Zig's Lovely Syntax

  string json = $"""
      <h1>{title}</h1>
      <article>
          Welcome to {sitename}.
      </article>
      """;

  string json = $$"""
      <h1>{{title}}</h1>
      <article>
          Welcome to {{sitename}}, which uses the <code>{sitename}</code> syntax.
      </article>
      """;

    const still_raw =
        \\const raw =
        \\    \\Roses are red
        \\    \\  Violets are blue,
        \\    \\Sugar is sweet
        \\    \\  And so are you.
        \\    \\
        \\;
        \\
    ;

I'm definitely an outlier on this given the direction all syntactically C-like new languages have taken, but I have the opposite preference. I find that the most common reason I go back to check a variable declaration is to determine the type of the variable, and the harder it is to visually find that, the more annoyed I'm going to be. In particular, with statically typed languages, my mental model tends to be "this is an int" rather than "this is a variable that happens to have the type 'int'".

In Rust, in particular, this leads to some awkward syntactic verbosity, because mutable variables are declared with `let mut`, meaning that `let` is used in every declaration. In C or C++ the type would take the place of that unnecessary `let`. And even C (as of C23) will do type inference with the `auto` keyword. My tendency is to use optional type inference in places where needing to know the type isn't important to understand the code, and to specify the type when it would serve as helpful commentary when reading it back.

Zig has some nice things going on but somehow code is really hard to read, admitting its a skill issue as im not that versed in zig.

But sure, if you only compare it with Rust, it is a big improvement.

At least in my pronunciation, all five of those are monosyllabic! (/kQnst/, /f@n/).

(Nice to see someone agree with me on minimizing syllable count, though — I definitely find it easier to chunk[1] fewer syllables.)

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

The use of Ruby block parameters for loops in a language without first-class blocks/lambdas is a bit weird to me. I might have preferred a syntax that looks more like normal variable binding.

This surprises me (as a C++ guy). I use lambdas everywhere. What's the standard way of say defining a comparator when sorting an array in Zig?

Do I read this correctly that it replaces `\n` at the end of the line with a whitespace? CJK users probably won't be happy with the additional whitespaces.

I'm not sure if I'm parsing this right, but is the implication that "const" is not monosyllabic? It certainly is for me. How else do people say it? I get "fn" because people might say "eff enn" but I don't see what the equivalent for const would be.

Such a good decision. There's no reason to use block comments in 2025.

After all, Rust's big success is hiding the spinach of functional programming in the brownie of a systems programming language. Why not imitate that?

    const x: i32 = 92;

    const int x = 92;

Libellous! The "spiral rule" for C is an abomination and not part of the language. I happen to find C's type syntax a bit too clever for beginners, but it's marvellously consistent and straightforward. I can read types fine without that spiral nonsense, even if a couple of judicious typedefs are generally a good idea for any fancy function types.

1. Integer literals. "var a = 1" doesn't work, seems absurd. In Kotlin literals do have strong types, but coercion is allowed when defining variables so "var a = 1" works, and "var a: Long = 1" works even though you can write a literal long as 1L. This means you can write numbers to function parameters naturally.

2. Multi-line string literals. OK this is a neat idea, but what about copy/paste? In Kotlin you can just write """ .. """.trimIndent() and then copy paste some arbitrary text into the string, the indent will be removed for you. The IDE will also help with this by adding | characters which looks more natural than \\ and can be removed using .trimMargin(), only downside is the trimming is done at runtime but that could easily be fixed without changing the language.

3. Record literals. This syntax is called lovely because it's designed for grep, a properly funded language like Kotlin just uses named kwargs to constructors which is more natural. There's no need to design the syntax for grep because Kotlin is intended to be used with a good IDE that can answer this query instantly and precisely.

4. Function syntax. "fn foo(a: i32) i32 {}" seems weird. If the thing that has a type and the type are normally separated by a : then why not here? Kotlin does "fun foo(a: Int): Int {}" which is more consistent.

5. Locals. Agree with author that Kotlin nails it.

6. Not using && or ||, ok this one Zig wins, the Zig way is more consistent and reads better. Kotlin does have `and` and `or` as infix operator functions, but they are for the bitwise operations :(

7. Explicit returns. Kotlin supports blocks that return values and also doesn't need semicolons, so not quite sure what the tradeoff here is supposed to be about.

8. Loops being expressions is kinda cool but the Kotlin equivalent of his example is much easier to read still: "val thing = collection.first { it.foo > bar }". It compiles to a for loop due to the function inlining.

9. Generics. Zig's way seems primitive and unnecessarily complex. In Kotlin it is common to let the compiler infer generics based on all available information, so you can just write "someMethod(emptyList())" and emptyList<T>() infers to the correct type based on what someMethod expects.

Overall Zig looks like a lot of modern languages, where they are started as a hobby or side project of some guy and so the language is designed around whatever makes implementing the compiler most convenient. Kotlin is unusual because it doesn't do that. It was well funded from the start, so the syntax is designed first and foremost to be as English-like and convenient as possible without leaving the basic realm of ordinary curly-brace functions-and-oop style languages. It manages to be highly expressive and convenient without the syntax feeling overly complex or hard to learn.

I've heard the argument that people might confuse binary operators for prefix/postfix operators, but I don't buy it. Who would think an operator named `orelse` is anything but binary?