Best Programming Language | John Carmack and Lex Fridman 

I found that the best defense against imposter syndrome, especially when it comes to programming, is to recognize that there's just so fucking much within the field as a whole that you'll never know anywhere near most of it, and that everybody's skill sets are all over the place. Undoubtedly, people are better programmers than me, in that there are people who have the knowledge and experience to better conceptualize a solution and better structure their code for a more simple and sophisticated program. But much like John up there, I'm not familiar with Rust a whole lot, all I did was just jump straight from hello world to writing a quick protype of a sound engine with no external libraries save for some win32. However, I'm also over here shutting the bed on OpenGL right now.

The thing is, there are some programs, some algorythms you could like to implement or to think about them. Following the known patterns leads to the feeling not of a challenge, but of a pleasant walk.

That made me laugh as well!

Naturally everyone can agree John is indeed a god of programming but don’t be quick to hit yourself down. I’d argue you could do roughly the same by following a spec or paper. After the obligatory console logging I try to make a non trivial toy app in a new language, web server, bitmap or jpeg reader, dumb synth or something with concurrency by doing the same. You can get very far in a language with just arrays and variables and very minimal use of their stdlib.

if you compare yourself with a living deity of programming well no shit, he is very good at what it does its that simple

Even though JS performance has tremendously improved, C, C++ and Rust are simply still the performance kings.

I've coded in Assemby, C, C++, C#, Javascript, Pascal and various versions of Basic... But my first love will always be C/C++... Although I am very fond of C# and, for some reason, I've always liked Javascript! Despite the deep flaws in that language. But yeah, people keep banging on about the coming end of C/C++... And it just ain't gonna happen... Not for the foreseeable future at least! And yes, people still code in assembly too! It's niche...Some might say antiqued but, the need to code at the lowest levels possible is still there. Perhaps now more than ever!

@@sdwone If you don't mind me asking, how I can learn C and C++ at the same time, I really love the idea behind of each one of these language's, and my goal to expose my self to a deep undergrounding for CS and be one of those who built the tools we are using today, so how should I do it I'll be thankful for answer from someone have an experience like you I really want to do it, I feel really frustrating ppl say that it's impossible to learn them both or C++ and it's so large you can't master it, etc... All what I want to understand what and how tech we use today is built and how to build my own and achieve something like this guy

@@0_Dseven Dude, John's work at id is open source. Go grab the Quake code. Q3 had C and C++. Go mod the shit out of it as a challenge/educational experience. Before they released the whole engine, moding the game DLL in Q2 is how I learned C.

@@meeponinthbit3466 can you explain more, I didn't understand what you said or what should I do really

I feel the same way about Wozniak.

And not answer the question while doing it

Isn't that typical of a programmer?

@@Little-bird-told-me old school programmer, from the 80s and 90s. probably from all diet coke + pizza

that's what happens when you put 100,000 hours into a skill.

You get that with decades upon decades of work.

He speaks with the depth of knowledge and experience that I've heard from George Hotz on RU-vid, but Hotz is wily and seems quite quite sceptical of people. When I was graduating college the general view was that we needed a very simple language (syntax and mechanisms), but with great controlled power (do stuff without shooting yourself in the foot). C++, once advanced enough does a lot of that and I'm hoping Scala can get there with a ton of complementary capabilities. Getting the speed is a problem for all the interpreted languages though. Where I'd like to hear more is about program design for resilience to change and the ease of management with new programmers (which he mentioned). Google is good with generating ideas, but they require time to really hone their products. Go might eventually become excellent, but it will take a while. "A better C" has been a goal for many people for a while and C++ seems closest.

@@DanHaiduc not only decades of work, but decades of work at the forefront of innovation. I was going to say it’s like he lives and breathes programming, but to say he dreams about it speaks for itself.

That's what I thought too. He effortlessly has some kind of a storyline without Lex having to point him in a certain way.

nice! cool uncle!

I don’t understand a damn thing he said I can barely operate Microsoft word lol. but yet here I am watching. Your uncle is responsible for Wolfenstein? that’s wild I played that back in the day when I was a young kid

Noice!!

do you program?

Awesome

It has been attempted. The problem is, you get a few dozen up and coming youths at a time and the lesson they don't want to acknowledge is one learnt after spending months trying to understand old code bases. It's very slow progress when it goes well, and when it doesn't, it's extremely hard to tell; and meanwhile they'll blithely claim "this would all be better to just rewrite completely with «tool they heard of this week»". There's much to learn if you just meet your professor privately and ask when they wish they could teach!

