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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?

#241

Post by happyslobro »

happyslobro wrote: post #235
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #113

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…

K lang was featured here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561573

(15 minutes later) Just started playing with this, it is much fun. I'll definitely be golfing more on the weekends now :)

For anyone else just starting out, I suggest using readline with the REPL: `rlwrap q`. It gives you history, search, familiar line editing commands, etc.

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

#242

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

happyslobro wrote: post #241
happyslobro wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

K lang was featured here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561573

(15 minutes later) Just started playing with this, it is much fun. I'll definitely be golfing more on the weekends now :) For anyone else just starting out, I suggest using readline with the REPL: `rlwrap q`. It gives you history, search, familiar line editing commands, etc.

If anyone happens to be on a mobile device, I recently put together a mobile-oriented frontend for my K interpreter. It's a somewhat different dialect (k6) and much slower than the real deal, but it makes a pleasant pocket calculator:

http://johnearnest.github.io/ok/mobile.html

Try entering:

    pl[.5*!50;sin]

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

#243

Post by npolet »

benzor wrote: post #240
kentosi wrote: post #167

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. Typi…

I completely agree that a minimum typing speed makes a huge difference. That being said, the code output bottleneck is usually my brain and not my hands!

Very much so. I think a lot of people who code or know much about it are surprised by how much abstract thinking there is involved when programming. I would love to time my work hours (somehow) over the course of a few months and see the amount of time spent thinking and jotting ideas down, to actually writing code.

I work closely with non-developers a lot and they have mentioned that they didn't realise how 'big' programming, languages, algorithms etc... are. There is a hell of a lot of stuff to know. But I suppose this is the same with many industries.

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

#245

Post by ljw1001 »

lmm wrote: post #19

Scala, back in 2010. I realised that I didn't have to sacrifice productivity for safety, I could have it all: code that's more concise than Python, but safer than Java. Best thing I ever did was finding a way to try it in my then job (a low-risk standalone tool); over the next couple of years I shifted gradually into doing more and more Scala, and now use it full-time.

> more concise than Python, but safer than Java

really? or was that supposed to be the other way around?

Personally, I can't help thinking of scala as a hipster beard on the face of java.

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

#246

Post by mpwoz »

fsloth wrote: post #227
votr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

What makes you categorize algorithms as non-programming? Isn't it like saying rhythm and melody are non-musical concepts?

Not OP, but maybe "coding" is a better term: they are language-agnostic fundamentals that don't change as quickly as the tools and frameworks we use daily as "programmers"

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

#247

Post by ljw1001 »

mikestew wrote: post #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 happ…

Foxpro was my first language and I loved it.

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

#248

Post by Spoom »

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…

This is basically what I'm trying to do now. My entire career has been dominated by PHP thus far (though I've learned many other languages along the way). About a year and a half ago, I saw the writing on the wall and decided to learn something new. I chose Python as I'd heard many good things about the language, and it was more or less entirely new to me (unlike, say, Java or C which I had learned in college). It is so much more pleasant to code in than PHP. And I can't talk about it publicly quite yet, but good things are happening due to my Python abilities.

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

#249

Post by kzisme »

partisan wrote: post #225
kzisme wrote: 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?

Same story: C++ at school and VB then eventually C# at work. About 7 years into my career, I started feeling as though I had stagnated. Over the past 4 years, I took the time to learn Ruby (RoR), Scala, some Clojure, Nim, and now, some F#. Each of them has, in some way, made me a better C# programmer. I can't go out and interview for a position programming any of these languages, but they aren't blindspots for me eit…

Have you ever felt the need to try to change positions to try to learn more about the non-work use languages that you know?

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

#250

Post by jay-anderson »

cfeduke wrote: post #215
tzhenghao wrote: post #150

Vim. I was first introduced to this text editor back in college. It has super weird navigation rules and editing modes that would easily deter many beginners. 70-80% of my course mates gave up on it and chose something else that worked more like a normal text editor such as Sublime/Atom. It took me several months to develop that muscle memory to increase my productivity. Today, I can log in remotely to my AWS instanc…

Same for me. Vim bindings in all my editors across all the operating systems I use. The editor is the way you communicate your will to the machine. IntelliJ has a particularly good plugin JetBrains created. Eclipse has a decent plugin for USD$14, or it was when I bought it years ago.

http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/ - vrapper is what I use for vim support in eclipse. It's quite good.
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