Nothing beats Smalltalk for rapid prototyping.
True! Smalltalk's weakness has always been not prototyping.
Just put your prototype in production; if it crashes, a debugger will pop up allowing you to fix it and continue!
Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
101–110 of 172 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#102I usually like to get two benefits from any project. A primary benefit which the project is intended to support, and a secondary benefit which I hope to gain either to open doors or make the effort worthwhile should the project fail.
I recently learned rust while experimenting with a neural net architecture. The neural net was mixed, the rust knowledge is pretty useful.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#103I use a niche language because it is by far the best language in which you can make the things I want to make as a hobby: tools to augment Emacs. I think that's how you are supposed to pick a language, right? Think of your goal and choose the most appropriate language to achieve that goal?
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#104Visual Basic and PHP are the first languages I learned for desktop and web development respectively. While I can and do code in other languages, I've found I can get to a working state faster with them because of that long-standing familiarity. So for hobby projects where nobody else can tell me what to do, I still use one of the two, regardless of how dated they tend to be perceived.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve been using PHP and writing web services for a long time and I can be productive quickly. I still use the language professionally too, which keeps my working knowledge of it oiled.
Go is a pleasure to work with, however, so I’m exercising that more and more.
I loved VB for a long time but finally moved away from it after the VB 6.0 years, primarily because my daily driver switched to Linux and I stopped writing software for windows. I now use a Mac but I tinker with Linux. My family has so much trouble with Windows I’m very unlikely to ever try it again and it’s been 23 years anyway.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#105I often feel like my primary language, c++, is somewhere between niche and mainstream. It leaves ample opportunities to do something in a niche way. I am often disenchanted after reading many open-source, ostensibly high-quality c++ libraries — namely Apple’s WebKit and a few parts of Google’s Filament. That said, there are a few gems of c++ that I can’t describe as anything but archetypally niche. Nlohhman’s JSON li…
Common Lisp has had compile time regexes for well over a decade.
Several languages support compiled regular expressions.
Also, I interpreted the parent comment as talking about the implementation/architecture of the projects, not the projects themselves.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#106No side projects yet, but I chose to learn Pharo [0] because I believe it'll make me hyper productive for certain side projects [1]. The reason: I use the debugger and REPLs a lot when programming. Pharo is a language with a debugger + REPL + language reflection tools on steroids. Also, I want to see up close what Alan Kay went on and on about.
From what I've seen, Pharo has a few things that would make Bret Victor proud. But it's still early days for me, I'm still getting the hang of the language.
And while the language is obscure there seems to be at least one SaaS company that is hiring for remote European software engineers [2]. There are some other examples, but IMO [2] seems to be the best one among all the examples [3].
[0] https://pharo.org/features
[1] I know that niche languages can have very weird issues, but there are enough side projects where these issues won't be much of an issue.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#107By trying new languages, I learn different ways of doing things and different ways of thinking. Basically it's a way of uncovering the unknown unknowns, be less of a Blub-programmer. It also makes me a better programmer in my day-job-or-other language.
The main reason I do it though is simply because it's fun to see new and different things. I'm very much a programming language and frameworks/libraries tourist. Of the languages I've tried, F# comes closest to seeming like it could be good for general use, if only it was more popular and had a killer framework or application space (like Scala for Spark). I think it gets overlooked because of its MS/.NET origin and OCaml folks either don't care for it or are small in number.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Common Lisp has had compile time regexes for well over a decade.
Several languages support compiled regular expressions. Also, I interpreted the parent comment as talking about the implementation/architecture of the projects, not the projects themselves.
The neat thing about Common Lisp is that cl-ppcre is just a library, but it still builds native code recognizers.
That’s neat about C++ templates too which is why I drew the comparison.
Personally I think Lisp macros are considerably more readable than C++ templates, especially when it comes to errors, but I’m happy to agree that reasonable minds may differ on that.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#109Because to be a common resume worthy language you have to be designed for folks who can be taught to write programs which overlaps with but does not cover people who inherently are programmers. The monotony of the guard rails wears thin.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#110I have strong OCD that I have to use my own language and own code for all hobby projects, I've met some blockers on implementing my language last year and haven't been coding much in my free time since and moved focus towards other things like music.. This will change when I start recording and have to write my own DAW. It's both a curse and a blessing.