Nim became the obvious choice, and I wasn't a fanboy before. Simple semantics, in a very functional style oriented around data's value. References and identity have to be trapdoored. Everything is single-owner unique lifetimes by default, no annotations or best-practices required. You end up writing extraordinarily functional/procedural code that produces very fast and memory-safe binaries, it fits right into C++'s niche.

The only objection I could steel man was that the standard library and most packages are composed of relatively pure functions that return new values, so allocations are happening there. But when types as complex as data frames can be semantically used as just values, and you know they have scoped lifetimes by default, the benefits are obvious.

With all of C++'s insanely specific, subtle, implicit, compiler- and platform-dependent behaviors, I've often wondered when the industry will finally consider its dominance an artifact of first-mover inertia and simply move on. There are vastly better ways to do all of the things it does, while easily exposing levers for the the things it's considered to do exceptionally well.

It also turns out that the mix is due to the standard library leaning on raw C loop iterations underneath whenever it can. Which is great! But it confuses the library's interface paradigms.

Buy or make a cube with a very normal distribution of cards, nothing crazy (I bought a cube made by Card Kingdom some time ago). There will be 90 spells per each of 4 players. Shuffle the whole deck, and deal out the 90 per player. Now you simply make 40 card decks, typically with ~25 spells each. There will be lots of wiggle room for sideboards or even side decks. Then run a little tournament.

The games are usually that ideal Magic scenario: Nail-biting back and forth gameplay, where anything powerful has a cost and games come down to the wire.

It's astoundingly easy to build software with that behavior set. Even if the occasional copy is necessary, you're paying a far lower cost for it than for an interpreted language. Slice off a couple important components into stateless executables built like this, and it's clean sailing.

The social taboos of cultures around the world are fighting a ceaseless battle to reign in these endemic outliers.

Thankfully newer languages like Nim, Odin, and Swift lean hard into value semantics. They drastically reduce the cost of focusing on data structures and writing obvious algorithms. Then, when bottlenecks appear, you can choose to opt into fine-tuning.

I really REALLY love the Lion icons. Colorful but subdued with only mild saturation, distinctive shapes, strong line borders with very slight halo, and mild gradients to make them pop.