Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What programming languages are used late at night?

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 244 posts

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#141

Post by nightski »

NickM wrote: post #65
sotojuan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning Haskell has been made much easier with Haskell Book[1]. Unlike LYAH, it actually has a ton of exercises and in-depth explanations so you understand the why behind things as you make progress. That said, it requires discipline to read through. [1] http://haskellbook.com/

The big problem I've had with Haskell is that even after gaining a pretty good understanding of the language (including monads and such) I still can't fathom how to do anything real with it. Exercises are great and all, but once I try to go past exercises, I start getting lost in layers of monad transformers, and I struggle to figure out the "right" way to do anything. It just feels like there are all these layers of…

I wrote a 3D mesh reconstruction algorithm using feature point extraction in Haskell. The hardest part was graph algorithms since those can be pretty tricky to express in functional languages. But Even with 3D output to OpenGL, image loading and manipulation, etc.. I never touched a monad transformer. I think you are trying too hard. Just embrace IO for the effects and move everything else to pure code.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#142

Post by joaomacp »

jacquesm wrote: post #117
matt4077 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about fluctuating interest dependent on time of day. Unless Haskell's documentation is worse at night than it is during the day, your perfectly parroted talking-point is controlled for.

> your perfectly parroted talking-point is controlled for. Sorry? Did I take the jam out of your donut or something?

Damn son shit just got real

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#143

Post by jcadam »

cstrahan wrote: post #85
NickM wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem I've had with Haskell is that even after gaining a pretty good understanding of the language (including monads and such) I still can't fathom how to do anything real with it. Exercises are great and all, but once I try to go past exercises, I start getting lost in layers of monad transformers, and I struggle to figure out the "right" way to do anything. It just feels like there are all these layers of…

I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind." As an example, the first "real" project I wrote in Haskell was one or two weeks into learning it: a web testing framework/DSL (a la Capybara[0]) that spoke a (custom) protocol over socket to a headless webkit in…

> I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind."

I tried that. When I got stuck (fairly early on), I ended up switching my project from Haskell to Clojure :/

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#144

Post by derefr »

ericfrederich wrote: post #138

C programmers start the day a bit later, keep using the language in the evening, and stay up the longest. This suggests C may be particularly popular among hobbyist programmers who code during their free time (or perhaps among summer school students doing homework). ... or they're the only ones stuck down a rabbit hole chasing some obscure memory leak that keeps bugging them until late in the evening.

Naively, there's nothing forcing these developers to chase that leak into the night, rather than into the next work-day.

But I do wonder whether some languages have debugging problems that require "keeping more state" to solve them than others, such that the developers doing debugging in those languages would rather forge ahead and finish, than drop it and pick it back up the next day. That'd be an interesting thing to measure.

It'd also be interesting if some languages attract certain developers, because the attention-span and "mental stack size" the language designers assumed for the language, feel better suited to them. Maybe there are languages better for people who can juggle many or few facts at once; languages better for people who can hold three screens of text in their head, or who prefer to only have to think about one line at a time; etc?

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#145

Post by trhway »

ericfrederich wrote: post #138

C programmers start the day a bit later, keep using the language in the evening, and stay up the longest. This suggests C may be particularly popular among hobbyist programmers who code during their free time (or perhaps among summer school students doing homework). ... or they're the only ones stuck down a rabbit hole chasing some obscure memory leak that keeps bugging them until late in the evening.

>programmers who code during their free time

for my sideprojects i use mostly C because it is easy and straightforward - you just write what you need without satisfying all the other requirements. At work it is Java, C++, Python.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#147

Post by bluejekyll »

kobeya wrote: post #123
thepratt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest player using Haskell would be Google.

I'm pretty sure the biggest player using Haskell is Microsoft, which develops and maintains Haskell in the first place...

I though MS was pushing towards F#. Is there any indication they plan to focus more on one or the other?

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#148

Post by derefr »

kccqzy wrote: post #139
ericfrederich wrote: post #138

C programmers start the day a bit later, keep using the language in the evening, and stay up the longest. This suggests C may be particularly popular among hobbyist programmers who code during their free time (or perhaps among summer school students doing homework). ... or they're the only ones stuck down a rabbit hole chasing some obscure memory leak that keeps bugging them until late in the evening.

Use address sanitizer and leak sanitizer (-fsanitize=address). Compile with options that forbid omission of frame pointers (-fno-omit-frame-pointer) to get a nice backtrace of where the allocation occurred. Also compile with full debugging info (-g) so that leak errors contain file and line numbers. Problem solved. EDIT: this apparently only works on x86-64 Linux. If you are targeting something else, it might be slig…

Unless you're working in the embedded space, there's no reason to not write your C project to target whatever arch is the most debug-friendly first, and then just port it to the system it's "for" at the end.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#149

Post by jakobegger »

jjawssd wrote: post #122
jakobegger wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a low incidence of transsexualism in the general population, but we are talking about the tech scene. And particularly among programmers, it seems to me that a lot of female programmers have a Y chromosome. Considering that there aren't that many female programmers to begin with, I wouldn't be too sure that effect is negligible.

> it seems to me that a lot of female programmers have a Y chromosome. I do not believe you

Well, it's just my personal impression. I'm not saying it's a majority, but there are a lot of trans people in the tech community. So if you want to make statistics, I think you should take that into account, and not pretend that they don't matter.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#150

Post by pyrale »

cookiecaper wrote: post #126
mrkgnao wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also happen to employ Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow, respectively, two of the originators of the GHC project.

Yes, please note that BigTechCo using something in production is not an endorsement that it's production-ready. Ironically, more often than not, it means the opposite. BigTechCo employs the best computer scientists in the world to make all of that stuff work together, frequently including the project's founders/BDFLs so they can get whatever changes they need rammed through. Your company does not have this luxury.

It is definitely an endorsement that it is ready, although maybe not we-search-code-monkeys ready.

A large part of our jobs is figuring things out.

People looking for so-called production-grade tech are usually looking for ready-for-managers tech in my experience.

Post reply on HN