially I got introduced to Java through making discord bots with JDA. It was great. Up until that point I was used to making bots with Python or C. Java was and still is pretty nice for bot development and I really enjoyed my time with it. Then later on I discovered C# and enjoyed it even more. The syntax was great, it was fast, had a whole bunch of IDE support, and had a whole bunch of stuff going for it. I especially liked it when interfacing with MongoDB with their library. My only real gripe with it was the .NET ecosystem. Being an enjoyer of linux the Windows-centric parts of C# really bothered me and I eventually just sulked back to Java.
I, like many other programmers, wrote my first Hello world in Python. For a good while I was having a blast. Python is what brought me into this world and I have to give it some commendation for that. However, over time, I have drifted away from Python. Here’s why.
Simplicity
Syntactically, Python is very simple. This is a great thing for new programmers…or is it? While being easy to understand is important Python’s strangeness makes understanding other languages a bit more difficult. It is almost like Python gives you training wheels, but never let’s you take a leap of faith and gain the full power of riding two wheeled. For example Python’s Dynamic Typing got me accustomed to making variables with little to no thought. Then when I tried languages like Rust and C I was very confused by the idea of static typing.