EPISODE 4 - Scott & Mark Learn To... Pick a Programming Language

In this episode of Scott & Mark Learn To, Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich dive into the quirks and philosophies of programming languages—debating the purpose of small languages, like Erlang, versus giants like JavaScript. Along the way, they discuss whether modern languages with hindsight (like Kotlin) are inherently better and reminisce about the good old days of writing code in C, Delphi, and even 6502 assembler. Mark reflects on transitioning to Rust for system-level code in Azure, marking a deliberate move away from C/C++. He highlights Rust’s ownership model, memory safety, and enforced concurrency as the game-changers. Meanwhile, Scott is poking fun at the oddities of language trends, including Python’s rise to dominance in machine learning.

Code: LDEQICH6FI4STFJY

[dalevross]

03:14 Just pick C#. Thanks for watching Scott and Mark Learn to. #cuemusic

[davidwesst]

There is something special about hearing like line "Probably cause you're looking at my butt" in a conversation about programming languages. Literally made me LOL.

10/10. No notes. Keep on with keeping the honesty in these conversations. Absolutely fantasticm

[mveteanu]

Such entertaining video about a tech topic!
Listing my languages that I used: BASIC (ZX-Spectrum), Z80 Assembly, Turbo Pascal (with inline assembly), x386 Assembly, Delphi, C# (from 1.1 -> ... skipping some versions though), JavaScript, C, Python. I then out of curiosity studied a bunch of other modern languages (go, rust, dart), DSL languages (proprietary), toy languages, etc. I also one tried to find a replacement to C (and wanted to avoid Rust), therefore I looked at Zig, Odin, V and a few others that I forgot.

[drg]

Great video. As someone who started learning CS at Edinburgh Uni in 1979, I've programmed in and studied many languages, and have witnessed their evolution. I think a huge aspect is that many languages were written without learning from the older ones, either through ignorance or time constraints, and then being in the right place at the right time. Ada and Modula were better Cs in the 80s, but had major adoption problems. This is why we have the current domination of Python and JavaScript, rather than statically typed languages, e.g. F#, that can look a lot like either of those, but uses type inference and many other quite hard to learn and develop techniques. C# is a case in point of a language that is learning over its evolution from this history: Edinburgh ML -> OCaml -> F#. C# got generics from the F# team. On the non GC language front, I am quite taken by the clean design of Odin. I wish I lived in a parallel universe where Microsoft adopted F# in the mid 2000s as their main general purpose programming language, using 3D GUI development as an exciting advert (and did not kill off DirectX for dotnet, which is now denied C# folks too).

[TheStevenWhiting]

UK here, I've always pronouced it Delph-E, not sure why. We used it in college in the 90s.

[janandersen]

I you never tried Algol? Backus–Naur form told us how to define a language syntax

[Chigiryov]

Thank you very much for the inspiring content!

[oluijks]

I've listened carefully what Scott said. Just like speaking a language because you grew up in a country or region you live in you want to speak the language correct and understand it sufficient enough to be able to have a conversation and make some software that works correctly. You want to feel at home speaking the language and be confident that other people understand you...

[pdebruin]

This episode is not yet in the playlist :-)

[jasonevans]

Channel 9 must be resurrected. It's a travesty that it was decommissioned 😢😢😢😢

[peaelare]

that zoomit session was one of my favorite in-person ignite things ever. i won't be there in chicago this year. boo.

[dfmera]

Final questions. Do you think F# is gonna face the same faith as J#?

[Janisku]

Suomi Mainittu, nice there Scott for mention Finland and Finnish

[YoutubeEllis-xz]

in azure mark, what coding environment do you guys use for writing, debugging releasing rust code?

[wowojune]

10:21 "C++ with COM", but ATL !

[jmd]

No COBOL, Algol, Ada!? 🙂 (not to mention CORAL)

[raffertyuy]

English is like Javascript made my day 😂

[mvadu]

13:26 very opt response.. Given Mark is inseparable from sysinternals how can he not have c/c++ as his favorite!

[dcuccia]

No one said Java haha. And...XAML, YAML, MD? :) Did a lot of Matlab in college/PhD. Also, learned Prolog in CS class.

[AdamsTaiwan]

Why not Julia? Suppose to be a better than everything, but they can get anywhere.