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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?

#221

Post by rpdillon »

kleiba wrote: post #41

Emacs. I remember finishing college in the late 90s and coming across Emacs (actually, XEmacs back then) for the first time. What a weird editor, how could anyone even want use this voluntarily? Until some coworkers at the place I worked back then showed me some tricks. The touch of enlightenment hasn't stopped ever since and probably never will.

Indeed. Starting using Emacs in '97 when I was still in school, but the mix of editor and programmable lisp environment changed the way I thought about computing (coming from Pascal/Java). Emacs made it so easy for me to implement small improvements to my work environment, so it allowed my curiosity to overpower my fear of breaking things, and that changed the way I thought about computing in general.

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

#222

Post by nhorob67 »

farm_code wrote: post #86
dvcrn wrote: post #21

Go recently, and Clojure previously. Clojure forced me to think in a radical different way than I was used to. I started with massive functions that easily became unreadable, and slowly adapted purity and wrote side-effect free code. The paradigm shift affected me so much that even in other languages, I started writing pure code and use function composition more and more often. Coming from an imperative background, f…

I am decade old Java dev, but Elixir changed the way I design web apps.

We just switched some of our back-end code to Phoenix in our farm management web app (https://www.harvestprofit.com/).

Your username intrigues me....what are you working on?

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

#223

Post by jtreminio »

amingilani wrote: post #208
jtreminio wrote: post #193

Hashicorp products. It's incredible how productive this company is, and how much I've come to use their applications throughout my career. First Vagrant, then Packer, then Consul, and soon Vault and Terraform. Everything I've been wanting to do for years, I am now doing thanks to Hashicorp.

Hey! Okay, this might be the best coincidence I've ever seen. I'm a random guy on the internet that thinks Vault looks awesome and I want to use it for my next project, but I'm having trouble since the documentation is so sparse and thin. Do you mind helping me out for some good Karma? Check your twitter! :D

Join us on freenode #vault-tool

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

#224

Post by gkya »

BeetleB wrote: post #180
DougWebb wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That joke's not true at all, if you write your code well. It comes from many people writing really bad code and sharing it widely through cgi script archives. Lots of stuff on CPAN was bad too. And of course there was a lot of intentionally-bad code too. These days I'm writing C# web apps, with plenty of client-side javascript. My problems dealing with large complex codebases went away years ago; Perl helped me to di…

>That joke's not true at all, if you write your code well. It comes from many people writing really bad code and sharing it widely through cgi script archives. Here's the thing. If I read Perl code written by someone new to Perl, it's hard to read. If I read Python code written by someone new to Python, it's easy to read. You can write good code in almost any language, so yes, of course you can write readable code in…

Certainly in Python it is easier to read the code, that is find individual lexemes and say what statements do. But thus does not necessarily mean mean it's any easier to reason about the algorithm and to say what a series of statements do. I'd thus rather talk about the readability if individual snippets and not if a language in general. Certainly there are some languages which impede the programmer to interpret the program, but Perl is not one of them.

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

#225

Post by partisan »

kzisme wrote: post #132
cagataygurturk wrote: post #13

My wow moment was when I quit trying to do everything in the language I was comfortable with (PHP) and became a language agnostic engineer. Since then (2 years ago) now I can write in 3 programming language, nobody can realize that I am new at these languages and I know that I can pick a new language up now in a very short time. I had to study so much in these last 2 years but since I love engineering it was funny ra…

I'm just starting my career as a dev, but my first language in school was C++. At work I use C# - but I hope to keep learning more languages. The main thing I was worried about initially was being stuck with one language my whole career. Anyone else ever feel that way?

Same story: C++ at school and VB then eventually C# at work. About 7 years into my career, I started feeling as though I had stagnated. Over the past 4 years, I took the time to learn Ruby (RoR), Scala, some Clojure, Nim, and now, some F#. Each of them has, in some way, made me a better C# programmer. I can't go out and interview for a position programming any of these languages, but they aren't blindspots for me either anymore.

I would suggest picking a language you have an interest in and a project you have an interest in and having a go at it. Then repeat the process with a new language and a new project. At the end, you will have some working software and an expanded perspective.

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

#226

Post by gkya »

pvdebbe wrote: post #211
hellofunk wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can make sure that no other bits of code depend on that value being available and thus modify what is internal to the encapsulating unit of code rather freely.

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

#227

Post by fsloth »

votr wrote: post #136
slinger wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome story! I'm interested in hear more about the time you spent learning non-programming fundamentals. Would you care to elaborate?

I'd say non-programming fundamentals took about two months at about 4-6 hours a day, with the majority of that dedicated to algorithms and data structures. I took these two OCW courses: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... And worked my way through these two books: https://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena...…

What makes you categorize algorithms as non-programming? Isn't it like saying rhythm and melody are non-musical concepts?

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

#228

Post by fsloth »

Veen wrote: post #163
votr wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I approached learning Clojure the way I approach learning everything else. I survey the resources available, then pick the two best books. Ideally, I want them to come at it from different perspectives. e.g. one may place an emphasis on doing stuff with Clojure while another may be more about functional programming. At the time, they were: https://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick-eboo... https://www.am…

> You write your base functions, then higher-level functions which use those base functions, and so on. Functions all the way down. I'm hoping to follow a similar trajectory to you, but with Elixir instead of closure. At the moment though, I tend to do things the other way around: write the top level functions and then fill out the base functions. So I'd start a module with def whatever(something), do: something |> f…

"some would say that tests should come before everything else anyway"

Which some others consider a cargo-cult practice if done mandatorily for it's own sake.

Good luck on your studies!

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

#229

Post by bpicolo »

Veen wrote: post #163
votr wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I approached learning Clojure the way I approach learning everything else. I survey the resources available, then pick the two best books. Ideally, I want them to come at it from different perspectives. e.g. one may place an emphasis on doing stuff with Clojure while another may be more about functional programming. At the time, they were: https://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick-eboo... https://www.am…

> You write your base functions, then higher-level functions which use those base functions, and so on. Functions all the way down. I'm hoping to follow a similar trajectory to you, but with Elixir instead of closure. At the moment though, I tend to do things the other way around: write the top level functions and then fill out the base functions. So I'd start a module with def whatever(something), do: something |> f…

It is useful and necessary to use both directions at times. You can't always presuppose the relevant details. But do be ready to factor away functions at a moments notice

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

#230

Post by MrMullen »

piokuc wrote: post #212
brianwawok wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked with a guy from Romania?

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

But he is in Romania. It would be a lot nicer if the Romania guy was in my timezone or, better yet, my office.
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