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Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

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Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#23

Post by aparks517 »

> I remember when Ruby on Rails hit it big, one of its mantras was that it made coding fun. As Rails has waned in popularity, has any other tech stack taken that crown?

I think Phoenix and Elixir are trying to. I like them.

I like Objective-C a lot too. It's a reasonably thin layer on top of C and has a dynamic flavor (which I prefer). The documentation is showing its age.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#24

Post by davidw »

Rails. 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 around with Elixir/Phoenix, coming from the background of a long-time Erlang user as well as Rails, and it's fun to learn, but I'm not 100% convinced that it's more productive than Rails outside of some niches. It's certainly not a bad thing to learn, though.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#26

Post by gls2ro »

I still think Ruby with Rails or Ruby with Sinatra are the most pleasurable for me.

In Rails I can spin up very quickly a prototype, either with frontend or without and do some small experiments, consume an external API.

For me is also a great way to find ways to express my ideas in coding as Ruby is a somehow permissive language, allowing multiple ways of doing something thus one can find lets say their "coding voice"

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#27

Post by cableshaft »

pavlov wrote: post #19

For me, native macOS with AppKit (Cocoa) and Objective-C is still the best and most productive development environment. No client/server division to worry about, all of the desktop environment's capabilities developed over decades, insane CPU and GPU power and memory bandwidth (now on Apple's industry-leading ARM chips). Obj-C gives seamless access to both C/C++ APIs and the best desktop GUI with incredibly powerful…

You still like Obj-C more than Swift? I vastly prefer Swift to Obj-C, and I used to code in Obj-C professionally.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#28

Post by dmux »

I've been having a wonderful time spinning up small projects using Tcl, Wapp, and Sqlite. Tcl's quoting rules makes it really easy to embed HTML (or anything else, really) inline within a procedure. Simple example:

    # available at /style.css
    proc wapp-page-style.css {} {
        wapp-mimetype text/css
        wapp-cache-control max-age=3600
        
        wapp-trim {
            body {
                background: aliceblue;
            }
        }


    }

    # available at /hello
    proc wapp-page-hello {} {
        wapp-trim {
            
            
                
            
                
                    Hello HN!
                
            
        }
    }
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