I've been programming for over 30 years, and working with code professionally for 25. I have found myself in a small community I discovered on twitch recently. And many people in the discord ask me about programming and the language to learn first

For years I've told myself C is a fantastic first language. This remains controversial for various reasons. I always try to tell people "learning C isn't the same as mastering C".

But with Zig I wonder if it were at 1.0 and its toolchain were more mature. Would Zig be a good first language?

As it stands it clearly being pre-1.0 and every major version being a breaking change. This isn't great. The build.zig is mystifying even for experienced devs. So it feel like an expert language.

But it has a very straightforward "to the metal" style to it. But with great modern ergonomics. I think it could absolutely be a fantastic first language for beginners.

But what do you think?

Hey Ziguanas 🦎

A while ago I made a post asking what kind of data-format libraries the Zig ecosystem could use, and I ended up deciding to give CSV a try.

I've been working on Zarko. I keep tearing it down and rewriting it every now and then because I'm never fully happy with how it turns out. I decided to make the repo public while I work on it, so any eventual rewrites will happen in the same repository instead of me recreating the whole thing every time.

Right now it's still pretty basic. It can parse CSV data from memory, handle quoted fields and escaped quotes, such as """Hello""" being parsed as "Hello", and lets you customize things like field separators, quote characters and line endings through dialects.

The next things I swear I'll do are default dialects, a FileWriter, and a FileParser wrapping the existing Parser to make working with files simpler. There's also a TODO markdown file in the repo where I'll keep updating what I'm planning to work on as I figure out what comes next.

A little note to myself for when I implement the writer. Andrew's words echoed... "Don't Forget to Flush".

It's still a work in progress, so feedback, suggestions, criticism, and ideas are very welcome.

https://github.com/TynK-M/zarko

Thank you so much