Ask HN: Did you ever fall out of Love with a Programming Language

In the 90s I was very into Objective-C, I thought it was a great programming language. You could drop down to C for performance critical sections, but for the 90% which wasn't performance critical the OO was much nicer to use than C++ IMHO.

I even moved countries because in the 90s NeXT wasn't a really popular platform, and there weren't many jobs. Most jobs were C++ jobs.

It took me a year and a half of pain at my first job to finally decide it wasn't for me.

- I developed a system using WebObjects, all in compiled Objective-C. If I had a single user in the office using it, normally my server would crash after about 15 minutes of usage. Double-free or use-after-free. I had already spend time tracking down memory issues but I spent a whole day looking for more and finally found one. Proudly deployed the software. It stayed up longer. Crashed after about 30 minutes. There were more memory bugs. It was just basically impossible to get right IMHO.

- Nulls. You look at the result of a piece of code and the result is null. Why is it null? [foo bar] (or foo.bar() in more conventional syntax) if foo is null, no NullPointerException is thrown, the result is just null. So if the result is null, ONE of the inputs or return values from a function or something was null before. Which one? Don't know.

The second job of my career was Perl. Perl might not have been perfect but it solved both those problems and I was happy. Debugging time was a lot shorter due to better null handling (if something's null you learn about it closer to the source of the problem), some hunting for memory cycles which the GC couldn't find but that was rare, basically it "just worked".

Back in the mid 1990s I had a summer job porting a map engine from Visual Basic to a Java applet running inside of Netscape. It ended up being a performance optimization nightmare. Because $reasons, the database stored polygons as strings, and parsing strings in Java to get the coordinates needed to draw the polygons was ridiculously slow when doing it the Java way. I ended up having to write my own custom string parsing code to avoid all the overhead associated with object creation and garbage collection when using the Java string libraries to get barely passable performance drawing the simplest of maps. It probably didn't help that computers were still only running in the hundreds of MHz at the time, but that experience ended up souring me on Java for just about anything else.

I was in love with java in 00-s as my first professional language, 10 years later I’ve grown up.

The world has then moved forward to web, open source and more lightweight environments and mindsets.

But java stayed essentially the same verbose corporate heavy monster.

And i left that old, arrogant and picky lady to hang out with young, pretty and more open minded alternatives like ruby, typescript etc.

Looking back now I think i fell in love not with java, but rather the team/project i worked at and the bright future java was promising.

I was quite thankful to be exposed to AmigaBASIC and QuickBASIC that led me into more structured programming than earlier line based BASICs. That really helped make the transition to C and Turing easier.