Ansible - I first discovered it from a comment here, thought 'who needs a new config management tool' then realised Michael Dehaan had also written cobbler so thought it was worth a crack. Since then my python skills have improved through reading and improving the ansible code base, I've written ansible-lint, ansible-inventory-grapher and ansible-review, and I've been on two long distance conference trips as a result.
Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
121–130 of 315 posts
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#122Terraform and Ansible so far have been insanely helpful additions to my infrastructure management tools. Actually, they are my only tools almost now.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#123About 2 years ago I discovered a programming language called K. It's a very unusual-looking, extremely terse language in the APL family. It just "clicked" for me. I enjoy the ability to experiment with different algorithms and approaches in a few keystrokes, and learning to think in a "vector-oriented" fashion has opened my eyes to much more elegant formulations of old problems. There aren't many extensive tutorial m…
Isn't K related to Q (and KDB)? We have one guy at work responsible for all of our KDB stuff because no one wants to learn either!
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#124Tachyons.css: http://tachyons.io/ Suddenly CSS became fun again and my time designing websites went down by a guessed factor of 5.
What happens when your boss all of a sudden wants to change all the colors from blue to red?
I have the same problem, and I've yet to find an acceptable solution.
Another problem I've encountered: functional CSS (such as Tachyons) is only good for minimal layout. I was recently converting a mobile+tablet+desktop PSD design to CSS with very complicated reordering rules (this is full height on the right on desktop, floated bottom of the page on tablet, etc.) and all my elements had 20+ classes attached to them.
So I went back and converted regular 60+ lines of CSS. Still, for some reason, working with Tachyons was for some reason faster and "easier" to reason about.
I think it's a step in the right direction, but we're not there yet.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#125Clojure. Before learning Clojure, I didn't even have a career. I just wanted to get into software development. But at the time, all I knew was a bit of Python. And while I could've learned Java, I figured that being yet another Java programmer in the marketplace, but with no experience and a liberal arts degree, was probably going to get me nowhere. So I decided I had to learn something emerging. Something where ther…
Awesome story! I'm interested in hear more about the time you spent learning non-programming fundamentals. Would you care to elaborate?
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#126I have just started using C# and .NET Core after years of dismissing it when it was only available on Windows. Now it is open source and cross platform! I come from a PHP background but have been writing smaller performance critical code in Go lately. C# is a pleasure to work with. It's got generics and good support for asynchronous I/O. .NET Core is also very good, it's dead simple to spin up an API serving backend…
For those of you, who are new to Microsoft Universe, i would suggest taking a look at F#. While i think that C# is the best imperative language, F# will change the way you think about software development.
If anybody would be interested, you can start here: https://swlaschin.gitbooks.io/fsharpforfunandprofit/content/
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
for the last 7 years i've been a php developer and i'm currently in the process of learning my second language, #c. it's good to hear that someone else has been through this process before me and said it was such a big step! thanks for giving me some more motivation!
Agree on this, and am at the same stage myself; C# is a huge transition from e.g. Php (or ColdFusion). Can't help but be amazed at the doors it opens up though - Pluralsight is definitely one of your friends here. Jon Skeet's walkthrough of C# 4, SOLID, the courses on DDD etc - so much to learn! :) MS Dev Essentials will give you a 3 month sub for free, if you didn't have that already.
In addition, you get to learn a lot of best practices from the trainers at PluralSight. If there were a similar company in the non Microsoft world with as comprehensive a library and as good a selection of trainers, I would love to know about it.
Also, check out their learning paths for C# - it can be a good option to avoid the overwhelm if you are new to the language.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#128It's far from cool now of course but Java, in 1995.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#129About 2 years ago I discovered a programming language called K. It's a very unusual-looking, extremely terse language in the APL family. It just "clicked" for me. I enjoy the ability to experiment with different algorithms and approaches in a few keystrokes, and learning to think in a "vector-oriented" fashion has opened my eyes to much more elegant formulations of old problems. There aren't many extensive tutorial m…
Isn't K related to Q (and KDB)? We have one guy at work responsible for all of our KDB stuff because no one wants to learn either!
Q and KDB(+) are written on top of K. The version of K which is currently commercially available from Kx Systems is K4, and it comes "hidden" within the kdb+ executable. The company I presently work for uses a customized build of K3. My interpreter targets K5/K6, the bleeding-edge release.
edit: If you can get past your initial reaction to the unfamiliarity of the syntax, consider giving K an honest shot. You might find you like it.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#130For web development: React. I have been developing web applications on and off throughout my now 20 year career - all the way back when Applets were all the rage. Spent time with a host of technologies and approaches: JSP/Servlets, JSF, Struts, GWT, Backbone. React has been hands down the most productive technology I've used in web space. I'm so productive using it that I now enjoy doing front-end development again.…
What have been your impressions with Elm so far? I started playing with it recently since I enjoy Haskell but I'm coming from it with no prior web experience so it's hard for me to gauge it in most aspects.