Because I can't get a job writing Haskell without having a PhD and some 5+ years of experience in the language even though I've been in the SWE field for 10+ years, so I have to get the fix for my addiction from somewhere else.
Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
51–60 of 172 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#52Nine years ago I started my hobby project in Go (round about when v1.0 came out). I thought the language looked interesting, kind of like C without the hard parts and with the added benefits of concurrency and I was excited to learn it despite no-one having heard of it. 9 years later Go is not such a niche language. Rclone is doing ok too :-)
The ending game me a good laugh, Rclone is a fantastic tool.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#53Nine years ago I started my hobby project in Go (round about when v1.0 came out). I thought the language looked interesting, kind of like C without the hard parts and with the added benefits of concurrency and I was excited to learn it despite no-one having heard of it. 9 years later Go is not such a niche language. Rclone is doing ok too :-)
Nice! My server uses Restic with Rclone as its backend. Thank you!
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#54I did the licensing server for Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) in Crystal.
It’s been a joy to work with it! The standard library for working with strings, JSON, YAML and XML is top notch. Type safe and extremely fast, very important characteristics for a licensing server that is queried hundreds of times a second.
I used the super simple Kemal HTTP server library which I like for APIs where most of the logic happens on the backend.
I have 8 years of experience as a Python developer and 5 as a Swift developer but after all that time I still like the terseness and type inference of Crystal.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#55I use the F# SAFE stack template to practice writing JavaScript-free front ends and back ends, all in F#.
My excuse is to create a rules based expert system for tabletop games to help game masters not have to remember as many rules during battles and such, but it is definitely slow going since I only hobby program when I'm procrastinating revising whatever writing project I'm on.
(Or when I'm procrastinating by typing on HN)
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#56Because I want to find out whether Oberon+ (see http://oberon-lang.ch) is fit for real-world projects, or how I would have to extend it to be fit. I think that one day complexity of present programming languages will blow up in our faces, and we will therefore have to focus on simpler (but still safe and very efficient) languages.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#57If you like racket try out bigloo https://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/ and gerbil scheme at cons.io
Erlang has been my favorite for over a decade. Feels like its own operating system: spawn many processes, kill/pause them, send/receive messages async no problem, add service introspection. It feels kubernetes/microservices architecture way before its time, except without the cgroups constraints or language options :o). Downside is slow text parsing, number crunching, no efficient vectors
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#58I make text adventure games in a language called Hugo. It was released in the late 90s and has not changed much. I have enjoyed being able to code with some stability for fun as I've learned other languages for work. Hugo feels like home, and it's comforting to know a language really well.
How does Hugo compare to Inform?
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#59I think generally, when you start from scratch we put a higher weight on language than mature ecosystems of libraries, framework and tooling. Newer languages have learnt from history and are often nicer to use (at least subjectively, this is usually the selling point). I remember seeing the SO surveys of work vs non-work and Java was the most extreme example (basically all work no play).
Some of the new languages survive and mature, like Go and Rust. Eventually, those become the new Java or C++. Some will fade away.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#60There is a real tension between the leverage of a niche language and the FOMO of it not adding anything to your resume.
I love Haxe for its power and the number of targets it can deploy to, but it doesn't do anything for my career unless I want to work as a game dev (which I don't).
So, I'm leaning more into Python with mpypy (and mypyc for iOS) and trying to focus more on the problem domain rather than the programming language.