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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?

#251

Post by chapingt »

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…

how do you feel about Vim plugins for external code editors (particularly, I'm thinking VS Code)? I somehow end up developing on new Windows machines all the time, and getting all the Unix emulation tools just so I can use Vim seems a bit over the top. Are there any enormous advantages to using Vim vs. a Vim emulator?

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

#252

Post by happyslobro »

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…

Where did you get this financial data for your first project? Is it a public feed / API? This sounds like exactly the sort of thing that I would like to start playing and eventually working with. I had been assuming that this type of data would only be available to the kind of entities that have a compliance officer, but I would love to have that assumption proven wrong.

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

#253

Post by lmm »

ljw1001 wrote: post #245
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.

Yes, really. You can write Scala in a very Python-like style, but "_.foo" is much more concise than "lambda x: x.foo", and class declarations are much more concise too ("class Foo(x: Int, y: String)" rather than "class Foo(object): def __init__(self, x, y): self.x = x; self.y = y").

Compared to Java, the inherent safety level of the type system is very similar, but since it's much lighter weight you can do a lot more of it; "newtypes" are much more concise, and for/yield makes it possible to treat errors as values in a lightweight way rather than using the second parallel type system that is Java checked exceptions.

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

#254

Post by AnimalMuppet »

misterioss wrote: post #67

Intellij IDEA <3

Seconded. It was like being psychic - the code just appeared on the screen. Amazingly fast and productive.

Before that (way before), telnet and ftp. Being able to deliver a new executable to personnel at a trade show floor from 500 miles away was mind-blowing in the early 90s...

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

#255

Post by gpsgay »

Honestly? PHP hehhehee. PHP is a language that works for people who want to get things done on the internet in a very uncomplicated way :P... Plus, it is also quite powerful if you actually go into detail and access low level things as well. I hated Java for example... But PHP.. Oh, you can programme such wonderful things with just a text editor.

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

#256

Post by petagonoral »

optionalparens wrote: post #195

Lisp - It was one of my first few languages, but really learning it damaged my view of everything else. To use a real Lisp machine, Lisp debugging/backtracing, and have code as data was such a huge win over writing ASM, C, Fortran, and the many other languages I used a lot back then. I still feel almost all other languages are catching up, while Common Lisp itself I felt got ruined by a lot of nonsense even though I…

>Lots of things here I don't like, but even the author of the language agrees with me on most of those.

Working with Clojure..would be great if you could expand on these. Curious as to what they are/Rich agrees with.

I find Clojure lacking when it comes to debuggabililty. In so far as everyone in my medium-ish non trivial codebase seems to find 'clever' solutions that are all but impossible to debug efficiently without a) understanding everything around it and b) printing everything. Debug statements seem to "ruin the cleanliness" (as well as genuinely ruining threading macro flows.

Do other companies use Clojure for non trivial web applications? Have these Clojurians ever worked on a properly complex system? A lot seem to do just data analysis with Clojure. More importantly, have they ever worked on a properly complex system that they haven't been involved with from the start where debugging comes back to 'intuition' and 'whack a mole' type debugging?

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

#257

Post by slinger »

votr wrote: post #136
slinger wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

Thank you for your reply. I'm currently studying CS fundamentals as well. I'm taking an excellent operating system class from https://www.ops-class.org and I recommend to everyone that wants to learn this stuff.

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

#258

Post by vintagedave »

For me it was Delphi. This was in the nineties and it was a beautiful language paired with a UI editor in a time when that didn't exist (there was only VB (ugh) or MFC, if that really counts as a UI designer.) It had a huge influence on languages, especially C#, which feels like Delphi-with-braces to many Delphi programmers. For me as a teenager, it was when I "got" OO programming and set me off on a programming career, which led to many adventures (sailing, natural disasters, etc.)

I came back to it quite recently and it's advanced a lot, although I use its C++ sister product, C++Builder, which pairs the same UI tech with C++, a trick that is hard to pull off (Qt manages it, through many clever C++ tricks; C++Builder does it through a couple of neat language extensions which I feel is cleaner overall. I really like it. This year I started working at the company making it, so full disclosure there, but I work there because I like the tech so much.)

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

#259

Post by cel1ne »

kasparsklavins wrote: post #239
cel1ne wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used bootstrap in the past, but not anymore. Tachyons is different, it doesn't give you components but single-purpose classes and a font-relative layouting system: http://tachyons.io/docs/layout/spacing/ It takes a while getting used to the names, but after that it's just awesome that you don't have to think about padding, margin and font-size values anymore. Just slap "pa1" or "pa2" there and everything looks p…

Doesn't it lead to inconsistent layout if someone forgets to add it? I am not a designer, but few things irks me more than paddings varying across the same 'components'. From experience, your method is easier to think through, but later on it is more time consuming to modify a layout. pa1 and the like should be treated the same as magic numbers.

That is the point. Padding can't be inconsistent if there are only 7 values to choose from, not 1..7, but powers of two, so 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8rem.

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

#260

Post by cel1ne »

Kiro wrote: post #82
cel1ne wrote: post #3

Tachyons.css: http://tachyons.io/ Suddenly CSS became fun again and my time designing websites went down by a guessed factor of 5.

What happens when your boss all of a sudden wants to change all the colors from blue to red?

That's a problem for your text-editor. Use search and replace.

Also, if you're using something like React, you can share the style strings in variables.

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