Ask HN: I just want to have fun programming again

C# can go in both directions because if you don't go full of shenanigans and simply write what you need it can be reasonably elegant. But to your point it won't necessarily be "fun", however if the fun is more in the problem it can be a great answer.

F# I'm finding to be a language I can have some fun with because some of the syntax just speaks to me (being able to use pipe operators aka |> to chain work so that what you work on is at the front and then it flows into each step without explicitly writing out intermediate variables or writing code inside out feels GOOD to me). It certainly isn't for everyone though.

At some point I want to play with Avalonia because I need to get back to doing non-web UI but I never have the right idea other than some of my game stuff and that's getting done in Godot or Unity.

I think of doing something like this, but I'm afraid my problem is that I'm self-directed and my motivation comes from within. Working for someone makes it again a job and making me fix problems someone else have created within limits they envision.

Is it different for you?

Yeah exactly, even though I'm more of a Linux user than an Apple user, one thing I do admire is that there a lot of apps with UI polish because they JUST build for one platform.

They just focus on making it exist, without premature generality.

Come help us build a quantum physics game engine: https://github.com/quantumlib/unitary

Well, I'm going to chime in with Java and JavaFX. Yes, its still used. Yes, its still active. Yes, its still updated.

Java is Java. A nice aspect of Java is that you can find pretty much anything in Java. Not written in something else and integrated with Java. Written IN Java. That helps limit the long running impact of "dependency hell". Of course you'll have dependencies, but in the end you have a static distribution, and its the same code, across the platforms. I'm currently working with Apache Jena and RDF (and this has nothing to do with the semantic web). For my purposes, RDF is a hoot, and adding Jena to my project was drag and drop.

There are exceptions. JavaFX is one in itself, as it does have a platform dependent binary component. If you're lazy on tooling (I'm lazy, I hate tooling, I should say I hate fiddling with tooling), just bundle all the platforms everywhere. But you can also make platform specific builds. In the end though, you don't have any environmental dependencies. All of them are brought with you. You can static link lots of things, but in Java, its routine.

Java is evolving into a multi-paradigm language. Still dominantly OOP, but it has the low hanging fruit of others as well. All of it is imperfect, but it's pragmatic as all get out.

JavaFX is a pretty solid piece of kit. It's modern, it's STILL modern. As old as it is, its held up really well. It's different, it's not Swing by any measure. My hurdles picking it up was taking preconceived notions learned from older frameworks and trying to square peg round hole them into FX. FX is opinionated enough to make that kind of effort frustrating.

But it comes with a scene graph. It comes with CSS. It comes with animation. It comes with 3D. It even has boolean 2D geometry operations. It comes with a bevy of layout containers. It has GUI screen builder. It has FXML, which is an XML based format for specifying scene graphs. With a bit of boiler plate, you can actually do entire screens and logic in an FXML file with embedded JavaScript, if you're so inclined. Perhaps not the greatest idea, but for certain applications the idea of being able to have an end user add a screen to your application can be very interesting.

I really like the Property and Binding mechanic. It's one of those things that's compelling and can lead to abuse and trouble. But that's OK. Just dial it back and it sings. It can also be used for simple rules, or as a simple constraint system.

Make no mistake, there will be battles. But for me, someone who hates Fiddly. Who tolerates tooling. Having everything underneath the one overarching canopy of the JDK is useful. But, it's still Java. Java can be wordy, to be sure. This doesn't bother me so much. Even my Common Lisp is wordy. CLOS isn't a poster child of terse coding. You still have your setters/getters (that can be sort of mitigated with the lombok project, but it doesn't have support for the JavaFX property idioms).

I do have one complaint about FX. The components and such are pretty locked down. It's really hard to extend them in ways they're not designed to be extended. Which means if something you're working with won't work for you, its baby out with the bathwater.

I've been playing with it all year. I have several half baked projects floating about. It's all been mostly fun for me. Desktop GUI work has a lot of minutia, which I've never been very good at. It's also a GUI, which is about presentation, and make this blue, and that 3 pts bigger and line all this up and can we have a shadow here. Most of which I hate. But that's an inner conflict unrelated to the environment. That's just GUIs and bike shedding. I've suffered this since they offered color to smart terminals.

GUIs also have a bunch of things that have nothing to do with your application per se. Global state, where do you put the logs, preferences (dare I mention Java has a cross platform preferences API built in?), perhaps capturing window layout on close, etc. I wish I could point to simple framework that supplies all that, but I can't. They exist, they're not simple, they come with a lot of baggage. That may or may not be "fun" for you.