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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?

#271

Post by jackmott »

js8 wrote: post #227
morgante wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, seeing the top 10 list made me immediately think of homework assignments. In the real world, programmers don't take their questions with "recursion" or "pointers" very often. Nor is Assembly a common language for side projects. This definitely seems like a case of students simply being relatively overrepresented on weekends.

Funny, when I saw the top 10, Edward Kmett came to my mind. He is likely the most prolific Haskell hacker, but he also recently started a side project writing some graphics shaders for VR in C (when he was younger, he was in the demoscene community). So yeah, some people are weird that way..

I think focusing one one high level language like Haskell/OCaml/F# and one low level language like C is the truth path to enlightenment.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#272

Post by brennen »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #206
brennen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realizing just how excruciating that sounds, I think am a notch or two closer to appreciating the merits of s-expressions.

I’m curious why it sounds painful to you. I didn’t mean to imply we should reimplement XSLT in JSON syntax, just that some JSON description of a stylesheet, to be applied to JSON data, could be useful.

It very well might be. My feeling was just more or less: I don't love JSON syntax or the tendency towards big, hierarchical JSON documents overmuch (though it's certainly been a massive real-world improvement on XML for most of the overlapping use cases I'm familiar with), so describing transformations on data in it sounds likely to be unpleasant.

Perhaps one of these decades I will actually learn a Lisp.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#273

Post by manikinmelt »

problems wrote: post #270

The curve for Selenium on this graph is the weirdest thing: https://i.stack.imgur.com/LUQei.png Anyone want to speculate why this may be?

This is strange. My wild guess is that 2012 was around the time that every new programmer thought they could get rich making some shitty mobile app. Maybe this represents a temporary skew in web-vs-mobile popularity correcting itself?

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#274

Post by bad_user »

jameshart wrote: post #262
bad_user wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Procedur…

Why does functional programming have to be about math? That is precisely the kind of insistence that prevents people from adopting functional languages for real world programming tasks. JavaScript certainly lacks language level support for function composition, but it has the basic tools to allow you to build combinators and compositional functions yourself, and when dealing with functions as data you often find you…

> Why does functional programming have to be about math?

Because that's its definition. Change that definition and it becomes meaningless. Functional programming is about working with functions that always have the same output for a given input - the definition of mathematical functions and I wouldn't have to say mathematical if software developers wouldn't feel the need to overload technical terms. Pascal and other languages had great names for pieces of code taking arguments and that aren't functions: procedures, routines, subroutines, etc.

> That is precisely the kind of insistence that prevents people from adopting functional languages for real world programming tasks.

So let me get this straight, in order to get people to adopt something, you want the definition changed in such a way as to become meaningless?

Also, I do expect software developers to know at least high-school level math, because CS is math. Even if you lack a formal education, that's no excuse for ignoring theory that can help in your daily work, especially in this day and age with so many online resources available for free.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#275

Post by wcarron »

radlad wrote: post #142
wcarron wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I have gripes about the OS X command line. I can't confidently use the scripts I do on Ubuntu/Mint/Debian. Like, get with the program, Apple. It infuriates me and I'm moving entirely off their platform as soon as my Mac kicks the bucket.

OS X is not Linux. It's a BSD-derivative, and doesn't use the GNU toolchain. It isn't that it's "not with the program." It's that it's not the operating system, or toolchain, you're familiar with. Install homebrew and GNU tools[1] if you want them. If you used an operating system that shipped with BusyBox, you'd be similarly frustrated. But operating systems are tradeoffs with pros/cons. Using a different set of tool…

Oh, my mistake. I was under the impression that sed/awk/grep/ack/etc etc were part of the POSIX standard toolchain, rather than the GNU toolchain.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#277

Post by na85 »

dagw wrote: post #247
sulam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that a statement about Haskell or an indictment of Java, I wonder?

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#278

Post by wyager »

sulam wrote: post #193
sulam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The predictable comment that learning Java is not necessarily an education is being repeatedly responded to here. I clearly should have included a response to this sort of argument in the original. Since I didn't, and since I can't edit now, I'll do it here. 1) Does learning Java keep you from learning CS concepts like pure functions and category theory? Obviously not. It may not be completely natural, but people do…

> Does learning Java keep you from learning CS concepts like pure functions and category theory?

Dijkstra certainly thought so. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/OtherDocs/To%20the%20Budg...

> They may contribute actual production code, but probably not if it's Haskell.

Not only can interns learn new languages on the job, but any student worth hiring probably knows multiple languages already. The argument here is that theory courses should be in a theoretically sound language; that doesn't preclude students from learning corporate-approved languages as well.

For what it's worth, I picked up new languages in two of the internships I did in college. It never took me more than a week or two, and happened contemporaneously with me figuring out the codebase and dev environment. In at least one of those, which was a JavaScript codebase with many functional elements, having a strong functional background as well as a strong imperative background was what allowed me to comprehend it without too much effort.

> then they are doing a great disservice to their CS students.

I'm inclined to agree. This is, of course, a matter of opinion.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#279

Post by dagw »

na85 wrote: post #277
dagw wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that a statement about Haskell or an indictment of Java, I wonder?

Honestly, a statement about Haskell. Haskell just makes certain core concepts about programming and computer science really obvious and clear. Also the discipline Haskell's purity and type system forces on you leads some pretty good habits that I try to keep in mind no matter what language I'm programming in (which these days is 90+% python or JavaScript).

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#280

Post by civility »

OJFord wrote: post #70
civility wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This chart was not what I expected: http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ocaml,scheme,rus...

That's not so surprising, is it? Unless I'm missing something that graph's all time - there's definitely tonnes of Python Q&A on SO, and as I (anecdotally) described above, not much Rust. That graph would be better titled "Have people talked about it".

> Unless I'm missing something that graph's all time

Yeah, I missed that. I thought it was recent history. If we normalized by years available, Swift seems like an outlier with Go lesser so.

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