I have been thinking of learning some programming recently, but I don’t feel confident enough. Is there any point in beginning with something like Zig or Go, and switching to something more serious later?
I have been thinking of learning some programming recently, but I don’t feel confident enough. Is there any point in beginning with something like Zig or Go, and switching to something more serious later?
Firstly, Zig and Go are serious. Anybody who told you different isn’t a good person to learn from.
My journey was:
With some others thrown in I’m sure and some hardware description languages. The stuff I learnt in Basic 45 years ago is still relevant today. I learnt something from all of them. It doesn’t really matter where you start, but you have to take a first step and you need to write code to learn, even if it’s just copying it. It has to go through your fingers.
I remember people telling Zig was a “vibecoder” language, in the context of rewriting Bun to Rust. Yeah I know, a very odd kind of logic
Zigs goal is to be more pragmatic than C.
It is quite possibly the worst language to vibecode in, it is updating fast so LLMs usually don’t know what format to use (meaning a person who knows zig must fix those format errors). You can also get an LLM to write terrible rust code and while it will perform shit it will probably work, Zig on the other hand has manual memory management and everything has to be thought about or else it won’t work. This is why once Anthropic bought bun they decided to vibe remove zig.
As the previous comment said the lead developer for zig really, Really, doesnt like AI and much of the community is also using zig because of its human focus. (Such as me)
The great benifit of Zig over C in my opinion, is it is more human readible, especially in terms of what is happening with memory management. Zig aims to have no hidden actions making it just as low level than C while making more sense and hiding less.
Whoever told you that really doesn’t know what they are talking about. Zig has a (IMO too strict) policy of no LLMs in any way to be used for it in an official capacity.