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Comment by johndoe42377 | Hacker News Reader

Class books, by established, no bullshit authors.

Joe Armstrong, Odersky, Stroustrup ("a tour" and "principles and practice", both latest editions, are finally good reads), the Go book by Kernighan is a decent one, etc.

Avoid blogs, shitty books by amateurs who are learning while writing (everything by Pact, lol) and other fast food.

Avoid everything related to Java or JavaScript - poorly designed crap, and focus on Scala, Haskell, Erlang, Go and Rust - attempts to fix the fucking mess we are in.

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This is such a silly reply. "Avoid the two most in-demand languages, particularly when one of them is the only language that can be used on webpages, in favor of "cool" languages that "make you think.""

You sound like those people that say you're not a real programmer if you don't know lisp.

Nope, it's not the tools, it's the people using them.

Give me your most beautiful perfect language and I'll find armies of incompetent programmers to create piles of garbage with them.

Give me your ugliest awfullest language and I can find, if I'm lucky, maybe 1-2 people that can do great things with them.

I agree with this to a point. I mean, tools really do help. Take C++ or JS which will make every effort to run total garbage that any competent user could see is garbage vs Python or Go which have very strict tooling to keep stupid users on the rails. I think it's the reason python is winning even though the runtime is such a poor performer.

There's some really terrible python code out there these days. It's on its way to becoming the next node. I know this reality will anger people but I'm sorry, I'm just a messenger here.

Come on, programming languages are not tools (compilers are tools).

Programming languages are cultures. Precisely.

This is why PHP Java or JavaScript are fucking abominations. They have been started with lack of a culture and discipline to begin with.

Forgive me but I honestly don't think you've read much code. There's a large field of talent in all languages.

That list is the classic "first language" list, the one that is taught to beginners and amateurs.

It used to also be Basic and Ruby. Every "first language" gets the short end of the stick.

You can add Swift and Kotlin to that as well, any language where you might find room full of children twiddling with computers.

You can also be an adult and use these tools, but that's really a personal decision.

been programming for ages, and just started getting into Go. The Go book by Kernighan is really quite good. Full of excellent explanations of the design choices made in the language and the exercises are better than any I have ever seen. They really lead you into self discovery of the subtleties you may have missed and need to understand.

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