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

Coming from PHP (did it from 2006-2011) JavaScript blew my mind.

Most of the time I saw it as a tool to use, when CSS wasn't powerfull enough.

After using NodeJS I was blewn away. NPM alone was a killer feature PHP was missing.

Functions as objects that can be passed around and closures introduced me to functional programming.

I really thought PHP would go downhill after I saw the whole JavaScript hype and switched 100% away from PHP. Many web-companies here in Germany were just doing Java or PHP at that time (before 2010) and if you didn't know about one of those two languages you were screwed, but now I do 100% JavaScript development AND get better projects than with PHP. But I have to admit Facebook pumping money into PHP helped tremendously to make it better.

At the moment I have smaller WOW-moments with TypeScript, RxJS and NixOS. Smaller basically because I don't have work-related projects at the moment to use them, but they seem to fix a few pain points I had with JavaScript, React/Redux and Vagrant. (undefineds everywhere, realtime-data stream control and sane dependency management)

Well I go way back, for me the first time it was PERL for web programming, that lovely write-only language.

The biggest one though was Javascript when Netscape first invented it. Suddenly FE development went from HTML without even CSS to actual programming, and one could see the potential of the platform.

Then ActionScript 2, which was the short lived phase of Flash where it evolved from a vector toy for making spinning logos into a JS-like language (they were in the ECMA committee and everything), but you could do all sort of crazy animation and sound too. Sadly ActionScript 3 and Flex ruined it all for me, turning Flash into Java. But it was fun while it lasted.

Luckily by then JS was reborn thanks to jQuery et al, and the next "wow" moment were all the APIs known collectively as "HTML 5" - from WebAudio to WebSockets to Canvas etc.

And finally ES6 / WebPack and React / Flux, finally we could break away from the MVC model that never sat well within a browser environment, and with a modern language to boost.

For me it was JavaScript.

I learned C and C++ in university. It was all either procedural or object-oriented.

JavaScript made things a lot simpler, especially first class functions and higher order functions. It delighted me that you can just pass the function like it's a variable instead of messing with pointers. It's also delightful that a normal function can return an object. No constructors, instantiation, hierarchies, complications. Just spit out the object. It's simple!

Lodash's "chain" was my gateway into functional programming. I am avoiding getting too deep into that because it feels kinda cultish the way adherents claim its superiority, but it has nevertheless impacted the way I approach problems.

It is not like studying a course in a organised way.. Luckily we switched to microservices architecture in my company and thus many stuff had to be rewritten. The old monolithic application was PHP and PHP was deprecated for new projects company wide. So I and my team picked GO, JAVA and Node.js for different microservices we are responsible for. (Mainly JAVA and GO, we deprecated then Node.js unofficially in our team because we did not like it at all.) So as you have a well defined project and you have to finish it in the language you are new with, you start to research and learn a lot. Tutorials, blogs etc. And when I had a problem and I could not solve the problem because of my unfamiliarity in the new stack, I started to read also after work and I started to apply what I learnt the next day. Every day I started to have less problem or finding solutions was taking less time because my involvement in that ecosystem increased. Specifically for JAVA, probably still I do not know many stuff, especially I don't have so much idea about the abandoned enterprise technologies, or legacy build tools like Ant etc. but still our applications have good quality and they are working well and my team did not receive any bad feedback from JAVA-expert fellows from the company, it means we adopted well the technology and caught the train.

I've to open a new paranthesis about Node.js. If you've never worked with Node.js before and you start in 2016 you're kinda f*cked up. The ecosystem is changing a lot and maybe 70% of the resources you can find over internet are already outdated. You start the day happy and with full batteries and you start to use some frameworks etc. The next day you realize that people already abandoned it. Beside all the disadvantages of Node.js, it's also so annoying and make the adoption process so hard. How such a simple language like Javascript could become so complicated?

GO is very cool. Relatively easy language and also very very powerful, it has a high quality community and the resources you can find are very clear. If you are trying to pick between GO and Node.js, go with GO. Your adoption will be much easier.

But exactly. The so-called OO languages are worse at the key tenets of OO paradigm: polymorphism and message passing. I didn't even attempt to clarify that in my original post so forgive me for that.