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Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#51

Post by skrebbel »

Kiro wrote: post #38
skrebbel wrote: post #31

Elixir. While Rust and Go get way more exposure lately, they're mostly designed for systems programming. Many more of us do web development, and it's really amazing how fast Elixir has become a very cool and mature environment for developing great web apps. Elixir is a really cool language, and also a great way to learn functional programming. But more than that, it gets all the non-languagy stuff right. The build sy…

I'm a web developer currently learning Haskell. Would you recommend learning Elixir instead?

No. You waste time if you half-learn something and then hop to the next hot thing again. Haskell is awesome too.

Do know that conceptually, Elixir and Haskell are pretty far apart. They're both functional, but that's about it. Elixir is dynamically typed, Haskell very much not so. It's a whole different approach to programming; where in Haskell, you'd "let the types guide you", in Elixir you simply can't do that. Elixir is much closer to Lisps in that regard.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#52

Post by rahilsondhi »

collyw wrote: post #44
sshillo wrote: post #14

If you don't know python and you're interested in analytics you should solve that. IMHO you'll become a far better developer if you devote the majority of your time to learning advanced algorithms, ml, and ai as opposed to the new hot framework.

No one asks for those in job specs though

Algorithms are definitely asked for in interviews at every company except small startups.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#54

Post by at-fates-hands »

lamby wrote: post #40

As a sub-question, I would be interested if the answer was restricted to frontend frameworks (eg. Backbone/Ember/etc.) for 2015. Thanks in advance.

If you're into SASS, I'd check out:

Susy: http://susy.oddbird.net/

Otherwise, if you're into the latest Javascript frameworks, I'd check out:

Aura: http://aurajs.com/

Kraken: http://cferdinandi.github.io/kraken/

SkelJS: https://github.com/n33/skel

If you're looking for something more "bootstrapish" but without all the "bootstrap" bloat, I'd look at some more modular frameworks like:

Semantic UI: http://semantic-ui.com/

Pure: http://purecss.io/

UIKit: http://getuikit.com/

Hope this helps. . .

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#55

Post by bwilliams »

Kiro wrote: post #38
skrebbel wrote: post #31

Elixir. While Rust and Go get way more exposure lately, they're mostly designed for systems programming. Many more of us do web development, and it's really amazing how fast Elixir has become a very cool and mature environment for developing great web apps. Elixir is a really cool language, and also a great way to learn functional programming. But more than that, it gets all the non-languagy stuff right. The build sy…

I'm a web developer currently learning Haskell. Would you recommend learning Elixir instead?

I'm somewhat in the same position and I'm learning both. Haskell is great for learning new programming concepts like monads, applicative, and every other crazy thing Haskell programmers love. It also helps you think and get used to the concept of pure and unpure functions which definitely expands into other languages in a positive way.

Elixir on the other hand gives you a great development environment by default with ExUnit for testing, the Mix build tool, hex.pm packages, a tempting library, and more. All of the tools feel mature as well. Immutability with rebinding is great, concurrency is made simple compared to some other languages, and it also has the entire Erlang ecosystem of libraries to work with.

It's definitely easier to write Elixir, but I wouldn't say better. They're both great languages, just different.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#56

Post by meowface »

lylejohnson wrote: post #50
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have to disagree. If you think it's just hype, try and calculate the enormous waste of both time and money from memory leaks caused by code written in C and C++. Rust solves this, and it's only going to get better once we're on the other side of Rust 1.0, and the library ecosystem grows.

> Try and calculate the enormous waste of both time and money from memory leaks caused by code written in C and C++. Rust solves this... This seems like an unusual language feature to highlight --- don't most modern programming languages solve this problem with various implementations of GC or memory management? N.B. I am not at all familiar with Rust and so maybe I'm missing some important context...

Yes, but all managed languages will necessarily be less performant and less efficient than C/C++/D/Rust (barring a hypothetical future interpreted language with an amazing JIT and GC; LuaJIT has the JIT part down but definitely not the GC). Rust is specifically for systems programming. If you don't need to do systems programming, then sure, use C# or Scala or whatever you like.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#57

Post by adamzerner »

colinbartlett wrote: post #34

I'd recommend learning how to learn. Making learning and curiosity a part of your every day existence will have more of an impact that the latest hot language or framework.

True, but I suspect that most people already agree with this, and it doesn't address his question.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#58

Post by meowface »

jordigh wrote: post #24

Git is not the final word in DVCSes... Take a look at Mercurial, in particular, the Mercurial Evolve feature. It's an innovative way to collaboratively polish commits. Imagine pull requests that could be rewritten with the history of the rewrites being easily accessible as you see them, well, evolve . Evolve is basically a way to record and use distributed meta-history of the editions of your commits. It's like a bee…

The problem is that in the open source world, most projects use Git and most active old projects using SVN or CVS are slowly moving to Git. Many people out there who greatly prefer Mercurial to Git admit to using Git much more than Mercurial due to the ecosystem.

See: https://fuzz.me.uk/git-vs-hg/

From Eric Raymond:

>git won the mindshare war. I regret this - I would have preferred Mercurial, but it too is not looking real healthy these days. I have made my peace with git's victory and switched. I urge the Emacs project to do likewise.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#59

Post by pella »

check: Technology Radar ; JANUARY 2015 ( by the ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board )

http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/languages-and-frameworks

http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/tools

http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques

http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/platforms

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