Best Programming Language | John Carmack and Lex Fridman

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GUEST BIO:
John Carmack is a legendary programmer, co-founder of id Software, and lead programmer of many revolutionary video games including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the Commander Keen series. He is also the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, and for many years the CTO of Oculus VR.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[Cobinja]

John about rust: "I've done a little bit beyond 'Hello world', I've wrote some video decompression just as an exercise"
How to trigger other people's impostor syndrom 😅

[leandrocasas]

I had forgotten how Carmack can just go explaining things forever almost without pause, with great clarity at that. What a great guy

[jokerpb]

I love how he says "We use Javascript then we have C++ for real work"

[florianhaffner]

John Carmack is stunningly intelligent. How coherent and fluent his answers are yet always well thought out. Only respect for that guy

[victormarconi]

"I did basic hello world and video decompression" LOL

[kasuha]

That man speaks my mind. My experience. The wisdom I gained over years. I mean, I don't dare to compare with John Carmack but what he says is exactly what I learned through my experience and mistakes. Couldn't agree more.
There's no best programming language and great programmers are not defined by language they use. Great programmers write code that lasts.

[alexfrank]

"Train wreck of over-abstraction." I love it.
"It's not about the writing of the program but the life span of the program."
I wish John Carmack can do a masterclass that teaches all the Professors and Computer Science teachers what to teach.

[fadedtimes]

I had the pleasure to meet John back in the Mesquite TX iD cube building around 2000, I was invited by Graeme and got to test Q3 team arena . I then got to listen to John at QuakeCon 2001 also in Mesquite TX. Being a huge Doom and Quake fan, I've always admired John.

[ObieR]

Nice!! You got John Carmack! This guy is one of my heroes!!

[MichaelBehrnsMiller]

C++ dev here, my 2c... I agree with JC 💯 in that I don't overly embrace metaprogramming or functional paradigms as my core approaches, but I love the lessons learned, like DRY separation of concerns, and immutability of data as it is passed around threads. C++ is a scalpel that gives you complete control. You will always pay more than you think for garbage collection and weak typing. For me, C++ is powerful and simple read: elegant) to start with, and finish with. Coupled with inescapable JavaScript, it's all I need at this stage. I use node modules for all my scripting needs. Focusing on just these two languages as my core is very helpful for my productivity.

[KG-xfew]

What John starts at 2:43 is perhaps the most important part of ANY programming. It has been true since the 1970's when I started and is still true today. It is a KEY concept many, many programmers miss in their work....to the detriment of all that come after them...and to their organizations. It was true with assembler, COBOL, BASIC, and everything after that. There is NOTHING worse than a uselessly tricky programmer.

[joehogans]

I did a Video Decompression with Rust, just for exercise ^_^

[carriersignal]

I studied C and C++ primarily back in the 1990's when in CS curriculum at university. While I have dabbled in other programming languages from time to time. C and C++ are still very much my go to languages for anything commercial or personal. These languages are about as mature now as they ever will be, even though they may (and hopefully will) still continue to grow and evolve. There has been very little I haven't been able to do with them. They work and I am comfortable working with them. I don't foresee either dying off anytime soon as they are interwoven in everything we do. While many of these newer languages may have certain things that are appealing, I just haven't found a solid reason to put a lot of effort into fully learning another language.

[JoeyGarcia]

Nice! a mention of OpenBSD which isn't talked about enough. My favorite programming language is any language that allows me to get a task done without too much hassle. Lately, that's been Python, but I've also programmed in Java, PHP, Perl, and sh. I learned C and C++ but never used it for work, since most my work is more Sys Admin stuff.

[phat-kid]

i was in school for programming a few years ago and they were pushing java. they were acting like c/c++ was obsolete. after that level i think it just gets more specific, but the industry at that time was more based on java. i taught myself c/c++ when i was a kid, so that kind of bothered me.

[svensvensson]

Coming from primarily a C++ background I took up Golang a while back for a specific research project and initally I really liked it as it was quick to get going but with time and size the restrictions, the abscense of a sensible standard library and poor encapsulation really started to get to me. The addition of generics is a good thing but it just feels like there're some serious basic flaws that will be hard to overcome. At this point i'm not convinced, but wouldn't classify myself as fully proficient. I probably wouldn't do it again.

[juanpanchoec]

I've used Python in a limited amount for a coding challenge processing and plotting a 9M record log file, but got great performance (~2.5 minutes) by using Pandas to take a relational approach in order to avoid looping the data, which would be disastrous with any scripting language.

[DavidBerglund]

As someone that only ever learned and worked with Python (well except for the odd Bash script and "hello world" scripts with other langs): learning some C++ would be nice as I'm interested in quite a few projects that are built with C++, but it seems like such a big language and I'm looking for a path to learn just a subset of it so I can get a feel for a lang that's closer to the metal. What's a good book (I like books) to start with?

[darkmatertm]

It's so refreshing to see someone who's both smart and understands maintainability. If someone breaks the product because they misunderstood your code, it's your fault too. If they misunderstood because you broke a convention, it's your fault exclusively.

[danmahoney]

Myself to a senior dev "What is the best language for automation?"

Senior Dev: "What are you best at?"