Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by scardine » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 11:43 AM UTC

Python saved my but 10 years ago when I was transitioning from operations to be a full time software developer. Back then I made the wrong technology choice for a project (OpenLazlo, a discontinued RIA platform on the frontend and PHP at the backend) and the schedule was slipping fast. Then I tried Django and it really stands for the motto "The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines".

I'm yet to find a language that allows fast prototyping while being readable six months after you wrote it - I used to love Perl, it is on pair with Python on productivity and blows it out of the water in performance, but I can't say it is easy to maintain.

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

#82

Post by Kiro » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 11:48 AM UTC

cel1ne wrote: post #3

Tachyons.css: http://tachyons.io/ Suddenly CSS became fun again and my time designing websites went down by a guessed factor of 5.

What happens when your boss all of a sudden wants to change all the colors from blue to red?

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

#83

Post by misja111 » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 11:55 AM UTC

cagataygurturk wrote: post #13

My wow moment was when I quit trying to do everything in the language I was comfortable with (PHP) and became a language agnostic engineer. Since then (2 years ago) now I can write in 3 programming language, nobody can realize that I am new at these languages and I know that I can pick a new language up now in a very short time. I had to study so much in these last 2 years but since I love engineering it was funny ra…

+1

I had the same learning moment a couple of years ago. I used to code mainly in Java so when I had to build a frontend, I tried to avoid Javascript and use some Java framework like GWT, Wicket or even Swing instead. At some point I grew tired of the pitfalls and limitations that I kept running into and decided to bite the bullet and just learn Javascript properly. It was a revelation.

TL;DR; Don't stubbornly stick to one language, choose the proper language for the job.

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

#84

Post by contingencies » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 11:57 AM UTC

Tools: Linux. IP. IRC. SMTP. HTTP. Wikipedia. SQL. RCS/VCS. Travel.

'Wow' moments: Working in a small publicly listed company early in my career showed me how inefficient and corrupt the stock market is, gave me a brief general education in business, and showed me a lot about the nature of international business. Travel showed me how there was an alternative to decades of 9-5 work, that I had nothing to fear from failure, and that I could actually afford to start my own companies. Starting my first company from concept to break-even revenue was a great learning curve.

Best decision: Moving to China. It gave me the opportunity to start a company and learn loads very quickly.

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

#85

Post by kaspermarstal » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 11:57 AM UTC

SimpleITK. Hands down the best medical image processing library ever.

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

#86

Post by farm_code » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 12:01 PM UTC

dvcrn wrote: post #21

Go recently, and Clojure previously. 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, f…

I am decade old Java dev, but Elixir changed the way I design web apps.

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

#87

Post by shakna » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 12:01 PM UTC

Ao7bei3s wrote: post #56

shakna wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's still evil - what if the input program doesn't halt, or allocates too much memory?

You design the functional building blocks. So a non-halting program would likely use a single stack, and never grow. But more than that, you can use continuations to abort the moment the calculation is too large.

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

#88

Post by wastedhours » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 12:01 PM UTC

Moving from PHP to Rails in 08/09. First dabble with MVC and it really changed the game for me - and the gem ecosystem made things (at least feel...) a lot less hacky than taking random scripts from Google.

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

#89

Post by dschiptsov » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 12:01 PM UTC

MIT Scheme, Common Lisp, SML, Haskell, Erlang.

Scheme - it's so concise, clean, Wow!

CL - LOOPing macros, SETF, OOP is just a bunch of slots and macros. Wow!

SML, Haskell - static typing done right. Wow!

Erlang - Wow!

Scala - concepts from SML + design choices from Erlang.

Java, JavaScript - Packers, packers everywhere...

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

#90

Post by galfarragem » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 12:02 PM UTC

It would be cool if HN had kind of auto TLDR tool. The sentiment seems to be:

PHP, JAVA -> RAILS, PYTHON, JS

PERL (1998)

LISPS, ML family, SCALA, GO, RUST

EMACS

GITHUB