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Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

thorstenball.com

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Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#281

Post by scarface74 »

vips7L wrote: post #107
scarface74 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you’re doing yet another software as a service CRUD app or another bespoke app that will never be seen outside of a company - like most developers - knowing: Given a binary tree, return the level order traversal of its nodes' values. (ie, from left to right, level by level). Isn’t that useful or how to invert a binary tree. I would much rather you show some competence in the language we are using. Knowing le…

Everything you're saying is true, but for some reason companies still think they need to test you on hackerrank/leetcode like problems. I would much prefer to do some code in the frameworks I claim to know.

Not companies I interview for. The last time I had any type of algorithm type interview was 1999 when I was applying for a job as a low level cross platform C bit twiddler. Since then all of my interviews have been a combination of soft skill, tell us about your experience, white board architectural discussions type of interviews. Of course they asked me technical questions about the language and stack they were using.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#283

Post by skrebbel »

pjmlp wrote: post #270
skrebbel wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is IKVM not a thing anymore these days?

Not really, and last time I checked there were no plans to ever migrate it to core.

Woa, bummer! That stuff was amazing. It opened up the entire Java ecosystem to .net apps, in an impressively seamless way.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#284

Post by jniedrauer »

gilbetron wrote: post #30

At this point I have almost 20 languages that I've used for at least two years, which is what I consider an decent bar for "knowing" a language. The problem I now have is that I don't know if I'll ever be able to master any language anymore. Mmmmaybe C, since I've used that fairly consistently, albeit on-and-off for 25 years. But whenever I get to an "if" or "for" or function declaration, I often have to look at an e…

The best technique I've found for staying sane when working in a large number of languages is to configure your editor to highlight errors based on language. If you use perens where you're not supposed to, your editor should tell you right away. No need to go find an example.

This becomes less useful when it's "which library do I use" or "what is the idiomatic way to do this in X language".

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#285

Post by pjmlp »

scarface74 wrote: post #279
pjmlp wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there is more to "architecting a system than just “code”.", which is exactly my whole point. Performance is a feature, it doesn't get retrofitted. There is only one shot, specially in fixed budget projects. While a perfect design is an utopia, and there will be surely some unforeseen problems, not designing at all is even worse. To calculate the initial set of VMs, database size, average users, network latency,…

Performance is a feature, it doesn't get retrofitted. There is only one shot, specially in fixed budget projects. So you’re saying it’s not possible to add indexes, increase the size of your database, increase the number of read replicas, increase the number of servers in your web farm, reconfigure your database to be multi-master, copy your static assets to a region closer to the customer or add a CDN after an imple…

Life is beautiful when one does time-and-material projects.

Every half backed release can always be improved later, at customer expenses.

Likewise, not everyone is doing button clicks on AWS to scale their compute center, and a proper knowledge of distributed systems is required in order to do correct scaling.

Mongo DB problems are well known across the interwebs.

I am not going to change your mind, nor you will change mine, so lets leave it here.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#286

Post by pjmlp »

skrebbel wrote: post #283
pjmlp wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, and last time I checked there were no plans to ever migrate it to core.

Woa, bummer! That stuff was amazing. It opened up the entire Java ecosystem to .net apps, in an impressively seamless way.

Here, the project end announcement.

http://weblog.ikvm.net/

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#287

Post by bbatha »

dxbydt wrote: post #105

Learn more ? I'm actively trying to unlearn a bunch of languages at this point! ofcourse, when I was a wageslave in the bay area, its nice to know python, java, javascript, scala etc. - got me jobs every 2-3 years & put food on table. now that i'm in academia, its completely upside down. literally everybody is way more productive than me in just about any task. The other day I as supposed to program a poisson clock,…

It’s funny you say spaghetti and list two tools that were invented to eat noodles (chopsticks and forks). Even after it’s invention, it took centuries to improve the fork with a third and fourth tine. It seems hasty in an industry so young to say pick one tool and get great at it. We wouldn’t be in the same place as an industry if we didn’t accelerate web development with oo, dynamic languages, various innovative frameworks etc. a poison transform doesn’t change but the http spec and its requirements do (try writing the asynchronous code that http2 requires on the languages and frameworks of a decade.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#288

Post by Yuval_Halevi »

dxbydt wrote: post #105

Learn more ? I'm actively trying to unlearn a bunch of languages at this point! ofcourse, when I was a wageslave in the bay area, its nice to know python, java, javascript, scala etc. - got me jobs every 2-3 years & put food on table. now that i'm in academia, its completely upside down. literally everybody is way more productive than me in just about any task. The other day I as supposed to program a poisson clock,…

that's the difference from being skilled in many eras, than focused on one single goal and be damn good at it.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#289

Post by leadingthenet »

skrebbel wrote: post #265
dhash wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust’s borrow checker was inspired by clean [1], which applied the same semantics to monads to allow in-place updates [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_(programming_language)

Clean is not a mainstream language.

He didn't claim it would be, though. He just said, for every feature implemented in a top20 lang, you can already find it implemented somewhere else, 10-20 years ago.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#290

Post by scarface74 »

pjmlp wrote: post #285
scarface74 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance is a feature, it doesn't get retrofitted. There is only one shot, specially in fixed budget projects. So you’re saying it’s not possible to add indexes, increase the size of your database, increase the number of read replicas, increase the number of servers in your web farm, reconfigure your database to be multi-master, copy your static assets to a region closer to the customer or add a CDN after an imple…

Life is beautiful when one does time-and-material projects. Every half backed release can always be improved later, at customer expenses. Likewise, not everyone is doing button clicks on AWS to scale their compute center, and a proper knowledge of distributed systems is required in order to do correct scaling. Mongo DB problems are well known across the interwebs. I am not going to change your mind, nor you will chan…

Every half backed release can always be improved later, at customer expenses.

So now, it’s an “improvement at customer expense” to add servers and increase the size of servers? How long do you think it takes to do everything I listed to add scale? When I say it’s logging into a website and clicking a few buttons, I am not exaggerating. Of course, in the modern era you modify a cloud formation template but that’s an implementation detail.

Likewise, not everyone is doing button clicks on AWS to scale their compute center, and a proper knowledge of distributed systems is required in order to do correct scaling.

Whether you are button clicking on AWS or using a data center, adding resources is the same. Increasing the size of your primary and secondary databases is the same on prem. It takes more effort and the turn around time is higher to provision resources, but it’s not magic. Everything I listed except for the CDN is something I’ve worked for a team that did on prem. I’m sure a lot of people can pipe in and say they have done similar things on prem or at s colo with Kubernetes and Docker. But that’s outside of my area of expertise.

Mongo DB problems are well known across the interwebs.

I am asking about your personal experience not what you “read on the internet”.

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