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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?

#202
post #194

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 m…

Is your interpreter available? I'm prototyping a language that will share some ideas from K but with more "normal" syntax. However all available K interpreters are as dense as K itself!

Certainly. It's written in a fairly dense style by JavaScript standards, but perhaps you'll find it less impenetrable than others?

https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok/blob/gh-pages/oK.js

I'd be happy to try to answer any questions you might have about it.

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

#204
Flash. Without it's awesome graphics, animation, and sound integrated with programming and its awesome community at the time, I might not have even gotten back into programming, as I had taken a two year break from it at the time after a rough college computer science experience with terrible professors.

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

#205
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did you get into/find side-project ideas?

Ideally I'd like to work on something others could make use of, but I've been having a hard time thinking of something interesting to work on.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A couple comments. * clojure protocols map to interfaces (abstract classes for C++ folks) * one can define records that satisfy protocol(s). This is one way to do OO in clojure, happens to map to the underlying JVM mechanisms for JVM optimizations to kick in. * Gamma et al., Bloch and many others tell to prefer composition over inheritance. Clojure makes this guideline easy to follow. * overall the OO leaders also re…

> a great many authors cite encapsulation to be the definite trait of an OO language

Yes this is what I was referring to, Clojure is not OO in the way that many think of OO.

But your other points are right on.

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

#208

Hashicorp products. It's incredible how productive this company is, and how much I've come to use their applications throughout my career. First Vagrant, then Packer, then Consul, and soon Vault and Terraform. Everything I've been wanting to do for years, I am now doing thanks to Hashicorp.

Hey! Okay, this might be the best coincidence I've ever seen. I'm a random guy on the internet that thinks Vault looks awesome and I want to use it for my next project, but I'm having trouble since the documentation is so sparse and thin.

Do you mind helping me out for some good Karma? Check your twitter! :D

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

#209
post #47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for the last 7 years i've been a php developer and i'm currently in the process of learning my second language, #c. it's good to hear that someone else has been through this process before me and said it was such a big step! thanks for giving me some more motivation!

I assure you many millions of people have been through this process before you! It gets easier after the second, particularly if you stick with mostly procedural/OO languages. So after C# you'll pick up Java, and maybe Python or Ruby in a heartbeat. Languages with fundamentally different paradigms will still be a little tricky - Haskell, Scala, Stan, R etc don't bear a lot of resemblance to PHP.

I agree to a point... C# is fairly unlike ruby in its idioms. You will be able to write C# in ruby fairly easily but it's a language that doesn't benefit much from that.

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

#210
FoxPro for Unix. The FoxPro part is what kept a thriving consultancy going for years (which we sold before...). The Unix part is how I ended up at Microsoft, ironically (in the 90s) because I knew Unix and a hefty helping of FoxPro knowledge didn't hurt.

I haven't touched FoxPro in over ten years and work primarily on mobile now. But a stint at Microsoft opened up all kinds of opportunity, and that wouldn't have happened were it not for a small company in Toledo, OH cranking out desktop database software. Otherwise I'd probably still be in Indianapolis cranking out CRUD for some insurance company.

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