R. Until I learned R, I really never was able to do statistics and machine learning on the datasets I was given. Python just didn't cut it since it had minimal statistics compared to R and scikit learn wasn't able to fully handle a lot of the missing data problems I had.
Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
151–160 of 315 posts
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#152PostGIS.
I'd messed with some of the ESRI server products and knew basic SQL but discovering PostGIS was a paradigm shift in terms of being able to easily and efficiently run more advanced spatial analysis in a database.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not like studying a course in a organised way.. Luckily we switched to microservices architecture in my company and thus many stuff had to be rewritten. The old monolithic application was PHP and PHP was deprecated for new projects company wide. So I and my team picked GO, JAVA and Node.js for different microservices we are responsible for. (Mainly JAVA and GO, we deprecated then Node.js unofficially in our tea…
> Specifically for JAVA [...] abandoned enterprise technologies > [...] > How such a simple language like Javascript could become so complicated? ;)
Well, let's admit that release-abandone cycle for a library/framework/approach in JS world is 100x faster :)
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#154I have been a "general purpose" developer (I hate saying "full stack", because there are no stacks and I don't always work exclusively cross-disciplinary). Mostly web-focused, but I've done stints where I was 100% SQL or 100% desktop. There was even a brief period where I was exclusively doing embedded C. I've done JavaScript since it was invented. I've done C# since it was invented.
In that time, I've never been quite as excited about anything as I am about Virtual Reality, and specifically what Google and Mozilla are doing with WebVR. I don't think people understand how much 2D systems are holding us back. We've had the same WIMP interfaces since Xerox invented them in 1980. And we largely do the same things with our computers as we did in the 90s when the GUI finally captured majority market share. Making computers smaller and faster is not going to change that. Only a complete change in the user interface will change that.
I've always banged around working on graphics, stereo-imagery, and simulation as a hobby, but I seriously started on making something about 2 years ago (actually, I recently saw my first commit for some reason, and it was July 10, 2014). When my son was born prematurely earlier this year, it lit a fire under my ass. I know a lot of people think that they need to get the startup stuff out of the way before they start a family, but for me, my family is my purpose, my family is what drives me. I feel strongly that well-designed VR systems are going to enable a whole new level of accessibility, interconnectedness, empathy, and collaboration. I need to make that world for my son.
So because of the stuff I started 2 years ago, I now have a job where I spend 100% of my time working on VR. For the first time in my entire career, I look forward to going to work. I feel great. I have great coworkers. We do amazing things together. And it's because of WebVR.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#155Golang - turned 30k C into 8k lines of Go, no more gdb.
Docker and containers for packaging, shipping, and sharing.
Kubernetes because it fundamentally changes the way we design and build systems.
ML (and now Cozmo+RL) cause future.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#156It's not exactly a language but learning puppet has opened up a lot more opportunities for me recently and is what pushed me into contracting.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#157NeXTSTEP 3.3 changed my whole way of thinking. It was an amazing development environment with a separate interface builder that allowed me to spend a lot of time just thinking about the best way to do things. Objective-C is still one of my favorite languages. It was also my first BSD experience and lead me to FreeBSD and then OpenBSD. The difference between Objective-C / NeXTSTEP or Cocoa and C++ / WIN32 was amazing.
Forth also made me go "wow". I really understood that way of thinking. I also think Forth is amazing for its ability to keep you from getting discouraged by allowing a problem to be broken down into new words. Postscript was my Forth "wow" combined with art.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#158Definitely Clojure, both server and browser (clojurescript), and also using React from Clojurescript (Om). These in combination gave me a big new glimpse into the wide variety of expressivity among languages, and how UI development can be significantly streamlined.
I don't use Clojure as much any more but everything I learned has had a lasting impact and much of it trickles into my other work now, in other languages (mainly C++).
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#159Python, coming from C/C++, Javascript (at least circa 2003) was like leveling up 10x in my programming superpower. I was able to explore concepts and domains so much faster, and those concepts have led to my career. I've talked with friends who only know something like C# or Java, and I feel bad for them - they have no language in which to rapidly play with things. And that rapid ability to play (like with the Python REPL) makes a huge difference in learning.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#160When I realized language and framework choice have at best a marginal influence on product success and started focussing on identifying the right problems and getting to a solution quickly without letting developers get distracted by superficial decisions.