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?

#231

Post by spricket » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:15 AM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #201

spricket wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. This kind of thing comes up constantly in RDBMS. New requirement means we need to join thneeds and widgets data together. In a regular database, even NoSql, this isn't a hard problem. When the services have their own datastores, well now they need to talk to eachother

not necessarily if you design a decoupled event driven approach where every service can just subscribe to the data it needs.

We actually tried this as well. It never made it out of testing. We ended up with copies of data in many places, which was annoying. We duplicated a lot of work for consuming the same events across multiple services and making sure they updated the "projection" the same way.

However a much larger problem was overall bad tooling. Specifically the data storage requirements for an event stream eclipsed our wildest projections. We're talking many terabytes just on our local test nodes.

We tried to remedy this by "compressing" past events into snapshots but the tooling for this doesn't really exist. It was far too common for a few bad events to get into the stream and cause massive chaos. We couldn't find a reasonable solution to rewind and fix past events, and replays took far too long without reliable snapshots.

In the end I was convinced that the whole event driven approach was just a way of building your own "projection" databases on top of a "commit log" which was the event stream.

Keeping record of past events also wasn't nearly as useful as we originally believed. We couldn't think of a single worthwhile use for our past event data that we couldn't just duplicate with an "audit" table and some triggers for data we cared about in a traditional db.

Ironically we ended up tailing the commit log of a traditional db to build our projections. Around that time we all decided it was time to go back to normal RPC between services.

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

#232

Post by Elrac » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:18 AM UTC

campezzi wrote: post #135

Immutability. I didn't really understand the benefits of having immutable data structures until I tried building a service with no mutations whatsoever... and noticed I didn't get any weird, head-scratching bugs that took hours to reproduce and debug. That led me to go down the Functional Programming rabbit hole - thus changing my entire view on what code is/could be. [edit: spelling]

Here's a "me too:" I'm working on a small-ish Java application with a couple of former FORTRAN developers. Last Thursday we got a bug report from our integration testers saying that some data from earlier messages was showing up in later, unrelated messages.

Sure thing, the data buffers are objects being re-used with mutation rather than being built from scratch per new message. Immutable objects, or a kind of "FP light" would have made this particular problem impossible.

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

#233

Post by neokantian » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:18 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…

While acknowledging the problem mentioned, I still believe in microservices, but in my opinion, it needs to be done with simpler tools. For example, next time, I will use firejail instead of docker.

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

#234

Post by dvirsky » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:18 AM UTC

adrianratnapala wrote: post #193

dvirsky wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the decision to do that project in C, in part to be better at it (I did a bunch of small things with it, but nothing serious). Since I had to interact with Redis' C API, the choices were basically C or C++. I hated C++ much more than C having worked with a lot, so C it was. I can't say I didn't miss things like having shared_ptr and, you know, having destructors, but all in all it was a good experience. (side…

I don't miss, `shared_ptr`. It is a disaster for anything other sharing a thing between threads (in which case, it is a way of managing the disaster you already have). Now `unique_ptr` is worth missing. And destructors are good too -- you couldn't have unique_ptr without them. But in it's own way, C has both: its just you just have to remember to call the destructor yourself, every single time.

Doesn't have to be threads, different contexts.

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

#235

Post by scoutt » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:23 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.

"Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick." -- Bruce Lee

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

#236

Post by IanSanders » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:23 AM UTC

analyzethis wrote: post #221

Having worked with .Net for many years, I always had a bad feeling expanding my experience with a closed source, Windows-only platform (I liked the C# language and tooling, though). I kept looking for an open source, cross platform language with the same features and characteristics as .Net. .Net Standard and .Net Core being open source (MIT licenced), cross-platform, more performant than .Net Framework and Mono and…

I really enjoy C#, .Net and VS features, but man VS2017 has been broken for a while. Numerous 5 year old bugs either not fixed or coming back. (SQL Schema compare not authenticating, Intellisense not working, compilation errors not displaying in the errors window, winforms designer messing up form layout when opened on high DPI screens, slowness and freezing on medium-sized projects and decent hardware, the list can go on and on)

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

#237

Post by jMyles » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:24 AM UTC

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 had this experience as well, but then I began to realize that, as the codebase got bigger (let's say, for your metaphor, I was exercising more) that I really actually did want unit tests (that I needed more water).

As the codebase gets larger and more complex (and interesting!), I want unit tests to fail because of small changes. That's actually useful feedback, whereas the simple, brutal failure of an integration test is just not granular enough to quickly help me understand the details of the change.

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

#238

Post by diminoten » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:27 AM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #133

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 quit around 2.2, never looked back. Python was a breakthrough scripting language ... in the 90s.

Realistically, how could you know if it's still any good if you haven't used it since 2.2? It's basically a different language now.

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

#239

Post by randomsearch » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:28 AM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #169

baobrain wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>but white space just is not one of them. This position is hard to maintain after you've spent an hour trying to debug a nonsensical error just to realize you opened the python file in an editor that used a different tab/space setting than the file was created in. Significant whitespace is one of the biggest misfeatures in programming history.

Anecdotally, from several sources teaching in tech, it’s the significant white space that makes python much more approachable to non-nerds. For some reason matching nested braces isn’t palatable to them. I attribute Python’s wide adoption in the non-nerd world in part to this (the other part being the ecosystem).

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

#240

Post by Elrac » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:29 AM UTC

mesarvagya wrote: post #176

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this: functional programming. Getting rid of state in objects was a DREAM for me. I used to think: come on you better than though hipsters... this shit looks ridiculous, and it isn't intuitive... There's no way it's worth it to learn. It's just the new fad. Oh, how I was so so wrong.

Tell us what was your starting point and references used to learn FP

My own intro to FP happened via Ruby and Clojure.

I wrote a rinky-dink Web application while teaching myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It turned out most of the pages were constructed from a database query returning a batch of results which then needed filtering, sorting and various kinds of massaging. I ended up really enjoying doing this work by applying a series of higher order functions like for() and map() to the data set. This got me started on thinking functionally.

Years later, I decided I wanted to do more with Lisp while continuing to work with the Java ecosystem. Clojure is a Lisp that runs on the JVM and is rather solidly functional. It's possible but very awkward to do mutation. If you don't want to run with shackles, you need to embrace immutability and FP. I found myself fighting FP until eventually I saw the light and was able to productively embrace it.