XNA was the most fun environment I've worked in. No web bullshit, no heavy-weight game engine editor.
Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
91–100 of 187 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#92Pure C* *Your mileage may vary
Thanks. My first few jobs out of college were programming in pure C, doing embedded software. I do have good memories of that time, although I'm not sure I would have the patience for ten-minute compile times these days. (Obviously not all C projects have that, but the ones I worked on did.)
If you haven't already, you should check out the C projects from Justine Tunny. Specifically redbean, cosmopolitan libc and ape. https://justine.lol/
Whether you should use them professionally is questionably. But for me they made writing C fun again.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#93For me, native macOS with AppKit (Cocoa) and Objective-C is still the best and most productive development environment. No client/server division to worry about, all of the desktop environment's capabilities developed over decades, insane CPU and GPU power and memory bandwidth (now on Apple's industry-leading ARM chips). Obj-C gives seamless access to both C/C++ APIs and the best desktop GUI with incredibly powerful…
You still like Obj-C more than Swift? I vastly prefer Swift to Obj-C, and I used to code in Obj-C professionally.
I'll take Obj-C over Swift any day. With Swift I feel like I have one arm tied behind my back and I'm constantly wrestling with it in order to do what I want.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#94SvelteKit! https://kit.svelte.dev/ It's really fun and easy to make front and back-end apps with any combination of pre-rendering, client-side navigation, and server-side rendering on server-based or serverless platforms. To me SvelteKit makes it feel like there's finally a harmonious unity between the front and backends. Plus the dev experience is straight fire. Not quite at a 1.0 release unfortunately but I still l…
Looks interesting but it says it's unstable. Do you have to write the backend in TS/JS?
Yep! As I said, not quite a 1.0 release but a bunch of people are using it in production.
And yeah, I think if you want to use SvelteKit the endpoints need to be in something that compiles to JS — not 100% sure.
But it's quite possible to hook Svelte itself into any stack you want. SvelteKit is the bundling up of a bunch of nice defaults whereas Svelte is completely stack agnostic.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#95Haskell, because:
1. every other mainstream language is one step below the Abstractions Ladder and Haskell knowledge converts naturally to any other $mainstream flavour of the day.
2. every other academic/research language either directly or indirectly assumes you are familiar with higher-kinded interfaces and compositions that all practitioners of Haskell are familiar with, which converts naturally to the desire to achieve more (dependent types and formal proofs, effect systems, and so on).
3. map/fold/traverse are ubiquitous patterns across all FP languages, even their syntax and signatures hardly ever vary.
4. you begin to understand and appreciate simple mathematical concepts in the context of industrial programming.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#96Go. 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…
4. Concurrency model that lets you spin up things in the background and keep processing in memory before you go into databases, worker queues, and whatnot. If you want to cache something slow, just put it in a map behind an RWMutex, and your single-process Go binary will scale way past any prototype stage.
This the big one IMO when comparing to nodejs but a showstopper for some apps in ditching nodejs for Go is needing a nodejs process for SSR.
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#97vim index.php :w Alt-Tab Ctrl-R
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#98Take Rails 7 with Turbo. Start with the Jumpstart Pro template. You’ll feel like a god. https://jumpstartrails.com/ Finally, all of the boilerplate and over-engineered components are gone. You’re finally free to solve the just business problems. And you’ll be fighting integration issues a whole lot less. I have no idea why any saas based startup, whether it’s one person or VC backed, would start with anything less. T…
From: https://jumpstartrails.com/pricing
> Pricing Plans
> Simple, straightforward pricing to get your online business up and running
> Rails Single Site - Build one application with Jumpstart Pro - $249 /year
> Rails Unlimited - Build unlimited apps with Jumpstart Pro - $749 /year
Might be useful to be aware of the commercial nature of the project, not that it's a bad thing in of itself, just not accessible to everyone.
The features list is promising, though: https://jumpstartrails.com/#features
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#99Go. 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…
Hmm, why would anyone even bother pulling out said pitchforks? In my eyes, Go is a pretty reasonable choice: the language is decent, simple enough to be learnt in a relatively short amount of time, is reasonably readable and doesn't force you to work in a really low level of abstraction. The runtime is also pretty good and the static executables that can be generated are a major boon in my eyes! None of the pain of P…
> Hmm, why would anyone even bother pulling out said pitchforks?
It repeatedly get raked over the coals here for being dumb, inelegant, stuck in the 80's and an overall Bad Language Which Cannot Be Taken Seriously. :)
Re: Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?
#100Elm is a great example of a fun tech stack.
- No environment configuration at all (third-party or otherwise). This is the most pain inducing part of Javascript projects.
- The code you write comes with a lot of confidence thanks to the compiler. Minimization of worry really contributed to a fun environment.
- The code you write is 'proximate to behavior'. In other words, you don't inherit some class or write some configuration file. You just write what you want the thing to do. To effectively program, code must be compiled by the mind.
- The code itself is very expressive so your code is minimal but communicates fully the breadth and depth of behavior. Overly verbose code is fatiguing to write and tedious to read!
- The language is reasonable fast so tests pass quickly. Slow tests are fatiguing and no fun!
I've heard a lot of people like Rails. I haven't used it. But I don't see much of a difference between Rails and every other framework out there. Maybe it has more "batteries included" but I don't want batteries! Batteries require trusting someone else which is not fun!