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

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

#211

Post by lispm » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:12 AM UTC

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 saw the better GCs were implemented for machines with the 68851 MMU. Later the 68030 had the necessary MMU functionality built in. Both allowed for example Macintosh Common Lisp to have an ephemeral GC, IIRC.

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

#212

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:16 AM UTC

Trying it out, and a couple of life experiences to already have a gut feeling how things are going to turn out, specially helpful those that went bad.

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

#213

Post by jcoffland » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:17 AM UTC

0815test wrote: post #49

dvirsky wrote: post #10

I used to hate C and thought it was primitive, ugly, dangerous, tedious to write in and annoying to read. While writing a big project in it ( https://github.com/RedisLabsModules/RediSearch/ ) , I've discovered the zen of C I guess. Instead of primitive I started seeing it as minimalist; I've found beauty in it; and of course the great power that comes with the great responsibility of managing your own memory. And wor…

I also used to hate C and thought it was primitive, ugly, dangerous, tedious to write in and annoying to read. Later, I too, discovered the actual point of C, the beauty and minimalism of it. Then I became a better coder, and once again saw the nature of C as primitive, ugly, dangerous, tedious to write in and annoying to read. I suppose that's what enlightenment feels like.

Wait until you go back again. Then you'll really be enlightened.

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

#214

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:18 AM UTC

alexval wrote: post #71

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 first job I wrote c++ for a win32 desktop app. I hated unit testing. My workflow was write the code, compile it, trigger the scenario, step through the code, write some unit tests after I knew it worked. It was the expectation on my team to write UTs so I did it. Fast forward to a different team I learned from a co-worker how UTs can help you influence your design. If you find yourself doing a ton of frustrating w…

My trick question to TDD advocates is how to develop native apps following those principles, after all no GUI change is allowed without a test.

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

#215

Post by wmnwmn » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:28 AM UTC

Changed my mind on OO after seeing how difficult it is for ordinary humans to design objects that can withstand the spec changes that are inevitable in any real project. Bad procedural code is a mess but bad object code can be completely irreparable.

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

#216

Post by alexchamberlain » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:33 AM UTC

lofties wrote: post #195

sbov wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microservices doesn't necessarily mean you have a ton of services. A single microservice can encompass millions of lines of code. Honestly, its a bad name for the architecture.

Service Oriented Architecture is a much more fitting name. ;)

Microservices are just SOA done right; services should have a single responsibility, be replaceable, have a schematic etc.

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

#217

Post by lmilcin » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:37 AM UTC

I have decide to switch to Clojure recently. It all started after I use Swagger Editor to generate REST service clients in a dozen languages and noticed the Clojure one was at least couple of times smaller and much cleaner looking than in other languages. I already knew Lisp, revisiting why the notation in Clojure is so clean and why it is not so in other languages was the push I needed.

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

#218

Post by wmnwmn » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:37 AM UTC

arduinomancer wrote: post #60

Static Type Checking. I used to think Node.js was the greatest thing ever. I won't bother explaining the benefits but suffice it to say I much prefer writing a server in Java compared to node. I think it takes getting burned at least once for new developers to understand why a lot of seasoned developers like types. Over time I've realized that there's a simple principle that applies to a lot of stuff in software and…

Yes! How much time have I wasted chasing some stupid error that "just worked" in perl which C or Java would have blocked at the get go. Just say NO to languages that try to guess what you were probably trying to do.

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

#219

Post by simonh » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:38 AM UTC

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…

Having worked on Quartz, probably in the handful of biggest Python code bases on the planet, that's just not my experience at all. It scaled very well and was a fantastic environment to work in. It certainly wasn't ideal for every use case, but then what is?

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

#220

Post by simonh » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:43 AM UTC

I was working on a Perl script, which kept throwing an error and Perl was somehow convinced the bug was about 15 lines further up the script, in a piece of code nothing whatsoever to do with the bit that was failing.

I was dabbling with Python 2.4 at the time and also hit an error. The moment I saw a Python stack trace, I was sold. All my anxiety about white space melted away and I don't think I ever wrote another Perl script (from scratch anyway) again. I'll always be grateful to python for making things I found painful and confusing in Perl (which I used for over 10 years) trivially easy.

I do have my fair share of prejudices and probably misconceptions. For example I have a deep distrust of java apps from working with several monstrously unwieldy, poorly performing, hard to support monstrosities developed in the language. Yet to be fair I also worked on a Java GUI client app that was fast, flexible and had really great logs and diagnostics. Personal history and experience are hard to transcend.