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Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

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Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

#1

Post by chickenWing »

After unintentionally ending up on several React Native projects, I hunger for the days when I used to enjoy coding. The developer experience of React Native is tedious, frustrating, and unrewarding. But as I ponder a job change, I wonder: What is better in this day and age?

I remember when Ruby on Rails hit it big, one of its mantras was that it made coding fun. As Rails has waned in popularity, has any other tech stack taken that crown?

What do you all think?

EDIT: Obviously this is highly subjective so if you can provide your motivations for why you feel how you do, that would help us all. Thanks!

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

#2

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

Pleasure is subjective.

I might enjoy what you find distasteful and vice versa.

Personally, I enjoy using Python and C. I am curious about Rust but haven't had an opportunity to use it much.

Your mileage may vary. I recommend trying a few different languages and see what you enjoy.

Edit: I like C because it feels simple and has a "what you see is what you get" property. The amount of "hidden" code feels like zero.

I like Python because the syntax is elegant and it is easy to get a lot done with a few lines of code.

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

#4

Post by chickenWing »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #2

Pleasure is subjective. I might enjoy what you find distasteful and vice versa. Personally, I enjoy using Python and C. I am curious about Rust but haven't had an opportunity to use it much. Your mileage may vary. I recommend trying a few different languages and see what you enjoy. Edit: I like C because it feels simple and has a "what you see is what you get" property. The amount of "hidden" code feels like zero. I…

Yes indeed. To clarify, what I'm looking for is people's subjective opinions, and if possible, some reasoning behind them. I can see this being helpful to many people, especially if we know what you're priorities are and whether they overlap with our own. Thanks for your answer.

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

#6

Post by chickenWing »

Ragnarork wrote: post #3

Pure 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.)

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

#7

Post by mschuster91 »

That depends what you want to do and what you see as "pleasurable".

If you just want something to manage a web site with as low effort as possible, go for either Wordpress or Drupal. Every web hoster offers some form of hosting for these platforms.

If you're in for something a bit more fancy frontend-wise, go for ReactJS combined with Parcel - the latter is multiple lightyears better than Webpack or, heaven forbid, Gulp. Seriously, discovering Parcel was an eye-opener. Beware though, a lot of Parcel plugins haven't been updated to Parcel v2 yet - backwards compatibility still isn't regarded highly in the frontend world.

If you're more interested in building APIs and know PHP - dive into Symfony, the progress there has been massive over the last years.

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

#10

Post by oxymoron »

Building a UI is usually tedious irregardless of stack. The fun part is what’s new and creative in the project, which is usually a small part of the overall thing.

My solution is generally to work at many different things in parallell, but that largely works because I’m a senior engineer and I’m naturally pulled to step in and assist in various places. I don’t think there’s an universal answer. Fundamentally, it’s probably not reasonable to expect that all aspects of once work should be thoroughly enjoyable.

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