Elixir is now fully mature (almost at v2.0) and probably the best all-round language, with a super powerful web framework (Phoenix) and a very rich ecosystem. Highly recommend playing with it!
Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
171–180 of 243 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#172JSX in favor of HTML has won. Compiled server side languages are the future. Everyone writing untyped is converting.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#173Probably the most surprising thing for you: Go is getting generics. No exact timeline, but it's happening for Go 2.0. Rust is seeing production use in many places and its being accepted more as the sane alternative to C for modern development of high performance software. Ecosystem still not big or mature enough to make big waves, however, but that depends on how you interpret "big waves". SPAs are used and abused, t…
>React has essentially won the mindshare battle I'm looking to learn a front-end framework and had a few people recommend Vue. Sounds like maybe I should go for React instead? In case it matters, I'm not looking to be a front-end developer. I'd mainly like to improve some small projects I have. And get the most value out of my time learning a framework.
Vue is definitely a better framework, and for built for larger projects (performance)... but React got the first mover advantage after angular abandoned it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#174MacBooks are still all the rage even with the crappy keyboard.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#175Probably the most surprising thing for you: Go is getting generics. No exact timeline, but it's happening for Go 2.0. Rust is seeing production use in many places and its being accepted more as the sane alternative to C for modern development of high performance software. Ecosystem still not big or mature enough to make big waves, however, but that depends on how you interpret "big waves". SPAs are used and abused, t…
>React has essentially won the mindshare battle I'm looking to learn a front-end framework and had a few people recommend Vue. Sounds like maybe I should go for React instead? In case it matters, I'm not looking to be a front-end developer. I'd mainly like to improve some small projects I have. And get the most value out of my time learning a framework.
At my company we decided to go with Vue and not React about a year ago, mainly to avoid the complex tooling that React absolutely demands that you add to your JS build process.
And we still like Vue a year later. It integrates well with the rest of our site, much of which still has not been rewritten in the functional-reactive style yet. And not having to do a full-on transpile/build step during development is a huge win for reducing cycle times.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#176Python 3.0+ is no longer optional.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#177JavaScript, Java and PHP still suck.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#178I think React is "winning" the framework competition, if we're judging from number of jobs. It seems like a business decision for many people - React can make websites and apps, and it's probably easier. I haven't had enough experience to say, but it seems like Java; not necessarily the best tool, but something easy to hire for. Flutter is also coming in hard on mobile. Also not something I've had enough experience t…
Dumb question but how is react better than jquery? (Im from 2010 instead of 2017 like op)
As other people have said, they're different sorts of thing; but the sort of thing React is wasn't as big a deal in 2010. Backbone and AngularJS, two frameworks that are practically Precambrian at this point, both had their first release in late 2010.
In 2010 terms: let's say you want to write a web app. jQuery : your library of useful PHP functions :: React : Ruby on Rails. That analogy breaks down in many obvious ways (React isn't MVC and [modulo JSX transpilation and whatnot] uses the same language as jQuery, Rails is not easy to reason about especially if you're in 2010 and method_missing isn't considered harmful yet), but hopefully the basic idea comes through - library of functions vs. very opinionated framework that facilitates rapid development.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#179MacBooks are still all the rage even with the crappy keyboard.
And now you can even buy one with the non-crappy keyboard again.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#180Java's market share is declining fast. Ruby and Clojure are dead, literally for Clojure, most libs are from >7 years ago. Javascript(and TS) and Python are the tools of the trade to achieve most common things. Devs are starting to realize how they got fooled by Rust's marketing/hype train for general purpose programming/exploration/prototyping and productivity because it's too restrictive and its compile times are at…
I think most Python, JS, Java etc libraries are "dead" in this sense that you lament about Clojure. The exceptions are the very recent languages. It's natural, most libs don't become popular and flourishing open source projects.
It seems to me Clojure ecosystem is in good shape, a lot of new libs keep coming out and there's a healthy & growing actively maintained set of libs. The Clojure way of data-centric APIs also means that stable libs don't need to be tweaked often to keep them working while the surrounding world changes. In the early days there were more hobby projects published and less serious use, currently the user base is more tilted towards inhouse business software. I grant that it would be cool if there were more stuff like Overtone or Quil from the early days happening now..