This may not be a popular opinion, but nearly everything is more enjoyable for me with Python. It does have some snags which flip that script into a hell scape, but generally I love programming in Python because it feels like the least amount of syntactical friction.
Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
111–120 of 187 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#112As others have mentioned, this is highly personal. My own favorite stack is Elixir and/or full-stack Clojure.
I will second the question, I kind of tried Closure few times and never stuck with it. Now for fun, Rails and Elixir for sure, but would love to hear from you if you have a moment, how to go about it and have fun with Closure.
Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#113Svelte + Meteor. You can quickly get something into the hands of users without reinventing the wheel and you write a lot less code overall.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#114In my opinion, it's Clojure(script). I simply just don't have as much fun with other languages anymore. Clojure let me write some of the most elegant code I have ever written, and knowing certain nooks and crannies of Clojure lets me pull off some...interesting stuff.
Could you say more about what/how you're using them? Like, frameworks, libs, practices (testing), editor, repls, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#115I really enjoy Rails and Golang.
I feel like I can use those and hit the ground running on my ideas immediately.
I also know Python and JavaScript quite well, but I don't look forward to using those tools and I feel like I spend too much time in the initial phase, instead of getting right into implementing ideas.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#116The most Fun you get is rebuilding the wheel. That is where you hit the sweet spot with a language.
People say that the "fashion" in chose stack is about shinny new things, but I think, instead, is the joy of have a chance of rebuild the wheel, better (hopefully!), this time.
That is what I see when Ruby/Django hit the market, and now with Rust.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#117Rails. 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 ;-)
To me it's just sort of a given that Ruby is pleasant to work with. Otherwise Rails wouldn't be. If Rails itself were unpleasant, though, merely being in Ruby wouldn't be enough to make up for that.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#118>What is better in this day and age?
That is highly subjective, as certain stacks are only available for certain kinds of tasks. What a web developer finds enjoyable is not the same as the Linux kernel contributor will enjoy.
Personally what motivates me is the domain of the problems I am trying to solve, such as contributing to the digitization of my countries' companies and industries.
Once you find that for you, you won't think much about technological stacks, unless the one you are stuck with is god-awful.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#119For work? Elixir! I particularly enjoy writing tests in elixir compared to any other language so far. Most code is transparent so you can always peek under the hood to see what it's doing, maybe copy a few ideas for your own use. Package management is rather straight forward. The console access in production has been a godsend to execute one off scripts or running export tasks, diagnostics or other bits. For personal…
+1 phoenix/elixir is such a joy to use. A big emphasis on developer happiness, extremely powerful (with a broader set of strengths than Rails imo), and the actor model is much easier for me to reason/think about because it cleanly separates logic and is designed to fail and recover cleanly.
> broader set of strengths than Rails imo
What are those, in your experience? The BEAM platform is certainly better for concurrent work where you might be holding open something like a web socket. But other stuff...? I'm a pretty happy Erlang programmer and feel like I 'get' the functional programming aspect of things, but to me ActiveRecord just feels like such a great fit for DB work in that it makes the simple things really easy and intuitive, lets you do some more complex stuff, and gets out of your way if you just want to go to SQL. I don't have too much experience with Ecto. It feels like it "does the job", but is maybe not quite so quick and intuitive for basic/simple stuff like AR.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#120Go. Lower your pitchforks and hear me out: 1. Sensible defaults, can go very with just the stdlib: no choice paralysis between frameworks, mental overhead of setting up a project or ecosystem fragments to pick from. Just start with a main.go with net/http, add things along as you need them. 2. No ecosystem churn, whatever you write now will be idiomatic Go and build without issues for years to come. 3. Enough of a ty…
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…
> Was OP perhaps looking for languages that feel more "fresh" and are more hyped, while still having vibrant communities around them?
For me, it's more about the day-to-day experience, hence the reference to React Native. I'm dismayed by its popularity, because it feels like such a step backwards - the ugly language (Typescript is slightly better than JS but still not great), the massive amounts of external dependencies required for even simple projects, the bugs, the lack of a decent debugger, and so on. All those things take away from the day-to-day enjoyment of programming.