Things change. The tools and requirements when I got my BSCS 35+ years ago are not the tools and requirements of today. 🙂

You, you, you.

I agree. IMO, this video is 100% programming wisdom

Carmack is one of those legendary programmers that truly deserves the accolades. When he speaks on these topics, it's always worth a developers time to listen - even when what he is talking about here is essentially common sense to senior developers, the fact that he has considered it and agrees says we're on the right track.

Uncle Bob? Is that you?

how can i be a good programmer kasuha

@@carlk.3264 How about Golang?

I started on C, spent many years with it in embedded stuff. Then we started using python for tooling around it. And with python turning problem into solution is just sooo much faster. I followed the python into web dev. I don't do much that cares about performance, the database, webserver and bit math/ai libraries do that. What I do is the logic that binds it all together and being able to easily express that in a very readable way is core and not something I could give up.

PHP was so much fun. I wrote a custom forum system in php in 2004-2006. And then they added objects... 😭

There's certainly a difference between bad Python code and good python code. Though the problem is that the number of bad programmers in the python world greatly outnumber the actual engineers who actually know the language and not just copy-paste and cross-fingers, so... RIP.

And that's why C is king, and people who don't write C will never be understand. It doesn't matter if it takes you one month to write something in C that could have been written in Python in a day, because once it's written, literally every programmer of C will be able to understand it without problems, and appreciate it. Linus Torvalds has mentioned this aspect as well. There are no variants of C: C is C. Whereas in C++, Trolltech C++ is a different beast than Mozilla C++, which is different than Google C++.

very few new shops and projects depend on Java and Java-based technologies...OMG jajajaja with this you lost us all..dude.

That's not what he said, though. He made a general comment about how the most useful thing to do is to write code that is long-term sustainable and easily adaptable. This is a separate issue from "tricky code" entirely.

@@felipec of course C is king but literally hundreds of millions of Indian software developers are and will change that. barrier of entry is too low. it is poison to the industry. I was active on related forums in the decades before this one, and in those decades was quality programming. now it is requests for copy paste and extremely shallow, because people don't work low level or have understanding of what it is they are using.

@@kurzackd This is true but I was using tricky to mean something not easily maintained/overly complex/ poorly designed etc etc

This isn't mentioned, Python forces you to optimize

We love dynamic programming :)

Very accurate tho. Still, Java is probably the one you should learn if you want a job. C++ or python you should learn if you actually want to build programs.

Not really a jab. JS is what you need to use for working with the DOM. Any other non-dom related operation/algorythm/data structure can be referenced to C++ that's compiled down to op codes

He's phrasing along the lines of UI vs business logic (server side). Not really a jab. My days are in JS these now and this makes sense

You've clearly never seen Swift 5 projects or Swift code written explicitly in implicitly unwrapped optional. Swift offers you the door to paradise, but also gives you a gun that shoots infinite ice bullets containing active anthrax and smallpox.

@@alexfrank5331 You can write bad code in any language. The idea that the compiler can give you additional information and catch more errors if code is written well makes it better than a language that doesn't do that if code is written well. I'm sure you can rip the safety off of any language with anti-patterns.

I've met programmers who loved the idea that they wrote a program that was difficult to read and understand. That it made them smarter than everyone else. They're fucking idiots. Code maintainability & readability are required to be considered good code. Leave your ego behind & write something others can actually use and extend.

Operating systems are indeed written in particular styles; mostly state machine, but some higher algorithms in scheduling and memory management, with a focus on actual steps in hardware. While they likely won't have a mark and sweep style garbage collector, they will have reference counting and implicit priorities (e.g. which memory page can you discard when you need more? when do you run the work of wiping freed pages for reuse?). The key tends to be isolation; if you're mutating your state, make sure you're alone in accessing that state. If your work takes time, see if you can do it without interrupting other work. Side effects remain anathema; so make very clear where they exist, e.g. scheduling points. If your work doesn't take notable time, make sure to squeeze it in before you do the overhead of switching back to user space. OS developers thus focus on costs and risks that are often further from mind in functional styles, even if they're not necessarily less efficient at them. If we could have a class of drivers that operate entirely in STM with bounded RAM, that could provide a considerable gain. Engineers have planned for such usages, e.g. with microkernel architectures and multiple privilege rings, but it hasn't quite caught on. I think two factors tend to dominate why not: short path to understanding what precisely is executed, and (sometimes excessive) focus on overhead. The really sad thing is, a lot of that overhead could have been removed on a hardware level. If you have the interest, take a look at e.g. CRASH/SAFE. A seemingly more successful initiative today is F* and Project Everest.

