Meanwhile:

    not     eax
    and     eax, 1

I see people waxing poetic over Ruby a lot saying that it's a language "built for the human". The thing is, every language is built for humans (or at least should be) but we tend to have different definitions for what "built for humans" means. Ruby certainly has some clean and expressive syntax, but I personally find it difficult to use because of its dynamic typing (which makes it hard to know what the types are while I'm writing it) and the heavy use of macros and other magic (which does unknown operations without my knowledge and introduces symbols into the scope mysteriously). That said, it clearly works great for some humans, just not for this human (me).

I have admired many parts of Zig and its philosophy but I've never seen it as a language that I want to use. What I've noticed is that Zig users care most about explicitness, simplicity, and minimal indirection. This leads to a lot of syntax that is cumbersome to read (albeit unambiguous) like casting and a lack of "convenience" features. I can't help but think that maybe they're right and that this philosophy probably leads to better software because nothing is "hidden". But, I also think that there's a level of abstraction/indirection that makes code clearer and less error-prone. It's a tricky balance to achieve, and past languages have succeeded and failed at it to different degrees. Either way, I echo the OP's sentiment: if Zig is your jam, great, go make some awesome stuff with it. It's just not my go-to today.

For those who are interested, I think that arena allocation is an underrated approach to managing lifetimes of interconnected objects that works well with borrow checking.

Piping syntax is nice for reading, but it's hard to debug. There's no clear way to "step through" each stage of the pipe to see the intermediate results.

I love seeing these kinds of explorations in the realm of language design. I've wondered about expanding the notion of boolean operators like this. For all its flaws, one thing I've always liked about JS is the overloaded (||) and (&&) operators. It's really slick to write something like `foo.get_that_can_fail(x) || "default value"`.

I'm less concerned about people not adopting other frameworks. I'm concerned about people not knowing/learning the fundamentals of how websites work. It's apparent in job interviews that developers from bootcamps are only learning how to make sites/apps with React and don't know the fundamentals that support it.

"So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming." -Dijkstra

I really appreciate how this article explains why certain design patterns became a thing. Usually, it was to address some very practical problem or limitation. And yet, a lot of younger programmers treat these patterns like a religious dogma that they must follow and don't question if they really make sense for the specific situation they are in.