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
And Clojure.
Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
131–140 of 315 posts
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#132My 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…
I'm just starting my career as a dev, but my first language in school was C++.
At work I use C# - but I hope to keep learning more languages. The main thing I was worried about initially was being stuck with one language my whole career.
Anyone else ever feel that way?
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#133Clojure. Before learning Clojure, I didn't even have a career. I just wanted to get into software development. But at the time, all I knew was a bit of Python. And while I could've learned Java, I figured that being yet another Java programmer in the marketplace, but with no experience and a liberal arts degree, was probably going to get me nowhere. So I decided I had to learn something emerging. Something where ther…
Are you employed remotely? Someone asked a question on Ask HN a few days back about whether learning a less common language made remote work more feasible. So this is kind of a follow-up to that question.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#134Functions as first class citizens in Python. I knew that you could pass function pointers as parameters in C but there was something so foreign and new about it.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#135About 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 m…
At the risk of spamming the same question to everyone who comments here with a less common language, are you employed remotely? Someone asked a question on Ask HN a few days back about whether learning a less common language made remote work more feasible. Do you get many remote opportunities as a known K programmer?
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#136Clojure. Before learning Clojure, I didn't even have a career. I just wanted to get into software development. But at the time, all I knew was a bit of Python. And while I could've learned Java, I figured that being yet another Java programmer in the marketplace, but with no experience and a liberal arts degree, was probably going to get me nowhere. So I decided I had to learn something emerging. Something where ther…
Awesome story! I'm interested in hear more about the time you spent learning non-programming fundamentals. Would you care to elaborate?
I'd say non-programming fundamentals took about two months at about 4-6 hours a day, with the majority of that dedicated to algorithms and data structures.
I took these two OCW courses: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
And worked my way through these two books: https://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena...
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Robert-Sedgewick-ebook/dp/...
I wrote out my solutions on a whiteboard or pen and paper before typing them into a computer.
Outside of A & DS, I spent some time on operating systems and networking in general. A little bit of probability, but no hardcore discrete math.
There are swaths of areas which I now cover at a slower pace as time allows; compilers, AI, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#137I'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.
That joke's not true at all, if you write your code well. It comes from many people writing really bad code and sharing it widely through cgi script archives. Lots of stuff on CPAN was bad too. And of course there was a lot of intentionally-bad code too.
These days I'm writing C# web apps, with plenty of client-side javascript. My problems dealing with large complex codebases went away years ago; Perl helped me to discover that I could do this as a career, but it hasn't been a crutch.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#138I'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.
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Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 in…
Is Project Rider usable already? I remember it was sort of in alpha not long ago
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#140My 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…
I'm just starting my career as a dev, but my first language in school was C++. At work I use C# - but I hope to keep learning more languages. The main thing I was worried about initially was being stuck with one language my whole career. Anyone else ever feel that way?
If you spend extra time after work building personal projects, contributing to open source community etc. you'll not stuck in nothing. Don't let your workplace limit and dictate the technology that you know and use, feel free to develop yourself. Then it'll be very easy to jump between different workplaces until you find the best for you.