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

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

#111

Post by Kaizyn »

DougWebb wrote: post #94

I'd been coding on the side from 12 years old right up through grad school; many different languages at many different levels. Assembly languages, BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Cobol, Forth, Prolog, Java, etc. Through it all I thought I'd eventually go into robotics where I'd primarily be a Mechanical Engineer building things, and writing software on the side for tools and controlling my creations. Then a friend offered me…

Have you heard the joke yet about Perl being a write-only language? Have a look at Python, Ruby or Perl6 for your next change of goto language. One of those should still fit your thinking style and should ease some of the pain points of working with Perl.

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

#112

Post by caleblloyd »

staticelf wrote: post #109
caleblloyd wrote: post #96

I have just started using C# and .NET Core after years of dismissing it when it was only available on Windows. Now it is open source and cross platform! I come from a PHP background but have been writing smaller performance critical code in Go lately. C# is a pleasure to work with. It's got generics and good support for asynchronous I/O. .NET Core is also very good, it's dead simple to spin up an API serving backend…

Me too. I also came from a php background and I love the new .NET Core, Typescript and so forth. Funny is that I've always been dismissing .NET for so long and been a heavy Linux user. I never thought the day would come where I prefer .NET and Azure. Although, professionally I basically only do frontend work or node work. So javascript is pretty much what brings in the cash each month nowadays.

> I never thought the day would come where I prefer .NET

Right!? Half my co-workers still think I'm joking when I say C# or .NET

I still strictly develop C# on Linux, using JetBrains Project Rider and VS Code. I run production apps on Google Container Engine.

I'll test in Windows for cross platform apps using Visual Studio Community Edition from time to time. Never messed with Azure but I think they have some nice integrations with Visual Studio.

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

#113

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

About 2 years ago I discovered a programming language called K. It's a very unusual-looking, extremely terse language in the APL family. It just "clicked" for me. I enjoy the ability to experiment with different algorithms and approaches in a few keystrokes, and learning to think in a "vector-oriented" fashion has opened my eyes to much more elegant formulations of old problems.

There aren't many extensive tutorial materials available for K, so when I decided to learn it I pored over the reference manual carefully and wrote an interpreter to try to match the spec. I built programming environments on top of my interpreter which are probably only suitable for my own use, but they make me deliriously happy to use. I made connections with both seasoned K programmers and other enthusiasts through my open-source projects with the language. Eventually I was approached with a few offers, and I am now gainfully employed by a firm which uses K more or less exclusively for backend work.

If you find a niche that makes you happy, and you're willing to invest the time to develop an unusual area of expertise, a career can follow naturally.

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

#115

Post by nickthemagicman »

cagataygurturk wrote: post #57
jjrumi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I had to study so much in these last 2 years" --> Could you give a glimpse on what have you studied/read? I'm very interested. Thanks!

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 tea…

Yeah. I agree. I dont understand how people build large Node projects.

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

#117

Post by imaginenore »

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…

Interesting. I had the opposite experience. I started with C++ , then JavaScript, but ended up doing lots of PHP work. There are just so many PHP opportunities, the demand is still very high, but too many low quality devs, companies are willing to pay a lot for a good PHP dev. My last project was $150/hr, the one before that was $90/hr - both remote.

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

#118

Post by fatboy10174 »

I Started with vb.net, and then quickly tranisitioned to C# at the advice of a manager about 12 years ago, naturally incorporating javascript and HTML and i've never looked back since. I had an 'wow' type of moment when i discovered MVVM (Knockout) and decided to bite the bullet and actually learn jquery.
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