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

Post by chalst » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 3:43 AM UTC

7373737373 wrote: post #2

The lack of secure composability in almost all existing languages. You cannot import untrusted code and run it in a sandbox. Unless you are completely functional, you cannot restrict the effects of your own code either. The solution to this seems to be the object capability (key) security paradigm, where you combine authority and designation (say, the right to open a specific file, a path combined with an access righ…

Post by koyote » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 3:48 AM UTC

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…

Post by chalst » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 3:52 AM UTC

Daishiman wrote: post #64

JesseAldridge wrote: post #62

The best code is code you don't have to write, because someone else has already written it. I've decided that number of libraries is the most important feature of a language, which is of course strongly correlated with popularity. Javascript is king in this regard.

Close, but much more important than the number of libraries is the number of high quality libraries for all purposes you could ever need. In this regard, JavaScript is far from good. There's huge amounts of package instability, a lot of mucking with node_modules, a lot of useless breakage. I have found that Python and Ruby are much better in this regard. The libraries serve way more purposes, they're stable and work…

Post by thoman23 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 4:01 AM UTC

spricket wrote: post #125

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…

Post by AlotOfReading » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

baobrain wrote: post #121

8bitsrule wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inde…