Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#21

Post by moksly » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

Is it actually always a good idea to keep yourself up-to-date with the hottest tech stacks?

We picked up the first angular, because of the “keep up mantra”. That turned out to be a complete waste of resources when the second version released. I’m not saying that it can’t be valuable, but these days we build 70% of our stuff with python, Django for web with a minimal amount of JS because it turned out our clients actually didn’t want SPAs. The rest we build in C#. When I look at the job market in my region of Denmark, almost every job is for JAVA, C# or PHP. No-one is hiring for Rust, graphql, go or any of the other hipster languages / frameworks. People are hiring for modern Angular (along with C#), but no one is hiring for the original version. So it’s frankly entirely possible to skip entire “hot tech stacks” without it being a disadvantage.

If you ask me, you shouldn’t pick up things until you need them. Unless it’s for fun, but who learns a new web-dev related framework for fun?

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#22

Post by truebosko » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:15 PM UTC

Learning what's new and shiny is great, but try to spend time this year building something, seeing it live in the wild, fixing and debugging it, nurturing it. Build on your critical thinking.

Perhaps do that with a new technology :)

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#23

Post by flanbiscuit » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:18 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #11

Kotlin is my new favorite language. You should give it a try. Fighting syntax noise, clutter, boilerplate and redundant repetitive work is a big chunk of what define a modern language, and at this, Kotlin is probably the best. It will make you more productive AND happier. BTW using new languages that have relatively poor ecosystem (go, rust, swift, elixir) is a far riskier choice than people believe. Having a poor li…

Just learned Android using Kotlin and really enjoyed it. Hope Kotlin picks up outside of the Android universe as well

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#24

Post by tw1010 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:18 PM UTC

Learning to become more creative so I don't have to chase new languages or frameworks for intellectual stimulation.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#25

Post by sidcool » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

I am focussing on Event Driven and Reactive programming models using Kotlin. Any wise words for me?

Edit: Also GKE and Firebase.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#26

Post by ttraub » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

"It is always good to keep yourself up to date with the hottest tech stacks."

It’s good to be aware of new stuff, but it’s also a good practice to have a firm command of some well established technologies that have strong support and resources behind them.

It’s been my experience that I get more work done when I can easily find sample code and multiple explanations for API calls. Experimentation and R&D to figure out some bleeding edge stuff may be fun but it’s a lot slower and less stable than using tried and true methods.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#27

Post by sriharis » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

Haskell, and Clojure

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#28

Post by Random_ernest » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

I know that this might be not a very popular opinion but I am learning Clojure in 2020. I work a lot with data and in my particular job the most important things are rapid prototyping, productivity and level of abstraction. After getting into the basics I find it to be the most intuitive and well designed language I came across. Last time I felt that I could do extremely complex things in hardly any time was when I learned Python.

About the Tensorflow/Keras thing you mention: Imho Keras is dead with Tensorflow 2.0 and the entire Clusterfuck that came along with it made me try out Pytorch and I haven't looked back at it. I was able to convert my model from TF to Pytorch in half a day without any prior knowledge of Pytorch and it works like a charm.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#29

Post by imedadel » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

I like learning things that are both trending and in demand.

So, for me, the next thing is trying to build something with React Native and Go as they seem to be very trendy and in increasing demand.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#30

Post by lostcolony » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

dsiegel2275 wrote: post #8

Elixir / Phoenix. Specifically: Phoenix LiveView. I've spent the last five years building SPAs using mainly React and see LiveView evolving as a compelling alternative.

Yeah; I would recommend Elixir over Go, honestly. Speaking from having used both Go and Erlang in production, Go is easy to pick up from a more Algol-based language background, but has a lot of implicit complexities that Elixir/Erlang forces you to address explicitly rather than ignore (and potentially be bitten by).

I.e., what happens in case of failure (blocking send/receives on channels; what happens if the sender/receiver fails?), distribution, memory management (Go requiring you to be very cognizant as to whether it's heap or stack based; Erlang is basically all stack based), the dangers of mutability and the required patterns needed to be consistently immutable, etc.