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8 Big Ideas From 8 Programming Languages
A tour of some of the defining characteristics and ideas of eight different programming languages
I have had an affinity for playing around with different programming languages for over 20 years. This is an attempt at recollecting some of those experiences — ideas which really stood out in each language or which I have in retrospect seen the significance of.
This list is highly subjective. It is a list of features representing ideas that caught my attention. You will always find people who think some other feature or idea is more prominent or important, but that is fine.
Zig — Compilation Time Code
In some areas, Zig almost behaves as a dynamic language despite being statically typed. With statically typed languages, no code runs until after you have compiled that code. However, in Zig, you can mark data as known at compile time. If the compiler cannot determine the value at compile time, it is a compilation error.
On the other hand, code that relies exclusively on values known at compilation time is allowed to run at…
