Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#71

Post by munctional » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 7:29 PM UTC

dangoldin wrote: post #54

koevet wrote: post #47

- Play! Framework - finally something close to Rails productivity for Java developers. And supports Scala too. - Redis - the fastest NoSQL engine around. Easy and elegant. - Solr - Indexing for the masses. If it only had real time search...

Agree with the Solr. I started using it this year and it definitely simplifies and speeds up our searches.

Wait until you discover Sphinx!

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#72

Post by munctional » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 7:31 PM UTC

berntb wrote: post #33

grinnbearit wrote: post #25

Currently working through Joe Armstrong's programming erlang. I'm interested in functional programming and concurrent programs and erlang seems to fit really well. I also find Clojure very cool :)

What book would you recommend for Erlang? (I've done quite a bit of functional programming, but not exactly lately.)

The referenced book is THE book. It was an easy read for someone who had no functional programming experience. :)

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Erlang-Software-Concurrent...

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#73

Post by munctional » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 7:32 PM UTC

dlevine wrote: post #64

Rails and JQuery. It's amazing how quickly I can build rich, interactive applications. I can do with two or three lines of code what would require 20 just a few years ago. Also, GIT. Best source control hands down.

This, but add MongoDB as a replacement for MySQL/PostgreSQL, too.

Switching from Subversion to Git was like seeing for the first time. No more nightmare merges!

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#74

Post by va_coder » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 7:36 PM UTC

yason wrote: post #63

va_coder wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem did you solve using it? I've been studying Clojure and it seems to be impressive. But I have yet to see some really impressive open source software that was written in it.

Hmmm, nothing big here either but I was learning anyway so I didn't set the par too high. Since you asked, let me see: A bunch of various throwaway programs or clones of small utilities I had already written in other languages. An utility to update metadata in my oggs, a command that finds similar files, a little solver to answer questions about a given set of different relations (I actually needed such a solver to m…

Thanks for sharing.

I've been investing quite a bit of time into Clojure and to motivate me to go further I'd like to find some software (not code snippets) I can download and see the power Clojure provides (that other tools like Ruby or C don't) in a real application.

Similar to what Rails did for Ruby.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#75

Post by justinlilly » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 7:57 PM UTC

berntb wrote: post #33

grinnbearit wrote: post #25

Currently working through Joe Armstrong's programming erlang. I'm interested in functional programming and concurrent programs and erlang seems to fit really well. I also find Clojure very cool :)

What book would you recommend for Erlang? (I've done quite a bit of functional programming, but not exactly lately.)

I've been reading through the oreilly book, Erlang Programming. Its good (like all Oreilly titles) though I'm only into chapter 6. I'd definitely suggest picking it up.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#76

Post by DaniFong » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 8:20 PM UTC

My vote goes to Mathematica, which is probably both the best and worst technology I've used this year. Oy!

A more one-sided review goes to Evernote :-)

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#77

Post by michaeljung » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 10:10 PM UTC

Certainly Google App Engine(Phyton). It is nice to have a small free version for experiments and own projects. Great way to get your hands dirty. AWS/Amazon has to do its homework and open up a sandbox type of platform where you can put your small project of your own at no cost, and opt-in that others can copy/improve.

'Open' is the best way to innovate (small steps of improvement) on something.

Zynga (the company and the concept) proved to be successful with enough leverage and network effects Facebook provided.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#78

Post by elliottkember » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 10:30 PM UTC

dyogenez wrote: post #62

XMPP and Bosh with Strophe - hit a XMPP server with Javascript instead of a web server. Realtime Javascript Push on an established base (XMPP). Real cool stuff, just need something to use it on. Sinatra - Very fast/easy ruby framework. (Similar to Cherry.py in the Python world). Jquery - Can't imagine using any other framework after a year working with this. Facebook Connect - Much more robust than I thought possible…

+1 for Heroku!

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#79

Post by evgen » Sun, Dec 20, 2009, 11:43 PM UTC

berntb wrote: post #33

grinnbearit wrote: post #25

Currently working through Joe Armstrong's programming erlang. I'm interested in functional programming and concurrent programs and erlang seems to fit really well. I also find Clojure very cool :)

What book would you recommend for Erlang? (I've done quite a bit of functional programming, but not exactly lately.)

Joe Armstrong's book is probably the best one to start with. It gives you a step-by-step learning process that will get you up and running with Erlang in short order. Once you are finished with it pick up Erlang Programming by Cesarini and Thompson; this book covers a lot of the same territory but goes a bit deeper into some areas that are missing from Armstrong's book (e.g. debugging & tracing, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#80

Post by thechangelog » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 6:14 AM UTC

paraschopra wrote: post #31

Solr for super-easy full text searching and Memcache for a no-brainer distributed queue

I just did my first solr implementation this year and it was a pleasure playing the various tokenizers and filters that are included out-of-the box. It replaced a hideous MySQL SELECT and the results from the two aren't even from the same planet in terms of quality.