I just read about and play with things I don't use for work or any real projects--recently-ish I posted about Dart/Flutter here, and I worked through some basic Kotlin exercises after Google announced it as a supported language for Android. ML languages fascinated me early on; I think OCaml was the first language I saw with both strong typing and good type inference to keep code from getting verbose. Once I started looking deeper the pattern matching seemed like a key feature. Stuff like WebKit's new Riptide GC for JS is interesting (concurrent and generational but not copying is a neat corner of the space I hadn't heard much about). Rust is making progress on low-cost memory- and thread-safety. Computers can be interesting!
HS/college was a lot of C(++). My work has been Perl (I'm old) and then Python/Django (with the usual sprinkling of other stuff: JS, bash, etc.). Go has been a surprisingly intense hobby over the past few years and it's probably the only lang I could bust something interesting out in soon without much of a learning curve. (I guess also some of the close cousins of JS out there, but not really a brand-new environment then.)
I did play with very early (pre-`var`) C# more than 10 years back (I'm old!), but that was before most of these improvements happened and before I understood the relevance of the things like value types that were in there from the start. It's interesting now mostly as another point in the space of programming languages/environments, e.g. different tradeoffs around GC, generics, etc. Guess it has somewhat more potential to be relevant to me as an open/cross-platform project, but it's hard to see myself making the big time investment to actually get up to building-stuff speed in it just for giggles. Similar feelings about Swift or Kotlin, FWIW. (Not that I'm totally ruling anything out, but I've got stuff to do!)
That specific discussion of proposals I just Googled up looking for the C# pattern matching stuff. I first heard about it via a different link posted on lobste.rs a while back, but it was faster to Google this than look for that.
HS/college was a lot of C(++). My work has been Perl (I'm old) and then Python/Django (with the usual sprinkling of other stuff: JS, bash, etc.). Go has been a surprisingly intense hobby over the past few years and it's probably the only lang I could bust something interesting out in soon without much of a learning curve. (I guess also some of the close cousins of JS out there, but not really a brand-new environment then.)
I did play with very early (pre-`var`) C# more than 10 years back (I'm old!), but that was before most of these improvements happened and before I understood the relevance of the things like value types that were in there from the start. It's interesting now mostly as another point in the space of programming languages/environments, e.g. different tradeoffs around GC, generics, etc. Guess it has somewhat more potential to be relevant to me as an open/cross-platform project, but it's hard to see myself making the big time investment to actually get up to building-stuff speed in it just for giggles. Similar feelings about Swift or Kotlin, FWIW. (Not that I'm totally ruling anything out, but I've got stuff to do!)
That specific discussion of proposals I just Googled up looking for the C# pattern matching stuff. I first heard about it via a different link posted on lobste.rs a while back, but it was faster to Google this than look for that.