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Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

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Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#51

Post by thepratt »

It all depends on the team, but personally the larger the team gets and the more complex your application becomes (monolith/microservice/etc independent) types are invaluable when it comes to shipping an actual product. You gain speed increases due to paths being evaluated ahead of time (compile time), but these are all secondary to developer peace-of-mind and time saved when work actually needs to get done - this includes ticket revisits due to "oh I forgot about that case", or "user did x and now this object is a string".

Yes, you should write unit tests to cover this in interpreted languages with weak or no types, but this depends on the developer a) doing it, and b) not missing any cases - PRs/code reviews are not a catch-all. Especially in the case of factoring common logic out or some other form of refactoring, a strongly typed language is my best friend.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#52

Post by [deleted] »

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #18

A few years ago, I rewrote an `R` script into Fortran, for better than order-of-magnitude speed increase. The script optimized the placement of samplers in a building, in order to maximize the probability of detecting airborne pollutants, or to minimize the expected time required to detect. The rewrite cut the runtime down from 2-3 days to sub-hour. Some of the speedup was intrinsic to the interpreted/compiled divide…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#53

Post by Elrac »

fhood wrote: post #19
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #18

A few years ago, I rewrote an `R` script into Fortran, for better than order-of-magnitude speed increase. The script optimized the placement of samplers in a building, in order to maximize the probability of detecting airborne pollutants, or to minimize the expected time required to detect. The rewrite cut the runtime down from 2-3 days to sub-hour. Some of the speedup was intrinsic to the interpreted/compiled divide…

This is the first time that I have ever encountered someone who used Fortran for something other than earth sciences related modeling. Thank you, now I have a second example the nest time someone claims "nobody used fortran anymore".

Sorry about the "me too" but I'm another example of someone who programs non-science in FORTRAN. I work on a crew management system for a major airline.

Most of this and related applications engage in data shuffling rather than number crunching, but FORTRAN used to be one way of creating code that ran at nearly assembly language speed and size in (historically) memory constrained environments.

That said, the application (and I) are nearing retirement.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#54

Post by afarrell »

This is a less dramatic change than swapping out the framework since we are still using rails, but a couple years ago my employer switched from using rails controllers to using https://github.com/gocardless/coach and it is noticeably easier to write good tests.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#55

Post by alexfarran »

charlie-r wrote: post #31

We're starting to develop greenfield APIs in Scala (with Play) rather than PHP (with Laravel) and we've noticed new developers without experience in either language have a surprisingly similar time-to-productivity. Here are some major factors: PHP's dynamic typing combined with Laravel's magical approach makes discoverability hard. A developer can't trace through a request by starting from a controller method and nav…

Thanks for posting that. Where would a PHP programmer go to get a foothold in Scala web development?

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#56

Post by christophilus »

taurath wrote: post #10

Developer ergonomics is underrated. Having an easy to understand system that has no magic, and in 90% of the work has no dependency chains that you have to hold in your head can really help people avoid bugs by being able to focus on the intent and execution rather than the framework quirks.

I agree. Do you have a platform/framework that does this for you?

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#57

Post by d--b »

Moving a large C++ codebase to C# has helped us a lot. The legacy code had memory leaks that caused random crashes. It was also long to build, and wouldn't build in 64 bit. The C# version seemlessly let us run the code in either 32 or 64 bit. C# is also a much more readable language, and has a lot of great tools for refactoring and profiling. And C#'s performance is almost as good as C++ in many areas, so all in all it's been a great move.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#60

Post by BrandoElFollito »

I am an amateur developer, mostly using python. I had from time to time to code a front-end in JS and it was a huge pain in the bottom (again, I am a real amateur).

This until I discovered Vue.js which changed my life. This and lodash made me actually like JS and front-end programming.

So this is an example what a framework did not help to improve code but actually made me choose in something else than the language I was using so far (coming from a background in C, then Perl)

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