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Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

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Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#71
post #54

Go. Lower your pitchforks and hear me out: 1. Sensible defaults, can go very with just the stdlib: no choice paralysis between frameworks, mental overhead of setting up a project or ecosystem fragments to pick from. Just start with a main.go with net/http, add things along as you need them. 2. No ecosystem churn, whatever you write now will be idiomatic Go and build without issues for years to come. 3. Enough of a ty…

I would add:

5. Good documentation (and good culture of documentation)

Whenever I have to go look up a Go package[0] and figure out how to use it, I am impressed with how good most of the documentation is. Yes, you have to be familiar with the golang conventions, but it seems like accurately documenting libraries is just a thing people take seriously in the ecosystem, and in many others it stops at the good intentions.

Also I really like how explicit it all is. I usually learn something more than just an API when I dig into a Go package.

So, if you like to nerd out on that kind of thing, Go is one of the best places to do it.

[0]: I hate that they replaced godoc.org with this, but: https://pkg.go.dev

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#72
Not an answer, but I work at Microsoft and unsurprisingly develop with C#. I can admit I miss developing primarily on Unix and FOSS.

At home I contribute to Tor's Rust codebase and it feels much more enjoyable than C#/.NET. Even unsexy languages are more enjoyable on Unix.

No wonder my home desktop and laptop run FreeBSD, as per personal email being self-hosted Postfix, even when I work in the Exchange umbrella. Old habits die hard

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#74
Leaving my decade-long job at Google at the end of the month, and am going to be taking some time to have "fun" and hopefully get my love for coding back. So I like this thread.

Am I messed up for finding modern C++ on Linux with CLion to be "most fun"? Is there hope for me?

Zig looks fun. Elixir looks fun. I thought Julia would be fun -- because I like multiple dispatch -- but I didn't find it "fun."

I want to love Rust and have been following it for years but as much as I like the language I don't find borrow checking "fun". Which is arguably a good thing, but maybe not good for language adoption.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#75
Honestly for me, the biggest things are:

- do I have an ide with an integrated debugger

- do I have to use external libraries

I honestly find that 99% of the un-fun stuff comes from integrating third party code. Whether it's built system awkwardness, messy package managers, debugger not working on third party libs, it's just a pain. When I write c++ I just vendor everything and that helps but it's still a chore to do the vendoring.

In general, I enjoy c++ and c#, except when I have to interact with third party libs. So when I do something for fun, I just try to diy everything (NGL, I kinda try to diy as much as is reasonable when it's "real work" also)

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#76
post #71
post #54

Go. Lower your pitchforks and hear me out: 1. Sensible defaults, can go very with just the stdlib: no choice paralysis between frameworks, mental overhead of setting up a project or ecosystem fragments to pick from. Just start with a main.go with net/http, add things along as you need them. 2. No ecosystem churn, whatever you write now will be idiomatic Go and build without issues for years to come. 3. Enough of a ty…

I would add: 5. Good documentation (and good culture of documentation) Whenever I have to go look up a Go package[0] and figure out how to use it, I am impressed with how good most of the documentation is. Yes, you have to be familiar with the golang conventions, but it seems like accurately documenting libraries is just a thing people take seriously in the ecosystem, and in many others it stops at the good intention…

Coming from well documented parts of python ecosystem and Go, I was surprised that spring being such popular framework had no approachable documentation. Maybe it's intuitive for people with 5-10 years experience in enterprise java but not for me.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#78
My definition of "having fun" while coding is to feel like I'm not struggling to manifest whatever idea it is I have. To that end, right now I find writing for Google Cloud to be fun; it requires almost no backend expertise to stitch products together to make a decently powerful API, which I can easily build a frontend against.

Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#80

Since you mentioned React Native, I assume you're pointing towards mobile app development. The best stack combination for me has been webview + PWA + webassembly + toucaan to create an intrinsically designed universal mobile-web app. There's something really powerful about deploying just one application on three separate distribution platforms. And it's not even a monorepo anymore!

Do you have an example repo of this stack you could point to? Been trying to scope out something similar lately and can't get all the pieces to fit together
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