He didn't have a lot of options though. It was almost inevitable that he would pick C/C++ when he started writing the code that made him famous.

@@judgedbytime sure he did, he just chose the best option.

@@sprenten1 What options was he choosing between?

@@judgedbytime he had other options, but c/c++ was easily the best option as it is now.

@@judgedbytime At first, maybe not. But over the years, as options appeared, Carmack is the type of programmer that would evaluate and look at whatever was happening in computer science. If moving to something else made sense, I feel confident he would have done it.

lekker jy

Exactly. There's no best language , coding is an art and the syntax is the brush. Code what you want with what you want

Following what you said I think C has a lot of virtues and the future at least of C and of C++ is to tighten up the language and their paradigms. There are a few things that appear to have grown uncontrolled. There are some interesting suggestions coming from the designers of new languages. I think it would be better to have a more convenient approach to build systems that is provided with the language standard rather than tools associated with scripts.

@@jwadaow Yeah don't get me wrong, there are several things bad and wrong about C (and even more wrong with C++ imo :P ) and I don't hesitate learning and testing out new languages. It is just that if you want to go deeper and learn how the computer actually work and how to actually make it work fast and what actually are good solutions and what actually is hard problems in a computer system C is probably your best option. I feel like all programmers should know a little C and probably coded some programs in it to get a feel for how it is like. And it will probably always be useful to know, since there will always be C code out there in use. I agree the build story for C (and C++) is horrible and clearly something that should be improved. Personally I think Zig's approach is very good for this, where you keep the build system within the same language (heard Jai does it similar). I am also very open to what Rust is bringing. I know from experience pointer and memory management in a large codebase can be horrible and scary. However, I am a bit scared it is walking to towards C++ a bit but I like the ML-flavor it is adding so I think it will do good in the space.

I wouldn't even bother with Java these days. Start with C/C++ then go for a higher level C=based language and master that. Something like JavaScript or C#

@@jwadaow One of the wonderful parts of C as well is that because of how absolutely simple it is, there are also a whole sea of different compilers available for it, for almost any platform you could ever possibly imagine. And not only that, these days you can even straight up write scripts in plain C code for performing very specific but extremely performant computations with almost no overhead (except for the system calls, which are of course a big one). To top it all off, it is also very easy these days to bootstrap. C++ is absolutely NOT very easy to bootstrap in no way shape or form.

For me the good thing about C, if done right for sure, it only does what you wrote. And also hardware design languages are very C like so you stay within a set of rules. Where C++ shines is encaptulating and messing with seriell or parallel compute. It can hide algorithms, implementations and hardware specific data so well that you don't need to care and see it while building the system. Also for dynamic programming where the data format and the right algorithm are just known in runtime C++ is really great with it's way of linking operations as lists and swaping the elements on the fly.

Scheme and the art of programming

I think people can "learn to code" in a week with their nose in a book, enough to teach themselves and try new things anyways - that's how I did it as a kid. 10 weeks is enough for an entry level cybersecurity+networking course, introductory web dev, introductory IOT. sure, they're not getting hired by google or facebook, but maybe a local school or state facility needs an "IT guy".

There are two type of courses. The 10 week / x hour courses are a social media industry. It's nice to refresh a language but these doesn't make you a programmer. They just take you by the hand and guide you trough an environment. Then there some older experts or profs giving courses. These are really great for people who are allready programming. As they show you a lot of problems and tools and how they link to things you already know. But the once Google, Facebook, "Elon" needs are those that know enough math and computer sience that they can design an algorithm and implement it in an ever increasing mess of a codebase. To get there you need to be skilled with math, because the easy tricks are most likely done already, and you need to constantly work on or evan solve real problems. So getting a certificate or a degree is a good starting point but the company you work for and the tools and problems they make or give you make great programmers like these two.

I am very into coding not because I want to get a job as a programmer, but I am owner of my own architecture firm and I want to learn to automate a lot of stuff I know that need automatization but there is no solution for me right now. I had experience in other stuff, but now, there is no programs that serve my needs. So I want to learn to solve those problems that only someone in my position of being a professional in a no software business can solve.

One, nearly every company can benefit from programmers automating some process, so there is huge demand for devs. Two, many problems do not require expertise in software or CS. Often, business just need code that runs. The last bit of expertise is not required unless the code is crucial for business operations. It's cheaper for businesses to hire 3 average dev and 1 expert dev than 4 expert devs.

