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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?

#161

Post by hellofunk »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #46
pvdebbe wrote: post #42

Clojure, or maybe all these related Rich Hickey talks transformed my attitude towards systems programming. Before that, the Unix philosophy. But perhaps I can't say that the Unix philosophy changed my career because I adopted it very early in my programming and way before any career established. Sadly, Clojure has left me in a position where Python + Django in my day work disgusts me with its mutability and unnecessa…

Clojure has mutability and a lot of its idiomatic abstractions are object oriented in nature.

> a lot of its idiomatic abstractions are object oriented in nature

This is a curious comment, and I'd like to hear some elaboration.

I used C++ for years, then 2 years as a full-time Clojure dev, and I don't see any OO parallels in Clojure at all.

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

#162

Post by mountaineer22 »

scardine wrote: post #81

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 langu…

I know of a successful SaaS that is currently using Perl for data cleaning/importing.

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

#163

Post by Veen »

votr wrote: post #147
heyts wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very interested in learning Clojure. Would you care to share more of your experience learning the language in terms of learning curve, useful libraries or just general tips. I'm sure that would benefit the community at large.

I approached learning Clojure the way I approach learning everything else. I survey the resources available, then pick the two best books. Ideally, I want them to come at it from different perspectives. e.g. one may place an emphasis on doing stuff with Clojure while another may be more about functional programming. At the time, they were: https://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick-eboo... https://www.am…

> You write your base functions, then higher-level functions which use those base functions, and so on. Functions all the way down.

I'm hoping to follow a similar trajectory to you, but with Elixir instead of closure. At the moment though, I tend to do things the other way around: write the top level functions and then fill out the base functions.

So I'd start a module with

def whatever(something), do: something |> function1 |> function2 |> function3

Then I'll write function1, 2, and 3 and whatever helper functions they need. And so on until it works. Maybe doing it your way is a better approach: helps you think it through first.

(although I'm aware some would say that tests should come before everything else anyway)

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

#164

Post by byoung2 »

votr wrote: post #143
jnbiche wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope. Still commuting. But becoming remote is my number one goal. At the moment, I have a client outside of work (ReactJS stuff), and am negotiating a remote gig with a company in California. I agree that exotic technologies give you a leg up. My stance is also that, if you're pushing for remote, then by definition you need to justify why you're a better choice than your remote competition who may live in lower COL a…

If you're remote, then why should someone pay you a high salary vs. paying a lower one to that bright guy in Romania, who can still live like a king?

Companies will pay a premium to have someone in the same timezone who speaks the language fluently.

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

#165

Post by unoti »

My biggest oh wow moment came from learning Erlang. At first I had trouble adapting to its functional style and punctuation, so I gave up. Later when reading a book about another functional language (Scala) the concepts fell into place. The way Erlang works from a language and platform perspective changed the way I think about constructing both programs and systems as a whole.

Today the learning process is far better and smoother using Elixir and Phoenix. Jump in and give it a try!

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

#167

Post by kentosi »

Though not a language, nor a tool: A touch typing course.

Early in my career I noticed programmers around me with 10+ years experience still typing the "preying-mantis" way (thumb+index+middle fingers pecking at the keyboard, head frantically bobbing eye-focus between keyboard and screen).

I thought to myself that if I had the same experience as them and could touch type I would be immensely faster.

I was right. Typing faster = coding faster = learning faster.

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

#169

Post by mountaineer22 »

Kaizyn wrote: post #111
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.

It is a joke, not to be taken seriously, right?

Do we have these contests in Ruby?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscated_Perl_Contest

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