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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?

#231
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can still do this in functional programming by programming functions that only interact with their arguments, and limiting what those arguments are. Additionally, in Clojure, you can in fact hide data by not exporting it from a namespace and only providing functions that operate on it in the namespace, and some other FP languages do this also. The difference is that within the namespace/module, all data is available to all functions, which is often easier to think about and organize than adding the complexity of marrying certain data to certain functions.

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

#233
identity-fixing monotone (in the prefix relation, a partial preorder) maps of cancellative monoids. It is possible to use them as a model of abstract sequential computation, so they can be used for applications such as mathematical models of compilers, parsers, ...

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/251059/what-is-the-real-na...

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

#234

Learning Lisp, more specifically Scheme. I became curious about it after reading ESR's "How to Become a Hacker". When homoiconicity and other Lisp goodies gradually permeated my brain, the computing world seemed different. I saw every config file differently, trying to see how the lines between config and code blurred. Method abstractions and bottom up design became much easier. I appreciated all those prefix-evaluat…

A Paul Graham article lead me to Common Lisp and Scheme, SICP, On Lisp which lead to Clojure which lead to being more interested in functional programming, which lead to functional reactive programming and Scala. Quite a long ride, but I'm so happy I'm not writing OOP C++ which was a very dull and frustrating part of my career.

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

#235

About 2 years ago I discovered a programming language called K. It's a very unusual-looking, extremely terse language in the APL family. It just "clicked" for me. I enjoy the ability to experiment with different algorithms and approaches in a few keystrokes, and learning to think in a "vector-oriented" fashion has opened my eyes to much more elegant formulations of old problems. There aren't many extensive tutorial m…

K lang was featured here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561573

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

#236

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…

+1 I had the same learning moment a couple of years ago. I used to code mainly in Java so when I had to build a frontend, I tried to avoid Javascript and use some Java framework like GWT, Wicket or even Swing instead. At some point I grew tired of the pitfalls and limitations that I kept running into and decided to bite the bullet and just learn Javascript properly. It was a revelation. TL;DR; Don't stubbornly stick…

Or you could have tried Vaadin (no connection to the company other than as a satisfied/impressed user)

https://vaadin.com/home

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

#237

Arduino. I went to school for Electrical Engineering and learned programming for small embedded computers using assembly. While assembly can be fun as an optimization puzzle, it takes a very long time to code even a simple project. Additionally, these computers can have 1000+ page datasheets that you need to comb through in order to set their peripherals up. Arduino takes care of setting up the peripherals, gives eas…

Every software developer owes it to themselves to pick up an Arduino and experience the sheer joy of writing simple software to control basic hardware (or more advanced software to control more advanced hardware once you get hooked).

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

#238

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…

+1 I had the same learning moment a couple of years ago. I used to code mainly in Java so when I had to build a frontend, I tried to avoid Javascript and use some Java framework like GWT, Wicket or even Swing instead. At some point I grew tired of the pitfalls and limitations that I kept running into and decided to bite the bullet and just learn Javascript properly. It was a revelation. TL;DR; Don't stubbornly stick…

Sticking to one language is like being a carpenter and only having a hammer in your toolbox.

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

#239
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bookmarked it. Are you using bootstrap / foundation?

I've used bootstrap in the past, but not anymore. Tachyons is different, it doesn't give you components but single-purpose classes and a font-relative layouting system: http://tachyons.io/docs/layout/spacing/ It takes a while getting used to the names, but after that it's just awesome that you don't have to think about padding, margin and font-size values anymore. Just slap "pa1" or "pa2" there and everything looks p…

Doesn't it lead to inconsistent layout if someone forgets to add it? I am not a designer, but few things irks me more than paddings varying across the same 'components'.

From experience, your method is easier to think through, but later on it is more time consuming to modify a layout. pa1 and the like should be treated the same as magic numbers.

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

#240

Though not a language, nor a tool: A touch typing course. Early in my career I noticed programmers around me with 10+ years experience still typing the "preying-mantis" way (thumb+index+middle fingers pecking at the keyboard, head frantically bobbing eye-focus between keyboard and screen). I thought to myself that if I had the same experience as them and could touch type I would be immensely faster. I was right. Typi…

I completely agree that a minimum typing speed makes a huge difference.

That being said, the code output bottleneck is usually my brain and not my hands!

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