New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: I just want to have fun programming again

Ask HN: I just want to have fun programming again
26 by jb1991 | 27 comments on Hacker News.
I've written in many very different languages in a professional full-time capacity in my many-year career. Now I'm interested in building something new and I have a clear idea in mind with some code already in C++ to proof-of-concept it for myself, but I'm struggling to find a direction forward that would be... fun. I don't mind challenging work, but I like an environment that feels sane and logical and where I am not facing loads of incidental complexity along the way. I'm also attracted to implementing my app cross-platform. I just want to have some fun writing something without headaches, and that is seemingly less and less easy to achieve today. I'm not a fan of the complexity of either JavaScript or C++, and while I very much like Swift and working in the UIKit world, it's not so portable to platforms that many use. 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. If I could write an app in a good static-compiled language that did not require extraneous expertise in CSS but that shipped on a web page and looked good using tools only in that language, with good interop with an HTML Canvas, that would be one possibility, but it is again a compromise -- no easy multithreading, dealing with all the front-end baggage to bundle or deploy such an app, etc. Any recommendations? I'm not afraid of learning an entirely new language too.