While I absolutely do not want to discourage people from going into Software development I have to say those courses are somewhere between rip-off and misleading people. 1) Nobody ever became a good programmers least he had some affinity to Computer, mathematics and logic beforehand. This can come in different shapes and there are those cases where the 30 year old car-mechanic who had an affinity for Sudoku and building mechanical gadgets and tools suddenly discovers that he always had this affinity for mathematics. But those are rare. 2) There is lots of rip off course addressing people in economically disadvantaged countries for whom becoming a silicon valley coder is the dream. It a shame because at worst people loose money in sham course and at best they produce sub standard, unmotivated Software people. 3) And then there are genuine companies trying to fish for the gems in a sea of unskilled people. The signs to look for, for a good course is: 1) There is co-sponsoring from a company, which is genuinely looking for people. 2) There are entry criteria and tests. They actually reject people. NEVER take such a course if they just take everybody. The best way to test your willingness and talent is: 1) Find a person who knows programming. Ask them to give you direction, NOT to teach you in detail, nobody has the time to do this. 2) With their direction, find place in the Internet offering free tutorials and excercises. 3) Once you done with basic tutorial, let them give you some "boring" real life tasks. Parsing and scanning files, reading a table in a database in filtering results into another one, cleaning up file system, Exporting and cleaning Excel sheets etc.

I'm getting there myself. I do a lot of (very) full stack work in the IOT space - with everything from C to PHP to Scheme. The best code is code that's easy to maintain and doesn't try to do anything tricky. There's a lot to be said about the different paradigms however - especially how they affect maintainability and elasticity down the road when reqs change. And they always will.

the best way to go WHERE? the best FOR WHAT? will you write a web app, or a mobile app in C? apples and oranges... programming languages are just TOOLS, and tools are suited to specific purposes. you sound like a carpenter who decided: "hammer is the best, hammer is the way to go" or a doctor who goes "i think stethoscope is absolutely the best"

C# and powershell is all I want to use

yes! c# is the best

No, I don't think quantum computing came up. Would've been great to get his opinion, maybe they do a round 2 podcast.

they didn't touch the subject.

@@watashiwahatchi 5 hours and the dude needs a round 2 where others (even Elon Musk) are done within 3 hours.

He is(was?) not excited about it. I don't remember on which podcast he mentioned it. We have plenty of power right now with GPU/Dedicated ASICs stuff, Q computing is still too slow and unpractical, the only value about Q computing the community is bragging about is the promise to break into crypto stuff, there's(was?) no real interesting ongoing work according to him. Ruffly what I remember. It was 1 or 2 years ago. Maybe on Joe Rogan Experience's podcast.

Agree and that leaves more headspace for thinking about the actual problem. I like Go a lot

You can do the most with the least lines of code. Ideal for ideas, but the speed isn't suited for high speed applications that use nested loops. But extremely easy when debugging, no compiling necessary.

Nothing beats python's syntax in terms of readability. I just wish it didn't use indentation to define code blocks, I want to write donut-shaped progams :(

Go is my favorite as far as something that is easy to right, easy to understand, and can actually perform in a production environment.

@@jessejayphotography depends on what you mean by production environment and depends on what you mean by easy. For example I took a look at how you read and write data from an SQL database, and calling it easy to write and easy to understand is strong statement :)

You don't have the temperament to program anything -- you have built nothing

"Great programmers may use and produce great work in any language." Perhaps you are right. But : 1-- Some languages should always be avoided ; 2-- Great programmers should never let average programmers tell them in which language to write code. (When choice has not been made centuries before)

A large project needs programmers to collaborate and support each other. The genius's role is to push the boundaries, but they can't make the thing on their own.

For me, a great programmer is somebody who produces elegant code that has a logical structure that is immediately recognizable to anyone who reads it. Fluency, in other words.

That's what makes python so ideal for prototyping. You're not meant to do nested for loops if you can avoid it! So python uncovers bad algorithms early on... then when you re-write in rust, you'll have it 99% correct the first time. Just use dictionaries liberally in python. The python dict is comparable to C++ STL unordered map performance.

I totally agree with you 👏🏻

I only code in c++ (I make video games in UE). What's difficult about it compared to other languages? I've never even studied a language other than cpp or JAZZ (blizzards proprietary language for wc3).

@@mr.doctorcaptain1124 I think Lex said it all. C++ expects you to be an adult writing your code. you certainly can write bad C++ code but when it scales it will be a nightmare to maintain that of course given you actually manage to get to run in the first place.

