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Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#21

Post by kstrauser »

firebaze wrote: post #11
Turing_Machine wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a site for programmers, not a world affairs site. "Discussing pet languages" is entirely within the scope of the site. There are about a zillion other places on the web to discuss current events. Maybe try one of them instead? (edit) From the FAQ: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute a…

Quoted post unavailable.

I'll be real: I only have so much emotional bandwidth to deal with the flood of news right now. I welcome having a place to talk about literally anything else for a few minutes, if only to relax and catch my breath before I go back to the world stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#22

Post by firebaze »

kstrauser wrote: post #21
firebaze wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I'll be real: I only have so much emotional bandwidth to deal with the flood of news right now. I welcome having a place to talk about literally anything else for a few minutes, if only to relax and catch my breath before I go back to the world stuff.

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#23

Post by smoe »

For my hobby projects or even more recreational programming I often choose some technologies that have some aspects I'm interested in learning I can't easily do during the day job. E.j. a different paradigm, digital signal processing, desktop vs web app, etc.

Because during work I tend to be very pragmatic, and choose pretty boring, but battle tested technology. For the projects I have been working so far, usually niche tech doesn't provide enough tangible benefits to justify the risk of choosing it, the generally smaller ecosystem, less tooling, fewer documentation and potentially longer developer onboarding. Doesn't mean only the most established things one can choose, but avoiding things that are too new and unknown or too far off of what I'm comfortable working with.

And once a tech stack is chosen you are likely not going to change it significantly for years to come. So it can get a little stale and I can get an urge to try new things. But my warm fuzzy feelings or curiosity for some new tech doesn't justify increasing complexity by adding no stuff to a production product/service.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#24

Post by [deleted] »

firebaze wrote: post #22
kstrauser wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be real: I only have so much emotional bandwidth to deal with the flood of news right now. I welcome having a place to talk about literally anything else for a few minutes, if only to relax and catch my breath before I go back to the world stuff.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#25

Post by capableweb »

binarynate wrote: post #19

Re: niche languages—Hacker News is written in a dialect of Lisp called Arc: - https://github.com/wting/hackernews - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

If you do want to get into it, checkout first the arc forums (the UI might be familiar to you: http://arclanguage.org/forum) and then after that check out Anarki which is a community-maintained fork of Arc, seems more up-to-date and has some QoL upgrades, https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

Coincidentally, seems my post have been the top #1 post on the Arc forums since I first made it, ~17 days ago. That forum could do with a bit more of traffic :)

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#26

Post by capableweb »

mateuszf wrote: post #7

Not sure if Clojure is considered niche, but anyway I do it because it's the most fun programming language for me.

Same here. I don't use Clojure because it's niche, I use it because it's the programming language I'm the most efficient in (even though years-wise, I have the least Clojure experience compared to other languages), build the most bug-free software with that has acceptable performance and because as you said, it finally makes writing software fun again.

I think Clojure's niche-ness is a hidden strength as well, as the community is so strong and knowledgeable that you get very good help when you need it, from all angles. It's been a pleasure to use Clojure and interact with the community, even though the language is effectively built by one person instead of a committee (which, I think is another one of Clojure's strength [but not so hidden]).

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#28

Post by samus »

Programming in niche languages can be fun and be a relief from drudgery at the day job. Mainstream languages are not bad of course. Many of them are great. But the requirement to be reliable and production-ready greatly restricts the diversion of tools one can choose to play with.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#30

Post by smoyer »

I'm programming a couple of side-projects in Go. I know it doesn't sound niche but I'm creating native applications for iOS, Android (and desktops) using Fyne as well as compiling Go to WASM to create a SPA. I don't know if these technologies are quite ready for prime-time but I can tell you that I had a lot of success with Java and GWT a decade ago.
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