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Four Years of Jai (2024)
I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and assembly languages through C++, Pascal and Delphi, through Java and Clojure, through Perl, PHP, Python, Javascript, Typescript and so on. I’ve tinkered with Rust, APL, Uiua, Erlang and Haskell.
Some of the slowdown comes due to various ideologies and methodologies, including but not limited to Object Oriented Programming, RAII (Resource Allocation Is Initialization) and Clean Code having turned out to be conceptual traps which provided a sense of achievement and righteousness, justified by terms like “zero cost abstraction”, “encapsulation” and “cleanliness” which in practice had huge performance hits, and a host of other issues, associated with them. In the simplest case, it means you don’t have to learn Make, CMake, Automake, Autoconf, Ant, Gradle, Buildtools, npm, bun, crate or whatever other inane thing a language throws at you. But beyond that, you can start to do more advanced things like embedding different levels of testing into your build process, enforcing house rules, or even compile-time swapping out codepaths depending on your intended platform (I have used this in reality).
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