@@mr.doctorcaptain1124 you use copy paste code in other languages, or they are extremely similar to C but worse. VB and java are like C, java is C without manual memory allocation, it uses garbage collector. JavaScript, LUA, HTML, CSS can be learned in a session when necessary, and python is for children and lesser programmers who want to use c++ without understanding any of it. c, c#, c++ all kings. but go learn how your OS memory works, how things are called with 64 bit and with 32 bit fastcall, registers, page tables, the kernel structure, and so on. you can write windows kernel drivers in c++, very rewarding, difficult, you will learn lots. forget other languages, the ones I didn't mention fall somewhere near another I have described here. master c++ and to master the others is trivial.

@@mr.doctorcaptain1124 well in UE u dont really write c++, you write archaic unreal's language that resembles c++

Did you learn the programming language patterns?

His code does not need testing 😂

You could check some of his initial work at id Software. Doom and Quake are fully open source

What? Scala is the most maintainable language. You have the best type system, and your pick of effect systems or actors for concurrency

Scala here too

@@fluffysheap having broader choices doesnt make managing large code bases easier, in fact it often makes it more difficult, and the fact that you can have such different paradigms and implicits means its insanely easy to write code that very few people can read, you have to have either senior devs that all share similar opinions or a lot of criteria in your cosing standards and a lot more time in reviews to stop both "too clever" and messy paradigm shifting from happening And what do you mean by "best" type system its my favourite for sure, but best at what? Theres no best type system for all purposes, thats like saying blue is the best colour Like if youre comparing it to java, c++ or javascript then sure its not likely to have more standard management overhead than them, but thats a very low bar to set

Lmao it's very accurate what you describe here. As a backend myself, I catch myself sometimes having elitist thoughts regarding frontend: "everybody knows that frontend isnt even programming"

​@@ilikecommenting6849 I think another sad truth is that many backend devs' daily jobs is not further than writing SQL to query data from DB, and then send the data to somewhere. It's purely CRUD and data -> data. Most (including frontend devs) wouldn't touch bleeding edges technologies, or architect a whole structure. In comparison, frontend might need to handle many application level optimizations (avoid duplicate API call, extra component rendering, client side data management/synchronization) besides getting data from backend, and checking lib combability issue. In worst case we need to write many "smart"(hacky sometimes) code to smooth out huge data rendering. It's actually math and algorithm intense. Of course, ideally we just want to render whatever from backend without any further actions. So it's data -> (data, optional) -> UI. I believe it's because our end result is tied to UI, it gives a false impression to the backend devs. You just don't know how many times I remind backend devs to check their data process (like n+1 issue, unnecessary handle data after using sql, accidentally override existing apis) when the entire process of getting and rendering data is being slow. I just can quickly figure out the issue is from the frontend or backend. Another subjective observation from me is that many backend devs constantly flex about how fast the tools/language they are using. All the fancy concurrency behaviors and low level memory address manipulation/optimization. Those has nothing to do with the code they are writing. They are just benefiting from those works but never being part of them. Frontend devs just love to comparing how fast the tools they are using, and then say X framework is dead, it's also really annoying

@@doc8527 I do both frontend and backend. I would definitely be more impressed by a great frontend dev than a great backend dev, since javascript and the whole ecosystem around it is constantly working to throw you into the pit of despair. Whenever I'm stuck on some horrible intense problem there's a 95% chance it's in javascript. Meanwhile when I need the backend to do something I just tell it do it and it does it, quickly and with little room for error. It helps of course that most of the backend work i'm involved with is in fact CRUD, that's just what most businesses need, but even when there's something actually fancy to do it still ends up being way easier to get right with static languages

@@HamidKarzai While I love frontend work because of the immediate visual feedback from the browser, it’s kind of hell on earth. Not only are you having to implement designs with CSS but also a lot of business logic and keeping it all scalable. When the Scala guys get a task, they just write it, test it and done. It seems like FE is the most frustrating role on the team.

World-class for sure, but I would not deem him as the goat.

After your job is done, you have to maintain it, if it's yours of course (not talking about consulting firms, who live mostly on bullshit code).

But C or C++ ?

Does it matter what language the bad programmers use? They'll create crap regardless. Perhaps it's best to give them C, so that their software will not advance beyond crash-on-launch, and expedite their transition to other positions in the tech field that makes good money but don't require coding.

Did you notice how sheepishly he asked "what's the best programming language"?

Will you like Actionscript 3.0 the most even if isn't tied with Flash, just as a generic standalone language?