Before we begin, I highly recommend that you approach quantum programming on a clean mental slate. Don’t go looking for how to declare and set variables, loop over code, create functions, etc. Any preconceptions you have about programming will probably not be useful. Quantum programming is not simply some way to make our existing programs run faster — quantum programming is fundamentally different from contemporary programming.
The most popular quantum imperative languages are:
QCL: Quantum Computing Language, one of the first implemented quantum programming languages. It resembles C language in regards of syntax and data types.
QMASM: Quantum Macro Assembler, published in 2016. ...
Silq is originally published in 2020.
It's actually that difficult. Currently it's not practical in any sort of commercial capacity, and it'd take a whole lot of new engineering to get any software you'd want to use to work with it. My understanding is as quantum computing as an inversion of the way quantum physics has functioned since it's inception.
Quantum computers were first proposed about 40 years ago, but they are only now becoming real machines. Making and controlling quantum computers has been elusive because their quantum weirdness arises from conditions that are hard to maintain.
Quantum computers were proposed in the 1980s by Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin. The intuition behind quantum computing stemmed from what was often seen as one of the greatest embarrassments of physics: remarkable scientific progress faced with an inability to model even simple systems.