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

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

#121

Post by baobrain »

8bitsrule wrote: post #93
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…

When I looked at Python, it looked interesting. Then I found out that -white space is important-. I thought about what it might be like to worry about that, and decided -not for me-. When CPUs ran at 1 MHz, I wasn't so sure about FORTH with its RPN. But it ran a lot faster than interpreted BASIC, and was a lot faster to write than assembler. Once the world discovers the source of all its woes and goes back to wide-op…

> Then I found out that -white space is important-.

I hear this a lot and I think it's a misunderstood statement. Python does not care if you do not have a space in assignments or arithmetic or between commas or parentheses.

What Python does care about is the indentation of the source code. The indentation is what guides the structure - which is already what we are doing with most languages that don't care about indentation!

What I really mean to say is there are plenty of valid complaints with Python, but white space just is not one of them. If you are writing good code in a language with C-syntax you are doing just as much indentation.

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

#122

Post by chalst »

gumby wrote: post #115

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 chi…

I wouldn't bet on the ML hardware startups either, but don't you think that what we regard as general hardware is always going to be too heavyweight to be suitable for massive parallelisation?

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

#123

Post by yougotrioted »

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…

I completely agree. If you have limited time to write tests, then I've found that integration tests provide the most value by far. If you're happy with your suite of integration tests, then it's also great to have a set of unit tests.

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

#124

Post by mdgrech23 »

chasingthewind wrote: post #73
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…

I will probably be the lone voice here defending mock testing but probably not for the reasons you'd expect. Does mock testing end up being brittle? Yes. Do you have to refactor the tests immediately after making small changes? Yes. Is there a cost to this? Yes. Mock based testing however is the only thing I've ever encountered that forces me to think very, very clearly about what my code is doing. It makes me inspec…

What's stopping you from thinking clearly about the code while/after you write it? As I'm writing this sentence I'm thinking clearly about it and I'll probably reread it after I hit save. There's no reason you can't do the same w/ code.

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

#125

Post by spricket »

Microservices. They seemed really cool until I worked on a few large projects using them. Disaster so epic I watched most of engineering Management walk the plank. TLDR: The tooling available is not good enough.

The biggest cause lies in inter-service communication. You push transaction boundaries outside the database between services. At the same time, you lose whatever promise your language offers that compilation will "usually" fail if interdependent endpoints get changed.

Another big issue is the service explosion itself. Keeping 30 backend applications up to date and playing nice with each other is a full time job. CI pipelines for all of them, failover, backups.

The last was lack of promised benefits. Velocity was great until we got big enough that all the services needed to talk to each other. Then everything ground to a halt. Most of our work was eventually just keeping everything speaking the same language. It's also extremely hard to design something that works when "anything" can fail. When you have just a few services, it's easy to reason about and handle failures of one of them. When you have a monolith, it's really unlikely that some database calls will fail and others succeed. Unlikely enough that you can ignore it in practice. When you have 30+ services it becomes very likely that you will have calls randomly fail. The state explosion from dealing with this is real and deadly

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

#126

Post by chalst »

samdk wrote: post #106
mattnewport wrote: post #5

Our introductory programming course at university used ML and I didn't like it or get it. I already knew some C++, BASIC and Java and was mostly interested in real time graphics programming and the kind of examples used in the ML course were not interesting to me and I didn't see how it would help me tackle the kinds of programming tasks I was interested in. I found recursion pretty unintuitive and didn't find the wa…

I think it's unfortunate the first/often only exposure people get to FP is a build-up-from-the-foundations approach that emphasizes recursion so much, I think it leaves most students with a poor understanding of why functional paradigms and practices are practical and useful. I've written primarily in a functional language (OCaml) for a long time now, and it's very rare I write a recursive function. Definitely less t…

Agreed. Point-free code is a better hallmark of good FP than recursion.

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

#127

Post by spricket »

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 agree, because type inference in some (Typescript) is good enough that there's almost no overhead. Back when it took twice as many lines with types it made sense. But the overhead in typescript is maybe 10%, worth it anymore? I don't think so

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

#128

Post by chalst »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #36

This is probably an unpopular opinion - Haskell, I used to think it must be cool (and useful) since people go on about it so much. I spent quite a bit of time learning it, and imho the usefulness to practicing programmers is marginal at best. It does present some useful techniques that are making their way into languages (e.g. swift optionals), but in general it didn't live up to the hype for me. I feel a lot of the…

Haskell has some problems that mean it is not suited to a lot of tasks, esp. the difficulty of predicting space/time performance and integration with OS-level facilities. But it is a serious contender in many cases where correctness is essential: Haskell's type system is expressive and the language makes valuable promises about how code behaves.

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

#129

Post by RandomGuyDTB »

Thought Python was great. Then I found out Ifs rely on indentations in order to be parsed correctly. As someone who generally uses whitespace-independent languages (Lisp and Processing mostly cover my bases) I really despise the fact that I have to tab-indent my code and that I can't add leading spaces just because.

Normally I use three spaces instead, and when naming variables I add leading whitespace to the line to prettify it up and make the "="s align. It irks me but I can get past it. Still wish it could've been done better.

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

#130

Post by ken »

chalst wrote: post #120
yuchi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Multiple dispatch is a big one.

Also, macros, which are what (the view layer of) CLOS is built with. In most other object oriented languages, the language isn’t powerful enough to implement its own object system.

Having the full power of function calls in all cases (named or anonymous) is incredibly helpful. I know the Python party line is “just use def” but adding a line here and a line there adds up fast. A syntax for function objects is also great.

I’ll also call out the ability to use dynamic or lexical scoping on a per-variable basis. That has saved me hundreds of lines of work, and made an O(1) change actually an O(1) patch.

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