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What programming languages are used most on weekends?

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Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#241

Post by sah2ed »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #96
freehunter wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a "user revolt" over something like that, whether you feel the post was right or wrong, that necessarily implies there is competition to SO and people can move to another community. I am not going to get involved in politics here or question your statement, what I'm asking is this: where would people go? What's the competition to SO? If people decided they didn't like Joel's views on politics, they'd load…

You get to a certain point in your experience where you have fewer questions to ask, and most of the questions I do have are already answered. Its possible to continue to use SO without contributing to it, which is what quite a few people in that thread had said they would do.

> You get to a certain point in your experience where you have fewer questions to ask, and most of the questions I do have are already answered.

That assertion is correct if you are at the cusp of retirement.

For most people, they'll need to re-tool by picking new technologies during their careers to round out their experience. The blunt truth is that, not keeping up with new languages/frameworks/stacks etc will mean that such folks will become very unemployable long before they reach 50 [0] unless they transition into a management role.

[0] http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#242

Post by mmjaa »

freehunter wrote: post #85
legostormtroopr wrote: post #46

Given the current user revolt over there regarding recent political shenanigans by the mods (and CEO), I'd be keen to see how their trends track over the next few years. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-e...

If there is a "user revolt" over something like that, whether you feel the post was right or wrong, that necessarily implies there is competition to SO and people can move to another community. I am not going to get involved in politics here or question your statement, what I'm asking is this: where would people go? What's the competition to SO? If people decided they didn't like Joel's views on politics, they'd load…

> Quora isn't going to help me figure out why Lua counts from 1 instead of from 0.

What is amazing though, is RTFM'ing will .. but who does that these days? RTFM'ing is just 'old' googling, nichtwa?

Have we really built programming tools so complex that they require the Internet?

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#243

Post by sah2ed »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #46

Given the current user revolt over there regarding recent political shenanigans by the mods (and CEO), I'd be keen to see how their trends track over the next few years. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-e...

I actually didn't know about the user revolt which you speak of, so thank you for at least bringing it up.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#245

Post by bluejekyll »

yetihehe wrote: post #234
vbezhenar wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can get NullPointerException, then you are using pointers. May be you meant that you can't use pointer arithmetic, but pointers are used almost everywhere.

If you can't use pointer arithmetic, you don't use pointers. Your language uses them internally, but not you. NullPointerException in Java/C# is a result of a leaky abstraction.

Yeah, they could just as easily have made it a NullException and not lost any meaning.

Or better yeah, they could have made a null safe language ;)

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#246

Post by bad_user »

nulagrithom wrote: post #79
segmondy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, that's what's wrong with the world. Chasing tech, pick something solid and stick with it. I have seen developers barely get decent in one language only to drop it and learn a new language. Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur.

> Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur. I disagree. I went from C# to Node.js and back to C#. I learned the hell out of JavaScript, and yet I feel like nobody will ever care that I can explain some of its nuances and gotchas. Language nuances are constantly evolving anyway. Learning Node.js unlocked whole paradigms I didn't underst…

> Learning Node.js unlocked whole paradigms I didn't understand in C#. I never really "got" functional programming

Don't get me wrong, but I'm pretty sure you still don't get functional programming, because functional programming is not practiced within the Javascript / Node.js ecosystem.

Yes, there are some exceptions here and there, some libraries like Facebook's React have FP-inspired ideas in them (even though those components are modelled with state and hence have nothing to do with FP) and working with asynchronous results signalled by callbacks is so freaking horrible that people have began using Promise abstractions sort of inspired by FP, except most of them broken. But no, unless you're into one of the languages that actively promote FP, like ClojureScript, PureScript, Elm, Scala.js, then you're probably not doing FP.

As evidence, go to GitHub, pick any sampling of Javascript projects and witness how a vast majority have nothing to do with FP.

Furthermore I think that with this argument you're proving the parent's point. If you want FP, then take the time to learn and work with one of the languages that actively promote FP and be prepared to suffer because it's not easy.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#247

Post by dagw »

sulam wrote: post #137
wyager wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was around when Dijkstra died that UT switched away from Haskell to Java. And yes, from what I've heard from several faculty members around in that period, a lot of it was from external pressure from large regional employers (some of which you have mentioned).

Honestly, would you rather hire an intern that has to learn Java from scratch, or one that actually had a class in it? I'm a fan of Haskell, but I think it being the intro CS class language is an educational fail.

I'm a fan of Haskell, but I think it being the intro CS class language is an educational fail.

My Haskell classes helped me more with regards to becoming a better Java programmer than my Java classes.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#249

Post by bad_user »

darkkindness wrote: post #98
eptcyka wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst it's true that one can program in a functional style in almost any language, I fail to see how javascript would help someone learn about functional programming.

It's true that you can program in a functional style in almost any language, but it's just simpler for Javascript. Functions are first-class objects in Javascript, and arrays have built-in forEach, map, reduce, and filter -- all useful for a beginner in functional programming. C++ and Java have lambdas and foreach, but they aren't as simple to use.

Functional Programming is about working with mathematical functions. Having "first-class functions" in the language is nice, but then passing function pointers around is nothing more than procedural programming [1] and yes, the difference is huge.

As for those utilities you mention, Javascript is the most broken of them all:

    >>> ["10", "10", "10"].map(parseInt)
    [10, Nan, 2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_programming

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#250

Post by olivier1664 »

coretx wrote: post #138

Not even a single Rust mention. Hmmm. Not sure if I'm a weekend-idiot or simply ahead of the crowd. Let's hope it's because of Rust developers both strongly disliking and never experiencing _stackoverflows_. ;+)

Probably because the "rust" keywoard hasn't yet the minimum mass to enter in the graph. It has only 6,000 questions* while only the tags with more than 20,000 are plotted.

* http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/62541...

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