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

There's no need to involve Go in that stack if you're building on Elixir. If you absolutely need interop with something else it'd be better to go with something more focused (either on speed, correctness or something else, as Go doesn't really focus on much of anything, except design-wise) and use it through ports or the like, from the BEAM.

Go as an addition to a BEAM app won't add anything as it mostly does nothing much better than the BEAM and what it does better will be better handled by other languages. Some people would attempt to make a case for it being able to spawn threads, etc., but its scheduling makes in inherently as incompatible with the BEAM as any other language, so it's not a reasonable point to make.

I started out doing a few years of C++ and ended up fairly disenchanted with programming. I had started when I was 14 and by 19 I was sure I didn't really want to sit down and program every day, because it just wasn't exciting enough anymore.

I found Python around 21-22 and it completely changed everything. I could sit down and just flash through the whole process of idea to actual execution in one day and I didn't have to micromanage everything. Programming became exciting again.

A few years later I was having a hard time with some personal issues and I ended up trying to distract myself with SICP. SICP just lifted a whole layer of fog for me and while in the process of reading it I found Racket. So I went into the rabbit hole that is Racket and found myself just unmasking programming languages in general, making all of them so much simpler and easy to learn. When I was done I just had a new appreciation for language features and how to build them.

Not all that long ago I looked at Elixir and started playing with it. While doing so I realized that there is no stack that can make playing with processes as easy as the BEAM and what that means for the apps you're making. The BEAM changed the way I looked at multi-threading and concurrency and it's the platform I'd use for all forms of control systems, with the branches in those systems either running entirely on the BEAM or just communicating to external nodes in other languages when needed.

After about 4-5 months of Elixir I landed a job using Erlang at a game studio and I'm extremely happy to be using the BEAM professionally. We're allowed to create fairly amazing things and the things we build, even though I don't agree with the reason they're being built all of the time, are made possible only because of the BEAM (running interop with Lua, etc., running all communication through the BEAM).

Lately everything's finally clicked for me with Haskell and I find myself not having issues with the things I had issues with previously. I don't know how, exactly, but I think I let my brain finally absorb "Real World Haskell" (the best book, in my opinion: If you're only going to read one, don't let it be "Learn you a Haskell". LYAH is nice as a reference, but I don't think the demonstrations in it are very good, relevant and exciting) and so I was able to _not_ worry about monads and simply use them, letting the idea of them just emerge in my head because of familiarity with them from usage, instead of forcing monad tutorials on myself.

When I started to appreciate Haskell as just another language is when I finally understood why it was so great. It's amazingly practical and I've redone some of my older Python projects in Haskell only to find that I've got about the same LoC count even with types, which means that I've got more safety, more robustness and I can add things faster and with less headaches.

With these languages, there aren't many things that are impossible, and I feel like they've all changed something in me in terms of how I look at programming.

Javascript+webgl

I have been a C++ dev for all my career (about 14 years), so JavaScript was pretty cool relatively speaking. For various reasons I had been a Luddite of sorts and late to the webapp party. But when I finally got in, (more like circumstances left me no choice, technically not financially or socially) mid 2015, I was amazed at the influx of ideas I had. I mean, not only am I porting my desktop apps to web, I am also tinkering with ideas that never made sense desktopically so had never occurred to me. I have to admit that JS was a PITA, albeit of a different kind from C++, but it has certainly made me more confident and viable in starting my own thing. (For those who care, the front end is in Vanilla JS and for back end I am planning ASP.NET and WebAPI.)

It's "Docker" that changed my career and I still believe it has the capability and growth to change my career further too.

When I landed my first job back in 2012, I used to be a PHP developer. As obvious, working in a startup will force you to be a jack-of-all-trades, I started picking up SysOps (Linux, Web Servers, Email Servers, Deployment..etc) tasks along PHP development.

In mid 2013, I stumbled up-on "Docker" and I started learning it immediately. Mostly, I used it to solve dependency and packaging issues for my PHP projects. Soon I became fluent in SysOps tasks too.

Early 2014, I wanted to get into a new job. But not sure to continue as a developer or get in-to DevOps. Instead of doing the same old boring development, I chose to be a DevOps and the opportunity was provided because I have working knowledge in "Docker", which is not an easy find at that point of time. Actually I got a pile of opportunities and landed in the best among them. After 2 years passed by now I'm at my third job in a different startup, which again I work mostly with Docker.

By looking at the Docker's growth and usability, I could even say, it's gonna get my future job also :)