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

Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 401 posts

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#111

Post by Bahamut »

DanHulton wrote: post #43

Testing. Unit testing to me seemed akin to drinking 8 glasses of water every day. A lot of people talk about how important it is for your health, but it really tends to get in the way, and it doesn't seem to really be necessary. Too frequently, code would change and mocks would need to change with it, removing a good chunk of the benefit of having the code under test. Then I started writing integration testing while…

My experience has been very much the opposite - integration tests are often very brittle, and finding the root cause is often almost a fools errand since stack traces are often no good for figuring out what went wrong, at least for web UI.

While yes, unit tests do have a maintenance burden, they are often reproducible, less flaky, give you targeted debug information, and run extremely fast.

There are heavy costs to integration and e2e testing that often gets dismissed by developers who often have not experienced the fast feedback loop a good fat unit suite gives you.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#112

Post by bradleyjg »

discreteevent wrote: post #50
DanHulton wrote: post #43

Testing. Unit testing to me seemed akin to drinking 8 glasses of water every day. A lot of people talk about how important it is for your health, but it really tends to get in the way, and it doesn't seem to really be necessary. Too frequently, code would change and mocks would need to change with it, removing a good chunk of the benefit of having the code under test. Then I started writing integration testing while…

You need to write a book and then get on the conference circuit with this message. You would be rowing against the tide but there is always hope!

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/write-tests

Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#113

Post by int_19h »

vivekseth wrote: post #97
int_19h wrote: post #92

The more code I write in dynamically typed languages, the more I believe that static typing is a must. Generally speaking, I noticed that I'm shifting more and more away from "stop annoying me and let me do what I want, I know better!" part of the PL/API design spectrum, and towards "better safe than sorry". Static typing, runtime checks, data schemas, design by contract, fail fast etc. Yes, it's overhead, but it's p…

One downside to static typing is the overhead required when writing/running programs. For example, let's say you have a class `Dog` that you want to rename to be more generic so you now call it `Animal`. In Python you can test out snippets of code with `Animal` without necessarily having to worry about other pieces of code still referring to `Dog`. You would just need to make sure that the code you want to run happen…

In a statically typed language with decent tooling, you'd just tell it to rename all references of Dog to Animal everywhere, and it will do that reliably. That's one other advantage of static typing - fearless name refactoring, which makes in that much easier to clearly express intent of the code even as it changes.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#114

Post by chalst »

fierro wrote: post #83
salex89 wrote: post #81

Using it as my main language: Python (2.7). How the hell did this thing become so popular? I've used it for all sorts of stuff earlier, less complex than the other. Scripts, devops, ETL... But then I got into a company that is using it for some quite serious stuff, a large codebase. Holly smokes this thing does not scale (in terms of development efficiency and quality) well. I swear at least 70% of our bugs is becaus…

I think dynamically types languages are on their way out. There aren't many good arguments remaining in favor of them.

I have a very high opinion of Julia's dynamic type system. Some static type systems are not very expressive, e.g., Elm, which encourages hacky workarounds. Julia's type system encourages specificity, which exposes problems early.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#115

Post by gumby »

General hardware. I used to do all my work on dedicated hardware with support for Lisp (CADRs, 36xxs, D-machines, and before that PDP-10s) because those general purpose machines couldn't implement important features like generational garbage collection without specific hardware assist.

Then one day in 84/85 I saw a generational GC using the MMU on a 68K and the light dawned.

Thus while I'm pretty interested in ML chipsets, I figure the necessary portion of functionality will ultimately end up subsumed in the generic chips and most if not all those ML hardware startups will go bust.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#116

Post by arbie »

salex89 wrote: post #81

Using it as my main language: Python (2.7). How the hell did this thing become so popular? I've used it for all sorts of stuff earlier, less complex than the other. Scripts, devops, ETL... But then I got into a company that is using it for some quite serious stuff, a large codebase. Holly smokes this thing does not scale (in terms of development efficiency and quality) well. I swear at least 70% of our bugs is becaus…

Couldn't agree enough. I have seen Perl (with automated PerlTidy on check-in) scale to levels I would never even attempt with Python.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#117

Post by mattkrause »

beetwenty wrote: post #103
mattkrause wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s hard about adding a library? You include the header, tell the linker about it, and update the library/include patches if it’s not already on it. Job done.

That's relying on distribution package management to save you. Here is what happens when you add libraries in any other context: The library has a dependency on another library, and when you go look at the dependency, it tells you that it needs to use a specific build system. So you have to build the library and its dependency, and then you might be able to link it. But then, turns out, the dependency also has depend…

I guess... though I’ve always found C++ libraries to be light years easier to manage than python.

To be honest, the per-language package management seems wasteful and chaotic. I must have a dozen (mutually compatible) of numpy scattered around. And why is pip responsible for building FORTRAN anyway?

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#118

Post by justinchan »

vivekseth wrote: post #97
int_19h wrote: post #92

The more code I write in dynamically typed languages, the more I believe that static typing is a must. Generally speaking, I noticed that I'm shifting more and more away from "stop annoying me and let me do what I want, I know better!" part of the PL/API design spectrum, and towards "better safe than sorry". Static typing, runtime checks, data schemas, design by contract, fail fast etc. Yes, it's overhead, but it's p…

One downside to static typing is the overhead required when writing/running programs. For example, let's say you have a class `Dog` that you want to rename to be more generic so you now call it `Animal`. In Python you can test out snippets of code with `Animal` without necessarily having to worry about other pieces of code still referring to `Dog`. You would just need to make sure that the code you want to run happen…

JavaScript and TypeScript. TypeScript is a superset of JS so you can write vanilla JS in TypeScript code.

Also, having worked extensively with Java, changing types is not as nearly as cumbersome as you describe. In an IDE, you can replace all usages of a type in a project or subdirectory with 3 clicks. Large, statically typed codebases are almost always navigated in an IDE.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#119

Post by koyote »

salex89 wrote: post #81

Using it as my main language: Python (2.7). How the hell did this thing become so popular? I've used it for all sorts of stuff earlier, less complex than the other. Scripts, devops, ETL... But then I got into a company that is using it for some quite serious stuff, a large codebase. Holly smokes this thing does not scale (in terms of development efficiency and quality) well. I swear at least 70% of our bugs is becaus…

Hah, I had the same thought when I first started using Python for some personal stuff many years ago. I enjoyed using it and it was quick to get some code out but I thought to myself "surely if you build anything large with this language it will be a massive pain to maintain".

Fortunately(?), I never worked for a company that used it for a large codebase so I never found out if my assumption was correct or not.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#120

Post by chalst »

yuchi wrote: post #87
ken wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s the problem. I wouldn’t use Python (especially 2.x), but I’d have no hesitation with using Common Lisp. It has lots of great features for programming in-the-large that Python simply lacks.

Genuinely asking: could you provide some specific example? What does CL has that Pythos doesn’t? (Disclaimer: i never worked on neither)

If I had to point to something, I would single out CL's powerful support for multiple dispatch. I'd hesitate to recommend CL to undisciplined programmers, because it is too easy to write code that works but you don't understand a week later.
Post reply on HN