Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#21

Post by endgame » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 12:54 AM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #9

These aren't new to the world, but they are new to me this year, and a lot of them sort of hit some sort of "usable by those without active interest in the continuation of said tech". 1. Mongodb -- This year it really hit its stride and have been able to use it without worry for storing test results and experimental data. This is much nicer than the textfile logs -> sql -> processing datapath I was using previously.…

0mq is fantastic. I just wish it had some way to put a socket in a half-open state: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3692854/how-should-a-zero...

ETA: `zmq_poll()` is nice, but some way to make it play nicely with other event loops (like libev's) would be even better.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#22

Post by endgame » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 12:56 AM UTC

Not new, but I've really enjoyed working with Lua (http://lua.org). The C API is really nice and I like how you can start from a known-safe, minimal interpreter and add new procedures carefully.

libev (http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html) was also a lot of fun to use for multiplexing sockets, plus it has a whole pile of other useful watchers that can use its event loop.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#23

Post by swannodette » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 12:58 AM UTC

Clojure - it's the gift that keeps on giving. It keeps getting faster and the feature set for writing robust object-oriented software (minus the broken stuff) just keeps getting better. In fact, it's changed how I assess the feature set of other OO languages old and new.

miniKanren - logic programming w/o the Warren Abstract Machine. Has opened my eyes to a ton of incredible literature on this under appreciated programming paradigm.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#24

Post by pederb72 » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 1:03 AM UTC

GLM (http://glm.g-truc.net/) - A C++ mathematics library based on GLSL. It's not a new library, but I didn't know about until 2010. It's really convenient to use (almost) the same syntax in C++ as you do in GLSL.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#25

Post by clemesha » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 1:05 AM UTC

Redis. Makes working with a database fun, just like jQuery made JavaScript fun.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#26

Post by sophacles » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 1:05 AM UTC

endgame wrote: post #21

sophacles wrote: post #9

These aren't new to the world, but they are new to me this year, and a lot of them sort of hit some sort of "usable by those without active interest in the continuation of said tech". 1. Mongodb -- This year it really hit its stride and have been able to use it without worry for storing test results and experimental data. This is much nicer than the textfile logs -> sql -> processing datapath I was using previously.…

0mq is fantastic. I just wish it had some way to put a socket in a half-open state: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3692854/how-should-a-zero... ETA: `zmq_poll()` is nice, but some way to make it play nicely with other event loops (like libev's) would be even better.

I know Zed Shaw played with such things for making mongrel2. I've never needed it, so that is the best pointer I can provide, but the IRC channel for 0mq may be of help too -- friendly crowd over there.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#27

Post by sibsibsib » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 1:05 AM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #9

These aren't new to the world, but they are new to me this year, and a lot of them sort of hit some sort of "usable by those without active interest in the continuation of said tech". 1. Mongodb -- This year it really hit its stride and have been able to use it without worry for storing test results and experimental data. This is much nicer than the textfile logs -> sql -> processing datapath I was using previously.…

My list is pretty much identical to this, aside from mongrel2 (looked at it briefly though).

I'm loving flask + mongo in combination; they make prototyping webapps almost effortless.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#28

Post by j_baker » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 1:07 AM UTC

I'm actually beginning to enjoy writing things in Haskell. It's the first statically typed language that I enjoy using (although I do still miss dynamic typing).

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#29

Post by lionheart » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 1:08 AM UTC

A bit late to the party but I finally learned and started using Ruby on Rails this year and I love it.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#30

Post by binaryfinery » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 1:08 AM UTC

Solid State Discs in everything.

Ok, perhaps not what you were asking, but they made a big difference for me. I have two, raid0 in my desktop, and a sandforce in my MBP. What a difference. Compiling, linking, copying, everything not just faster, but almost instantaneous. Yum.