Not enjoying programming anymore

I have been programming for more than 25 years now, and it used to be great fun.

In this time, I have written lots of programs that I don’t even remember; Games,
various utilities, web applications, my own word processor, etc.

----

However, for some time now, it stopped being fun and started to feel like a chore.

It started with programming languages getting on my nerves. One of my main languages
was C++; I did lots of stuff in it. But for some reason, the negative aspects
(slow compile times, annoying build ecosystem, verbose syntax, ...) are getting more
and more on my nerves; it feels like I am just fighting the language instead of
getting to the point of realizing the idea I have.

C, another language I like, feels like a chore too because you need to do so many
things manually that are just given freely in other languages.

Rust: I have 8 years of professional experience in Rust, and I appreciate how stable any
software written in Rust is; when it finally runs, it runs forever without
randomly crashing, etc. – however, getting there means fighting the compiler.
Even worse is the crates.io ecosystem, where it seems to be considered "normal" by
other people that a crate has 100+ dependencies, and lots of crates are overengineered
to the top, throwing Traits at everything where it is not needed. Basically, you
have to write everything yourself or use C libraries.

Python is great for small scripts, but when the applications get bigger I struggle with
proper organization of a project. The GIL is not great, either.

Common Lisp seems really nice, but the dynamic typing is something that can cause
applications to fail at runtime, if e.g. something in a JSON response is suddenly a string
instead of a number. This is something that does not happen with Rust so easily,
because Rust forces you to think ahead for these cases.

I worked with Java, C# and JS and don’t have anything positive to say about these.

Languages I have not tried yet:

* D
* Zig
* Haskell
* OCaml
* Vala (but it just compiles to C)
* ... (lots of others)

Basically, what I am looking for is a language that makes programming feel
*fun* again, while I can implement my ideas. This is hard to find, and what
makes things worse is that the learning material (books, videos) is of abyssmal
quality nowadays. Videos are too slow for my taste, and most of the programming books
just discuss one aspect of the language per chapter, e.g.:

* Chapter 5: Arrays
* Chapter 6: HashMaps
* Chapter 7: Classes

Without putting this into any context of a sample project or similar. This is just
boring, and you don’t learn for what these concepts are for. Back in my day
programming books teached you a language practially, e.g. "Learn C++ by writing
a Space Shooter" (yes I am old).

To be fair, there is a modern counter example:

[Lisperati](http://www.lisperati.com/syntax.html) teaches you the basics of
Common Lisp by creating a text adventure. This is really fun and in the middle
of the text, when the Game suddenly is playable, you realize the power of these
Lisp expressions; at least I did, and my first thought was: "This is really cool".

So if you know anything similar, or have any other comments, write to: liron@tilde.team

tags: programming