Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

Clojure forced me to think in a radical different way than I was used to. I started with massive functions that easily became unreadable, and slowly adapted purity and wrote side-effect free code. The paradigm shift affected me so much that even in other languages, I started writing pure code and use function composition more and more often. Coming from an imperative background, functional programming was a bit difficult at first to wrap my head around, but now I love it! (Eventually I even ditched JavaScript for ClojureScript).

Go recently because it was my first truly compiled, statically typed language after almost 7 years of working (I know, right?). My entire career consisted of Python, PHP, JS, Ruby - you get the idea. Go changed that. On top of that, it is a very biased language that forces it's coding standards on you. Not all are good but you learn a lot about the design decisions behind them and why things work in the way they do.

Plus after working with it for a while, even other compiled, statically typed languages like C++ became a good chunk easier.

And as a extra, very recently: Elixir. Loving functional language, Elixir taught me erlangs genservers and process manage and oh boy! I don't understand why that's not the default tool we use for webservers all the time. It just seems like a natural fit vs other languages. Thanks to supervision trees, it is very easy to write fault tolerant, highly concurrent applications that span multiple servers, without the need for extra tools.

For example: You can spin subprocesses up at any point, communicate with them, kill them, let them crash without fearing that anything else in your application is affected. When previously you needed a queue server, a cache server, background workers, service crash recovery, long running requests processing and more to build a concurrent system, Elixir makes it very easy to implement these things extremely easily as subprocessed without the need to leave your application and grab tool X (upstart/cron/rabbitmq). Worried that something will crash? Just let it crash and the supervisor restarts it. Worried that the supervisor crashes? Then the supervisor of the supervisor restarts the supervisor.

Your background worker process is on server 2 and you want to dispatch something from server 1 from the same mesh? Just use it's PID and let BEAM handle the rest. Same for Queues, Stores, Caches or anything really.

I am highly convinced that learning Elixir is something every web engineer should learn.

I feel sad when I hit special forms in languages, and can't just a macro to change the language to suit the way I want to do it.

It made every other language I used feel overly verbose. Sure, Scheme is a bit verbose, but with two or three macros, and a handful of recursive functions, I write about 1/3 of the code I would in another language.

Having readers, and parsers exposed makes it so easy to fit the language to the task, rather than bludgeoning the language with a hammer, or rephrasing the question till it almost fits.

Random example:

You need to allow a user to run half a dozen functions, with a syntax.

Normal approach, (after you've argued you shouldn't do this), is to write a parser and evaluator, and hope you didn't expose a security hole like SQL injection by accident.

Scheme approach: Generate an empty environment, attach only the necessary functions. Parse and handball to the environment.

Eval doesn't have to be evil, especially when the language provides the tools you need to sandbox users.

I work on many projects with many different modules, languages, databases... What this enables me is to be one single command and a seconds away from completely switching context while still maintaining basically identical environment. It encourages experimentation because you're language/project agnostic and it reduces friction to getting started which is a great boon for productivity.

But more importantly, when I read Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. It was my introduction (though I didn't realize it) to functional programming, closures, and thinking much more about scope. I went from thinking of JS as a pile of junk to a language with remarkable flexibility.

That doesn't mean I do everything in JS, but I find I like the language a lot more than most of my peers.