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Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

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Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#141

Post by jamie_ca »

lukifer wrote: post #7

Rich Hickey's "Value of Values"[0] is what finally sold me on the benefits of pure functional programming and immutable data structures. (It remains horrifying to continue working with MySQL in my day job, knowing that every UPDATE is potentially a destructive action with no history and no undo.) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6BsiVyC1kM

That feature's "coming" - part of SQL 2011 called System Versioning, currently supported in DB2 and SQL Server, but available in MariaDB 10.3 Beta according to this talk:

https://youtu.be/xEDZQtAHpX8?t=2278

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#142

Post by jmole »

thoman23 wrote: post #138
spricket wrote: post #125

Microservices. They seemed really cool until I worked on a few large projects using them. Disaster so epic I watched most of engineering Management walk the plank. TLDR: The tooling available is not good enough. The biggest cause lies in inter-service communication. You push transaction boundaries outside the database between services. At the same time, you lose whatever promise your language offers that compilation…

> "all the services needed to talk to each other" I'm not an expert by any means, but I'm pretty sure that statement indicates a problem.

Yes, then you're just doing bad OOP with sockets instead of a language that was designed for it.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#143

Post by h0l0cube »

DanHulton wrote: post #43

Testing. Unit testing to me seemed akin to drinking 8 glasses of water every day. A lot of people talk about how important it is for your health, but it really tends to get in the way, and it doesn't seem to really be necessary. Too frequently, code would change and mocks would need to change with it, removing a good chunk of the benefit of having the code under test. Then I started writing integration testing while…

You might like this article: https://rbcs-us.com/documents/Why-Most-Unit-Testing-is-Waste...

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#144

Post by pacala »

arduinomancer wrote: post #60

Static Type Checking. I used to think Node.js was the greatest thing ever. I won't bother explaining the benefits but suffice it to say I much prefer writing a server in Java compared to node. I think it takes getting burned at least once for new developers to understand why a lot of seasoned developers like types. Over time I've realized that there's a simple principle that applies to a lot of stuff in software and…

Good insights. Modern platforms are neither full dynamic nor rigidly static, but gradual, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradual_typing. Start with a dynamic script, add typing as you go to strengthen the system. Notable mentions: Typescript, Python + mypy, C#, Dart.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#145

Post by threeseed »

spricket wrote: post #125

Microservices. They seemed really cool until I worked on a few large projects using them. Disaster so epic I watched most of engineering Management walk the plank. TLDR: The tooling available is not good enough. The biggest cause lies in inter-service communication. You push transaction boundaries outside the database between services. At the same time, you lose whatever promise your language offers that compilation…

> Keeping 30 backend applications up to date and playing nice with each other is a full time job. CI pipelines for all of them, failover, backups.

This isn't normal.

You should just have a single CI pipeline, failover and backup approach that is parameterised for each microservice.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#146

Post by spudlyo »

lukifer wrote: post #7

Rich Hickey's "Value of Values"[0] is what finally sold me on the benefits of pure functional programming and immutable data structures. (It remains horrifying to continue working with MySQL in my day job, knowing that every UPDATE is potentially a destructive action with no history and no undo.) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6BsiVyC1kM

Often times MySQL is set up with auto-commit set to true, where every DML statement (like UPDATE) is wrapped in an implicit BEGIN and COMMIT. It doesn’t have to be that way though, you can manage the transaction yourself, and you don’t have to COMMIT if you don’t want to, you can undo (ROLLBACK) if necessary.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#147

Post by brianberns »

koyote wrote: post #134
vivekseth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One downside to static typing is the overhead required when writing/running programs. For example, let's say you have a class `Dog` that you want to rename to be more generic so you now call it `Animal`. In Python you can test out snippets of code with `Animal` without necessarily having to worry about other pieces of code still referring to `Dog`. You would just need to make sure that the code you want to run happen…

In C# with Visual Studio and Resharper: * Have cursor on 'Dog' * Ctrl-R-R * Type 'Animal' * Press Enter Done. And your code won't be littered with 'old' types and other garbage.

This is native to Visual Studio now. You don’t even need Resharper.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#148

Post by chuckdries »

spricket wrote: post #127
fierro wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think dynamically types languages are on their way out. There aren't many good arguments remaining in favor of them.

I agree, because type inference in some (Typescript) is good enough that there's almost no overhead. Back when it took twice as many lines with types it made sense. But the overhead in typescript is maybe 10%, worth it anymore? I don't think so

I think we have a ways to go. Typescript's type system is very feature complete (which is a good thing, but it also means there's a lot to learn, and I feel like I have to think about type definitions more than I ever did with other languages), but also, fantastic libraries like Ramda have a lot of trouble with expressing their types with Typescript. It's a tough problem to solve, and I still use both, but I'm just saying we're not there yet.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#149

Post by sbov »

spricket wrote: post #125

Microservices. They seemed really cool until I worked on a few large projects using them. Disaster so epic I watched most of engineering Management walk the plank. TLDR: The tooling available is not good enough. The biggest cause lies in inter-service communication. You push transaction boundaries outside the database between services. At the same time, you lose whatever promise your language offers that compilation…

Microservices doesn't necessarily mean you have a ton of services. A single microservice can encompass millions of lines of code.

Honestly, its a bad name for the architecture.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#150

Post by ryl00 »

baobrain wrote: post #121
8bitsrule wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I looked at Python, it looked interesting. Then I found out that -white space is important-. I thought about what it might be like to worry about that, and decided -not for me-. When CPUs ran at 1 MHz, I wasn't so sure about FORTH with its RPN. But it ran a lot faster than interpreted BASIC, and was a lot faster to write than assembler. Once the world discovers the source of all its woes and goes back to wide-op…

> Then I found out that -white space is important-. I hear this a lot and I think it's a misunderstood statement. Python does not care if you do not have a space in assignments or arithmetic or between commas or parentheses. What Python does care about is the indentation of the source code. The indentation is what guides the structure - which is already what we are doing with most languages that don't care about inde…

But doesn't the whitespace issue gimp Python's lambda syntax? AFAIK you're limited to one expression or function call, to get around the fact that you can't just inline a completely new function (with its associated control flow structure).

And what about one-liners, a la Perl? Stack Overflow answers seem to imply either embedding newlines in your string, or using semi-colons (as a Python newbie... you can use semi-colons?!)

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