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Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

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Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple comments. * clojure protocols map to interfaces (abstract classes for C++ folks) * one can define records that satisfy protocol(s). This is one way to do OO in clojure, happens to map to the underlying JVM mechanisms for JVM optimizations to kick in. * Gamma et al., Bloch and many others tell to prefer composition over inheritance. Clojure makes this guideline easy to follow. * overall the OO leaders also re…

> a great many authors cite encapsulation to be the definite trait of an OO language Yes this is what I was referring to, Clojure is not OO in the way that many think of OO. But your other points are right on.

But what exactly is achieved with information hiding, hmm? :)

Now there forms many schools of opinion, and in many of them it suffices to have data immutable and value-like, and suddenly it doesn't matter if the information is hidden into opaque memory addresses or not.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#212
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Still commuting. But becoming remote is my number one goal. At the moment, I have a client outside of work (ReactJS stuff), and am negotiating a remote gig with a company in California. I agree that exotic technologies give you a leg up. My stance is also that, if you're pushing for remote, then by definition you need to justify why you're a better choice than your remote competition who may live in lower COL a…

Have you ever worked with a guy from Romania?

I have. He's a good programmer and a nice chap.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#214
post #130

For 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.

Different poster, but I have an opinion.

I think that if you're going to do React/Redux, your life would be easier in Elm.

I'm a full time Clojure/Clojurescript dev and from my perspective, the main thing Elm is lacking is Protocols (in Clojure/Swift, Traits in Rust). I know Evan has been pushing back on it because it adds complexity to learning the language and you can get by without them, but I miss them. I could quibble about other things but there's nothing I strongly dislike. From an adoption perspective, I think a focus on tooling would help a lot. There was a talk at elm-conf where a refactoring suite was written as a chat bot. Ditching the chat bot part and building a language server [1] would make it much easier to pitch the language.

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol

For a non-web developer looking to transition into web dev, the main weakness of Elm is that the community is small so you basically have to build your components yourself. This tends to be challenging for experienced programmers coming from other languages because CSS has no abstractive power at all and the traditional layout techniques are incredibly unintuitive. You'll probably have the most success using flexbox everywhere. The community is friendly and I think Evan does a pretty good job leading it. I've pushed a number of younger developers at js meetups to pick it up and they've reported back with positive impressions. Of the compile to js langauges I know, I'd pick Elm as the most likely to succeed.

Overall, I like Elm and am happy with it's progress. I don't think it's ready for unqualified adoption, as you'll be doing a lot of library building you wouldn't need in more mature ecosystems and I'm not completely confident it's on the path to great success. I wouldn't push the language in a workplace at this point. By comparison, I would push Rust. You're in largely the same position in both languages in terms of writing libraries but I think Rust has hit critical mass.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#215

Vim. I was first introduced to this text editor back in college. It has super weird navigation rules and editing modes that would easily deter many beginners. 70-80% of my course mates gave up on it and chose something else that worked more like a normal text editor such as Sublime/Atom. It took me several months to develop that muscle memory to increase my productivity. Today, I can log in remotely to my AWS instanc…

Same for me. Vim bindings in all my editors across all the operating systems I use. The editor is the way you communicate your will to the machine.

IntelliJ has a particularly good plugin JetBrains created. Eclipse has a decent plugin for USD$14, or it was when I bought it years ago.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#216
post #159

Python, 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…

Same story with me as well, Python has made me so much more productive, I can build websites and do monte carlo simulations with ease all from the same language.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I had the opposite experience. I started with C++ , then JavaScript, but ended up doing lots of PHP work. There are just so many PHP opportunities, the demand is still very high, but too many low quality devs, companies are willing to pay a lot for a good PHP dev. My last project was $150/hr, the one before that was $90/hr - both remote.

Any advice on increasing rates? 90$ to 150$ is rather drastic.

It's all about finding the clients willing to pay.

If you're sure you can find more clients, you can just double the rate with the existing ones.

I hear about devs billing $300-500/hr, but that must be some golden enterprise moneys.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#219
post #25

Nobody mentions RUST? I thought it,s popular here...

Rust has been great. Not so much for the language itself but rather as a vehicle to explore the layers under the language runtimes I've been using for most of my career.

It hasn't really changed my perspective on programming. I haven't been doing it long enough to have it transform my career. As an answer to the OP, it's not a particularly good one for me.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#220
post #130

For 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.

I have only limited experience with web development, but my impression of elm is that it purposefully throws a lot of the standard HTML/CSS/JS paradigms out the window on purpose, in exchange for an extremely clean set of functional-friendly abstractions. The downside to this is that there is a lot of "magic" going on behind the scenes, and I don't know exactly how fragile that magic is.
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