Ask HN: I just want to have fun programming again

Check out the talks by Rich Hickey to see if you have the same sentiment or perhaps this paper: https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-final.pd...

The community of the language largely follows this philosophy, the ecosystem is very stable and there is little churn. The most common implementation is on the JVM making the language very portable.

The headaches historically were with getting your environment setup, but there are amazing tutorials and good tooling or VSCode, IDEA, Emacs and vim.

This has, literally always, been the case. You need to pick where you want to compromise, because there is no "one-fits-all" solution.

- Use Electron/Typescript/React/Tailwind or some similar stack if you want to pull together something quickly that works across multiple platforms

- Use Flutter if you want to do that but don't mind it's kinda poor re-implementation of platform-native widgets

- Use Qt if you don't mind the C++ dialect and complexity

- Keep it simple and use Dear Imgui

- Use something like Blazor to build a web app in C#

There are loads of options with different tradeoffs.

Pick something that sounds refreshing and fun to you. A few recommendations for you: make a game for a fantasy console like pico8, walk through an adafruit embedded project, or get interested in the front end / design part of web development (look through dribbble for inspiration). You don't necessarily need much CSS and it's not hard to learn anyway.

>> I feel like there aren't really any good options in software development any more. It's always one big compromise with lots of possible decision fatigue. Every direction has drawbacks.

It seems most of your dissatisfaction comes from whining about the tech stack. Either focus less on the technology stack and more about the end product, or stop attaching emotion to decisions that are best made logically. It's okay if you choose options that have drawbacks if every option has drawbacks. There's no such thing as a silver bullet. Choosing the wrong option is rarely going to kill your project and you can always change directions later so breathe easy.