Ruby and Rails in 2004. I'd been a Perl developer for 8 years till that point but had basically given up on building anything substantial with it and was transitioning to being a freelance writer. Ruby and Rails got me straight back onto the development track and had a huge influence over my successes since.
Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
61–70 of 315 posts
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#62Elasticsearch + Kibana. First it was a weekend project, then a full project at work, now there is a full team working on it and my title has changed to "Data analyst". All in 6 months.
upday?
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#63Wow moment for me was finding out about Nim which proved once-and-for-all for me that the idea of performance vs. code clarity/convenience having to be a trade-off was a fallacy.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#64Nobody mentions RUST? I thought it,s popular here...
Rust is extremely new, with way fewer people who have tried it. So there wasn't much opportunity to change someone's career (both on the time and the people axis).
Additionally, Rust is a very well-engineered language, but it has few ground-breaking attributes. The borrow checker has never appeared in a non-esoteric language before, I guess. Most of the other goodies could have blown people's minds long before in another language.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#65Verilog its like going from 2D -> 4D
And thats for real complex projects, not making LED`s blnik.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#66Emacs. I remember finishing college in the late 90s and coming across Emacs (actually, XEmacs back then) for the first time. What a weird editor, how could anyone even want use this voluntarily? Until some coworkers at the place I worked back then showed me some tricks. The touch of enlightenment hasn't stopped ever since and probably never will.
Testify!
Emacs is so mysterious, some people actually think it's a Text Editor.
It's like saying Android is a Phone.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#67Intellij IDEA <3
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#68expect, TCL and DejaGNU. My first consultancy work assignment: "Paul had to go on an extended vacation. Nobody understands his code, but he says it is almost done. Finish it up, please!" Thanks to DejaGnu and expect, I could write an extensive testsuite, get good test coverage, fix the few missing pieces of code, and deliver a bugfree product in less than the allotted time. (Of course, I'm not sure it was bugfree, but nobody found a single bug in the next couple of years.)
Then Python, where I understood that a language doesn't have to be as toylike as TCL to be extensible and embeddable.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#69Learning Lisp, more specifically Scheme. I became curious about it after reading ESR's "How to Become a Hacker". When homoiconicity and other Lisp goodies gradually permeated my brain, the computing world seemed different. I saw every config file differently, trying to see how the lines between config and code blurred. Method abstractions and bottom up design became much easier. I appreciated all those prefix-evaluat…
Scheme changed everything for me. 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…
> You need to allow a user to run half a dozen functions, with a syntax.
You could do this with Javascript 'eval' too and I still wouldn't recommend it. Usually when this sort of requirement comes up the answer is actually visual programming, where the user just has to join blocks up and get's some sort of immediate real time feedback [1]. It's the only time VP is a good idea as the problem is in an extremely extremely constrained environment. Putting Lisp in it's place is really just an all round awful solution. Look at how the AutoCAD Lisp experience turned out [2].
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#70Knowledge-wise: Github. When I began learning Javascript I'd read through the source code of any libraries that appeared to do magic and figure out what the trick was. Very helpful in making things 'click'. Tool-wise: Vue.js (a single file for code, templates and style is refreshing), Now by zeit.co and Sublime Text are my three hombres. And hot-reloading, for all those hours it saves me....praise be to Websockets.
I agree with GitHub, everyone here is talking about programming languages, but the ability to search through millions of projects and basically get a 'head start' on any idea you come up with is just brilliant. The other day I needed a Bezier curve editor and GitHub gave me a 100 to choose from! I just took the one with the most features and started adding to it from there - saved perhaps a week of effort right off the bat.