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Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

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Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#101

Post by KronisLV »

q3k wrote: post #99
KronisLV wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, why would anyone even bother pulling out said pitchforks? In my eyes, Go is a pretty reasonable choice: the language is decent, simple enough to be learnt in a relatively short amount of time, is reasonably readable and doesn't force you to work in a really low level of abstraction. The runtime is also pretty good and the static executables that can be generated are a major boon in my eyes! None of the pain of P…

> Hmm, why would anyone even bother pulling out said pitchforks? It repeatedly get raked over the coals here for being dumb, inelegant, stuck in the 80's and an overall Bad Language Which Cannot Be Taken Seriously. :)

I'm sorry that you had to experience that!

The biggest criticisms that i've heard of Go is that the error handling ends up with a lot of boilerplate due to the syntax, and previously people also complained about the lack of generics (which is now being added and refined).

If anything, i would expect people to be more negative towards PHP because, while the language and its ecosystem have both come a long way towards being pleasant to work in and overall capable, i'm sure that plenty out there have ran into horrible WordPress sites/plugins or old and neglected codebases with bespoke frameworks that have no documentation and that are just horrible to work with.

In contrast, to me Go actually feels like what Pascal should have been.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#102

Post by rognjen »

aantix wrote: post #61

Take Rails 7 with Turbo. Start with the Jumpstart Pro template. You’ll feel like a god. https://jumpstartrails.com/ Finally, all of the boilerplate and over-engineered components are gone. You’re finally free to solve the just business problems. And you’ll be fighting integration issues a whole lot less. I have no idea why any saas based startup, whether it’s one person or VC backed, would start with anything less. T…

I am very put off by the fact that the template is a yearly sub.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#103

Post by skytreader »

I have two definitions of "fun" but the common denominator is that I find the ecosystem "reasonable" (in quotes because I have no objective definition).

Also, an important factor I feel I should disclose is that my idea of fun does not involve my code being able to run in other people's computers. Though it is important that I can understand myself three months down the line. That said, my definitions of fun are:

1. I'm productive in it. The tech stack would definitely include Python for very subjective reasons. The decisions PSF makes for their batteries-included standard library really suit me. Did you know they now include basic stats functions too?[1] I have a single-file lib that does this which I copy-paste around as a utility script (never bothered to package it properly); I use this whenever I want to do benchmarks or other standard software eng'g/CS stats analysis. Now, I don't need this script anymore!

If I have to design a UI though, I tend to stick with JS, maybe Android if the use-case makes sense. But with JS it's either very vanilla or I'm making a game with Phaser. (My thoughts on Phaser is another post...)

2. It teaches me something new. This is the part where I just learn a new language (Scheme, even Ruby ha!, one of these days Prolog or Haskell). Most of the time I just work through some textbook or maybe Advent of Code/HackerRank.

For a combination of 1 and 2, I program in---drumroll please---C! Good old, restrictive C, though still with a wealth of libraries and real-life examples available. I've been implementing some 1980s-era game listings in C; what I thought was a straightforward exercise (these are text-based BASIC programs) ended up being a deep dive into Linux signals and buffers (I won't pretend I've mastered this). It turns out, these 1980s platforms (ZX, Apple, TRS-80, etc) has some "syscalls" that don't have a direct equivalent in modern Linux (maybe ever?).

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/statistics.html

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#104

Post by abujazar »

trhoad wrote: post #29

I really hope Rails make a comeback. Older versions of Laravel were superb - but when I went back recently I was shocked at what a clusterfudge had been made of shoehorning a frontend framework in.

UI components were removed from the framework and made optional with Laravel 6 in 2019.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#106

Post by q3k »

KronisLV wrote: post #101
q3k wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hmm, why would anyone even bother pulling out said pitchforks? It repeatedly get raked over the coals here for being dumb, inelegant, stuck in the 80's and an overall Bad Language Which Cannot Be Taken Seriously. :)

I'm sorry that you had to experience that! The biggest criticisms that i've heard of Go is that the error handling ends up with a lot of boilerplate due to the syntax, and previously people also complained about the lack of generics (which is now being added and refined). If anything, i would expect people to be more negative towards PHP because, while the language and its ecosystem have both come a long way towards…

> I'm sorry that you had to experience that!

It's fine, I'm not religiously affiliated with any technology to be offended. I've worked with everything from Haskell to C, from Rust to Go, from Lua to Lisps, from BlueSpec to Prolog - and that's been a good lesson that there's more to a language than its' syntax and semantics as analyzed in a vacuum on an internet forum. And that you should use different tools for different jobs - and usually the simplest tool which works is the best choice.

Go is very often that simple tool which works for most simple things.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#107

Post by bronze »

For me, it would be nim. A single language that can run on all sidesof the stack, great to write in and ~fast compile times. It helps that I have been toying with it for years, but it's definitely the language I enjoy the most. Of course the ecosystem is not huge, so you have to roll your own solution a lot, although it's getting slowly better.

Jester+custom HTML dsl+compiling nim to js makes for a good experience, imho

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#108

Post by aantix »

rognjen wrote: post #102
aantix wrote: post #61

Take Rails 7 with Turbo. Start with the Jumpstart Pro template. You’ll feel like a god. https://jumpstartrails.com/ Finally, all of the boilerplate and over-engineered components are gone. You’re finally free to solve the just business problems. And you’ll be fighting integration issues a whole lot less. I have no idea why any saas based startup, whether it’s one person or VC backed, would start with anything less. T…

I am very put off by the fact that the template is a yearly sub.

I guess we’ll agree to disagree on the sentiment.

Software maintenance never ends. And programmers just like every one else, need to eat.

Assuming even a modest $50/hr rate, you’d chew through $250 just trying to get the team invite functionality working, let alone the other 15 features.

You’re worth $250 a year for something that will make you a happier engineer.

Why burn nights and weekends implementing api tokens or 2fa or user invites when it gives you zero competitive advantage and you could pay $250 and all of that is provided for you?

Spend your dev time where you bring the most value.

You’re worth it. Your ideas are worth it. Be kind to yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#109

Post by GiorgioG »

q3k wrote: post #106
KronisLV wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry that you had to experience that! The biggest criticisms that i've heard of Go is that the error handling ends up with a lot of boilerplate due to the syntax, and previously people also complained about the lack of generics (which is now being added and refined). If anything, i would expect people to be more negative towards PHP because, while the language and its ecosystem have both come a long way towards…

> I'm sorry that you had to experience that! It's fine, I'm not religiously affiliated with any technology to be offended. I've worked with everything from Haskell to C, from Rust to Go, from Lua to Lisps, from BlueSpec to Prolog - and that's been a good lesson that there's more to a language than its' syntax and semantics as analyzed in a vacuum on an internet forum. And that you should use different tools for diffe…

> Go is very often that simple tool which works for most simple things.

If only folks applied that kind of thinking to things like architecture and devops.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#110

Post by mikeryan »

davidw wrote: post #24

Rails. Nothing really beats it for the combination of * Getting something up and running quickly. Something that does what you want. * Iterating quickly on the thing you're building. Need a library (gem)? There's very likely a pretty good one. * Building the thing in a fairly clean way (tests, code organization) in a way that's not too bureaucratic and tedious. * Friendly community of people. I've done some playing a…

I’m at least a bit amused that you have a whole comment about how nice rails is without mentioning ruby ;-)
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