eh, i really did look for a joke. all i see is a "well actually" opinion that somebody here probably holds

Yes if you remove all frivolity I'm sure the joke will be funnier

I definitely agree on the last point. Personally I like languages where I can get the compiler to check a lot more of my reasoning, but I still want to be able to use all the memory management techniques that people use in C.

I remember Jonathan Blow did a fairly rambling stream of consciousness talk on his criticisms of Rust, and it was largely written off as "old man yells at clouds", but I tried to make sense of what he was saying and eventually realised he had a lot of good points.

I think it was this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk

That's what std::move does, and you're right that it's quite an ugly hack to deal with C++ legacy mistakes that C doesn't have.

I say move semantics to refer to the broader concept, which exists to make manual memory management safer and easier to get right. It's also a core feature of Rust.

Also I'm talking about parametric polymorphism, not subtype polymorphism. So I mean things like lists, queues and maps which can be specialised for the element type. That's what I can't imagine living without.

I would have said the same thing a few years ago, but after writing C++ professionally for a while I have to grudgingly admit that most of the new features are very useful for writing simpler code.

A few are still infuriating though, and I still consider the language an abomination. It has too many awful legacy problems that can never be fixed.

The only conceivable way to avoid pointers in C is by using indices into arrays, which have the exact same set of problems that pointers do because array indexing and pointer dereferencing are the same thing. If anything array indexing is slightly worse, because the index doesn't carry a type.

Also you're ignoring a whole host of other problems in C. Most notably unions.

People say that "you only need to learn pointers", but that's not a real thing you can do. It's like saying it's easy to write correct brainfuck because the language spec is so small. The exact opposite is true.

I'm not a fan of C++, but move semantics seem very clearly like a solution to a problem that C invented.

Though to be honest I could live with manual memory management. What I really don't understand is how anyone can bear to use C after rewriting the same monomorphic collection type for the 20th time.

If every EU politician was elected on a promise that there would be no more half measures, they would then proudly announce the end of quarter measures.

They are both doomed because neither is transformative enough to justify adoption. They are going to need to solve much harder problems to do that.

Take Rust as an example. It solved a problem that most people weren't even paying attention to, because the accepted wisdom said it was impossible.

Mojo's starting point is absurdly complex. Seems very obviously doomed to me.

Julia is a very clever design, but it still never felt that pleasant to use. I think it was held back by using llvm as a JIT, and by the single-minded focus on data science. Programming languages need to be more opportunistic than that to succeed, imo.

The github blurb says the language is comparable to general purpose languages like python and haskell.

Perhaps unintentionally, this seems to imply that the language can speed up literally any algorithm linearly with core count, which is impossible.

If it can automatically accelerate a program that has parallel data dependencies, that would also be a huge claim, but one that is at least theoretically possible.

Out of the ones you listed I'd suggest Julia or Clojure. They are simple and have interactive modes you can use to experiment easily.

Experienced programmers often undersell the value of interactive prompts because they don't need them as much. They already have a detailed mental model of how most languages behave.

Another thing: although Julia and Clojure are simple, they are also quite obscure and have very experimental designs. Python might be a better choice. From a beginner's perspective it's very similar to Julia, but it's vastly more popular and lots of people learn it as their first language.

Based on the languages you found, I'm guessing you were looking for something simple and elegant. I think Python fits this description too.