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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 152 posts

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

#81

Post by dashundchen »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #60

I am an amateur developer, mostly using python. I had from time to time to code a front-end in JS and it was a huge pain in the bottom (again, I am a real amateur). This until I discovered Vue.js which changed my life. This and lodash made me actually like JS and front-end programming. So this is an example what a framework did not help to improve code but actually made me choose in something else than the language I…

Would you be able to recommend any Vue tutorials/resources/projects you found useful while learning?

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

#82

Post by levthedev »

dashundchen wrote: post #81
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #60

I am an amateur developer, mostly using python. I had from time to time to code a front-end in JS and it was a huge pain in the bottom (again, I am a real amateur). This until I discovered Vue.js which changed my life. This and lodash made me actually like JS and front-end programming. So this is an example what a framework did not help to improve code but actually made me choose in something else than the language I…

Would you be able to recommend any Vue tutorials/resources/projects you found useful while learning?

All you need are the (excellent) docs! You can read the whole thing in like an hour or so.

Onve you've read the docs, just start building.

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

#83

Post by reacweb »

Rjevski wrote: post #33

Well I'll provide a somewhat different story where the lack of change has caused quite a loss in productivity. At my current employer's a big part of the codebase is in Perl and the boss is a fan of the language, so we keep using it. The problem is, Perl is pretty much dead, and most of the packages out there on CPAN feel like they've been built 10 years ago. Not to mention, the language itself lacks what I would cal…

The problem of old languages like perl and Ada is not lack of libraries, but lack of good developers that know how to write idiomatic code. Performing caching at the application level is so trivial in Perl that I do not see how a caching at ORM level could give any benefit.

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

#84

Post by taude »

lucaspiller wrote: post #65

I worked on a project a few years ago that was a mixture of Erlang and Ruby. Most of us were new to Erlang, coming from a Ruby background. We wanted to use Erlang to its strengths for high availability and to make the platform distributed, and Ruby (via BERT/Ernie) to its strengths for business logic. Unfortunately Ernie didn't work as well as it advertised, had many edge cases, and in the end it was a big bottleneck…

Do you have any experience with Elixir? I'm hearing that Ruby devs like it for similar syntax that runs on the Erlang runtime....(But I don't really know much about it, but I am curious.)

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

#85

Post by gravypod »

atemerev wrote: post #80
gravypod wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like what?

Julia, C++ with libraries, Python with Cython or Numba, etc.

You could also get much faster if most of your work is matrix multiplication if you make use of libraries like ViennaCL and a modern C++ compiler.

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

#86

Post by marcofiset »

christophilus wrote: post #56
taurath wrote: post #10

Developer ergonomics is underrated. Having an easy to understand system that has no magic, and in 90% of the work has no dependency chains that you have to hold in your head can really help people avoid bugs by being able to focus on the intent and execution rather than the framework quirks.

I agree. Do you have a platform/framework that does this for you?

Functional programming languages are better at it, simply because there are constraints in place preventing you from having mutable state everywhere.

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

#87

Post by scardine »

10 year ago the RIA (rich Internet applications) platforms were the trendy thing of the day. Microsoft had Silverlight, Adobe had Flex and so on. I made a bet on OpenLazslo, an open source contender. I made a wireframe and the snappy interface impressed a client that gave me a big project.

1 month working with OpenLazslo and PHP it became clear I would not be able to finish in time. I started searching for alternatives and was unable to finish the Rails tutorial - but after 30 minutes I had a basic CRUD app done using Django.

I ditched the RIA thing, rewrote everything in Python/Django, was able to finish that project in time and this stack is paying the rent since then.

It was really worth.

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

#88

Post by d--b »

amelius wrote: post #66
d--b wrote: 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.

Actually that particular C++ was very well written. It had been written by a single very disciplined person over 3 years, following a lot of very strict conventions.

So, no it was not really messy in there. But it was big and memory leaks are hard to find.

The main problem is that there was some low level funky stuff happening that we didn't have a good grip on. The guy who wrote it thought it would be great to optimize the code in some ways, but clearly overdid it.

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

#89

Post by cbcoutinho »

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #18

A few years ago, I rewrote an `R` script into Fortran, for better than order-of-magnitude speed increase. The script optimized the placement of samplers in a building, in order to maximize the probability of detecting airborne pollutants, or to minimize the expected time required to detect. The rewrite cut the runtime down from 2-3 days to sub-hour. Some of the speedup was intrinsic to the interpreted/compiled divide…

Fortran is an excellent language. I enjoy the fact that people think it's too old and/or difficult to learn, because neither of those are true. It's a great fit especially when the problem domain is heavily numerical in nature.

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

#90

Post by amelius »

d--b wrote: post #88
amelius wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually that particular C++ was very well written. It had been written by a single very disciplined person over 3 years, following a lot of very strict conventions. So, no it was not really messy in there. But it was big and memory leaks are hard to find. The main problem is that there was some low level funky stuff happening that we didn't have a good grip on. The guy who wrote it thought it would be great to optim…

> The guy who wrote it thought it would be great to optimize the code in some ways, but clearly overdid it.

But then I suppose a rewrite would undo those optimizations and solve the problems.

Post reply on HN