If I couldn't use a great / cool / interesting programming language, I wouldn't be programming a hobby project. Whether the language is niche is irrelevant.
Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
41–50 of 172 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#42I'm currently learning lisp dialects. Clojurescript and fennel atm.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#43I enjoy cleanly organizing code more than getting things done. I can't help it.
I seriously thought I was the only one. I could spend hours refactoring and organizing code
I find it's also a great way to procrastinate. "Trying to fix this elusive bug or design this new feature is becoming time consuming and boring... but I bet I could shave a few cycles off my rendering loop (again)"
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#44I thought it would be interesting and appropriate to write the high level behavior code for a home automation system in Prolog so I did. It has evolved a lot, but has been running things in the house for almost 20 years now. It currently sends commands and receives stimuli via MQTT and is running in a Docker container.
That sounds awesome, is anything about it open-source?
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#45I like GPU programming but lack patience for CUDA- julia's gpu package provides a wonderfully performant middleground
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#46I use Clojure for my hobby projects because: pervasive immutability applies very well to lots of things I like to work on, I have extensive experience in both Java and JavaScript (Clojure's 2 major host environments), and it's fun.
The other language I really like to work in is Elixir. I use it for hobby projects where the concurrency model fits really well.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#47I programmed my Chess Position Ranking [1], used to accurately estimate the number of chess positions, in Haskell because of the ease of building powerful abstractions like a Ranking [2].
[1] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking
[2] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking/blob/main/src/...
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#48I often feel like my primary language, c++, is somewhere between niche and mainstream.
It leaves ample opportunities to do something in a niche way. I am often disenchanted after reading many open-source, ostensibly high-quality c++ libraries — namely Apple’s WebKit and a few parts of Google’s Filament. That said, there are a few gems of c++ that I can’t describe as anything but archetypally niche.
Nlohhman’s JSON library (also, the constexpr fork of that library), and the CTRE library for compile time regular expressions are absolute gems.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#49Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#50I make text adventure games in a language called Hugo. It was released in the late 90s and has not changed much. I have enjoyed being able to code with some stability for fun as I've learned other languages for work. Hugo feels like home, and it's comforting to know a language really well.