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Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#11

Post by ps101 »

a-saleh wrote: post #8
davismwfl wrote: post #4

I can't really think of a current language I wouldn't be interested in learning or learning better. But there are languages that I am just not sure I am sold yet on, like Haskell. I am not saying it is bad as I just don't know, and functional programming isn't bad, but I am just not sure why Haskell over other options. Would love to hear reasons it might be a better choice and in what circumstances it is advantageous…

Depends what you want and what you value. Do you really need types? I did work in Clojure and I think having good support for immutable data-structures got me 80% of the benefits of functional programming. Similarily, maybe you are sold on actors and message-passing and Erlang/Elixir is proven there :) Or you would like types, but are not sure about the whole separation of IO from pure functions in type system, you c…

What's the more general pitch for learning a functional language in the first place?

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#12

Post by dagw »

a-saleh wrote: post #8
davismwfl wrote: post #4

I can't really think of a current language I wouldn't be interested in learning or learning better. But there are languages that I am just not sure I am sold yet on, like Haskell. I am not saying it is bad as I just don't know, and functional programming isn't bad, but I am just not sure why Haskell over other options. Would love to hear reasons it might be a better choice and in what circumstances it is advantageous…

Depends what you want and what you value. Do you really need types? I did work in Clojure and I think having good support for immutable data-structures got me 80% of the benefits of functional programming. Similarily, maybe you are sold on actors and message-passing and Erlang/Elixir is proven there :) Or you would like types, but are not sure about the whole separation of IO from pure functions in type system, you c…

After having dabbled a fair bit in Lisp, Haskell, Ocaml and, to a lesser extent, Elixir, I've found F# to strike a very nice middle ground when it comes to functional programming.

edit: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ is a very nice introduction to F# and all the things it can do.

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#13

Post by dagw »

ps101 wrote: post #11
a-saleh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you want and what you value. Do you really need types? I did work in Clojure and I think having good support for immutable data-structures got me 80% of the benefits of functional programming. Similarily, maybe you are sold on actors and message-passing and Erlang/Elixir is proven there :) Or you would like types, but are not sure about the whole separation of IO from pure functions in type system, you c…

What's the more general pitch for learning a functional language in the first place?

It forces you to learn a new and different way of thinking about programming and solving software problems. Even if you never end up actually using a functional language, many of the techniques and approaches you learn can be applied in all languages.

Learning Haskell was probably the single best thing I've done with regards to becoming a better programmer even I've never really written much Haskell since then

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#14

Post by a-saleh »

ps101 wrote: post #11
a-saleh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you want and what you value. Do you really need types? I did work in Clojure and I think having good support for immutable data-structures got me 80% of the benefits of functional programming. Similarily, maybe you are sold on actors and message-passing and Erlang/Elixir is proven there :) Or you would like types, but are not sure about the whole separation of IO from pure functions in type system, you c…

What's the more general pitch for learning a functional language in the first place?

I don't think there is a general one anymore.

The original "wouldn't it be better if we just passed data around through simple composable functions" kinda won, you have first-class anonymous functions with support for closures in most languages today in use :-)

I think the next pitch is along the lines of "We can solve the evil of mutable state making your app hard to debug/test" and i.m.o. that took over a bit as well, i.e. with frontend we usually have state in one tree sitting somewhere and what we display is just a function from state to our html.

And I have seen the state being represented as a fold/reduce over events in the application.

So the pitch i.m.o. is along the lines "Hey, we converged on the idea that functional programming is good, why not use language that has good support for it" :D

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#15

Post by buboard »

Javascript. There is not much to learn if you come from c. And ‘the javascript way’ is just a tangled mess. Python, because ‘the python way’ is just a bunch of weird idioms for apparently no reason other than making it odd to read for beginners. You have to use both, of course

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#16

Post by ps101 »

buboard wrote: post #15

Javascript. There is not much to learn if you come from c. And ‘the javascript way’ is just a tangled mess. Python, because ‘the python way’ is just a bunch of weird idioms for apparently no reason other than making it odd to read for beginners. You have to use both, of course

Which idioms in Python are you referring to?

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#17

Post by buboard »

ps101 wrote: post #16
buboard wrote: post #15

Javascript. There is not much to learn if you come from c. And ‘the javascript way’ is just a tangled mess. Python, because ‘the python way’ is just a bunch of weird idioms for apparently no reason other than making it odd to read for beginners. You have to use both, of course

Which idioms in Python are you referring to?

The pythonic ones

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#18

Post by acdha »

buboard wrote: post #15

Javascript. There is not much to learn if you come from c. And ‘the javascript way’ is just a tangled mess. Python, because ‘the python way’ is just a bunch of weird idioms for apparently no reason other than making it odd to read for beginners. You have to use both, of course

> Javascript. There is not much to learn if you come from c.

Ah, yes, C, well known for having rich data structures, object orientation, higher-order functions, etc. Even if you weren't conflating rather different languages, JavaScript is inherently interesting for being the only language supported by web browsers and thus being one click away from billions of people.

> Python, because ‘the python way’ is just a bunch of weird idioms for apparently no reason other than making it odd to read for beginners.

That's a pretty flame-y way to say you didn't choose to learn the reasoning behind something. Python has a lot of history developing language features in public – note that https://www.python.org/dev/peps/ starts in 2000 — so it's not like this is hard.

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#19

Post by a-saleh »

dagw wrote: post #12
a-saleh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you want and what you value. Do you really need types? I did work in Clojure and I think having good support for immutable data-structures got me 80% of the benefits of functional programming. Similarily, maybe you are sold on actors and message-passing and Erlang/Elixir is proven there :) Or you would like types, but are not sure about the whole separation of IO from pure functions in type system, you c…

After having dabbled a fair bit in Lisp, Haskell, Ocaml and, to a lesser extent, Elixir, I've found F# to strike a very nice middle ground when it comes to functional programming. edit: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ is a very nice introduction to F# and all the things it can do.

Hm, I was always kinda scared about setting up .Net on my linux box. What setup do you use?

Re: Ask HN: Which popular programming languages are you NOT interested in and why?

#20

Post by buboard »

acdha wrote: post #18
buboard wrote: post #15

Javascript. There is not much to learn if you come from c. And ‘the javascript way’ is just a tangled mess. Python, because ‘the python way’ is just a bunch of weird idioms for apparently no reason other than making it odd to read for beginners. You have to use both, of course

> Javascript. There is not much to learn if you come from c. Ah, yes, C, well known for having rich data structures, object orientation, higher-order functions, etc. Even if you weren't conflating rather different languages, JavaScript is inherently interesting for being the only language supported by web browsers and thus being one click away from billions of people. > Python, because ‘the python way’ is just a bunc…

Like i said i use both. But I didn’t find it interesting to learn either.
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