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Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

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Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#71
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll say it again. If the natural language of your problem domain is linear algebra and/or matrices (tensors), Fortran is the perfect tool.

Why is it better than C(++) for this?

Because scientists already know fortran and they're too lazy to learn something else even if there would be significantly improved results.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#72
I'm a solopreneur and switching to AngularJs 1.x really made a drastic difference to my work. Before we used all sorts of hacks and jquery plugins to do the same and it was really hard to maintain our code.

After switching to AngularJs the development time became 20% and it became super easy to maintain. Not to mention programming became super fun again. I've tried react and angular 2 and vue but that just didn't click for me. We're are a small team of two so we don't follow the industry best practices, just whatever works for us and gets the site launched as quickly as possible, so i guess my comment is highly opinionated.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#73
post #34

I was involved in the conversion of over 500k lines of Visual Basic 6 to C# motivated by Microsoft's EOL'ing of VB6. Most of it was a desktop application although part of it was a server component. We used an automated code conversion tool which did a surprisingly good job of handling the mindless parts. Some pieces such as the database interaction code had to be hand-ported. I was pretty surprised that we were able…

Interesting. Is the conversion tool internally developed? How did you handle semantics like -1 is true?

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#74
post #49

At work, we greatly benefited from a transition from Spring with Java to Play with Scala. This mostly due to the inherent complexity in Spring and the fact that Spring developers are also Spring experts. When the main developer behind the application left, we struggled to add new features or even fix bugs because the team lacked the Spring expertise. The rest of the business mostly dealt with Scala, so it was almost…

Oh man I would love to work with Scala

I would not recommend Scala anymore unless you're a small team with smart devs eager to learn it.

My project is not so small, and the average developer is not interested in spending the time to really learn the language and functional style.

So in the end, we have code that not everyone reads and writes well, an ecosystem that is years behind Java, and tons of incompatibilities between Scala versions as it's still not stable. It's a mess, and most just end up writing Scala imperatively a la Java from 2005.

Java 8 is actually pretty good and has a lot of the power of Java without the complex features few use correctly. I'm hoping Kotlin continues improving, too.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it better than C(++) for this?

Because scientists already know fortran and they're too lazy to learn something else even if there would be significantly improved results.

No, because computer scientists are too lazy to create modern domain specific languages that are powerful enough for practitioners to put to effective use. :-)

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#76
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting that. Where would a PHP programmer go to get a foothold in Scala web development?

There's a Coursera specialization on Scala[1], however it seems to focus more on data analysis than web development. [1] https://www.coursera.org/specializations/scala

I didnt think the Scala Coursera was very good for general developers - a bit too academic and focusing on functional / recursive patterns which aren't a good way to get a feel for the language in everyday web usage (vs Php, Java, etc).

I'd recommend the book 'Scala for the Impatient', tutorials and projects from Twitter, and Maven or SBT template projects.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#77
post #66
post #57

Moving a large C++ codebase to C# has helped us a lot. The legacy code had memory leaks that caused random crashes. It was also long to build, and wouldn't build in 64 bit. The C# version seemlessly let us run the code in either 32 or 64 bit. C# is also a much more readable language, and has a lot of great tools for refactoring and profiling. And C#'s performance is almost as good as C++ in many areas, so all in all…

I'm guessing that moving from C++ to C++ (i.e., a rewrite in the same language) would also have helped a lot.

There is a lot of safety features in C# that are not present in C++, so a rewrite in C++ would probably have helped. However the same class of errors that was a problem in the old codebase are still present.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#78

> I'm curious about real world examples where a change has lead to a significant positive outcome in performance, code quality/maintainability, etc. Another example: same language, new framework: In a Python web app, we needed to have websockets. But at that time Django had no real websocket support. But there is future proof framework that does: aiohttp! Also one might argue that you can use old django with websocke…

Is the Django-websockets story ok now?

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#79
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll say it again. If the natural language of your problem domain is linear algebra and/or matrices (tensors), Fortran is the perfect tool.

Why is it better than C(++) for this?

Modern Fortran is high-level enough to pass for MATLAB, has full vectorized operations support, but in many cases faster than C. What's not to like?

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it better than C(++) for this?

Because scientists already know fortran and they're too lazy to learn something else even if there would be significantly improved results.

Like what?
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