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

I started learning Nim a few years ago, and came back to it last year after seeing it had improved in a number of areas. I started working on a practical utility, a self-contained document uploader system that could be customized for certain departments at work. Eg, take a Word document, convert it to PDF, upload to a specific location on our company website. Not truly a hobby project, but no one asked me for it, just playing with an idea I came up with based on frequent help desk tickets I get. I guess one of my hobbies is inventing programs that someone might find useful, without having an actual target audience. 8]

Since then I have written a handful of graphics programs in Nim which are more in my hobby area. I wrote a nice version of the Reaction Diffusion simulation that generates fascinating tile patterns and naturalistic forms. I also plan to make a version of Pickover popcorn.

More recently I started working with the V programming language and have been playing with the Mandelbrot example they provide. I added a 256-color palette, higher iteration options for more detailed images, and am working on a system to create a catalog of favorite points and images. It will also save and load simple text files describing a particular point and zoom level that people could share in a chat or text message. This kind of thing has all been done before, but these are just exercises in fundamental aspects of the language to help me learn the basics and determine if it's worth pursuing it further.

I am playing with these languages particularly because they make smallish executable programs that can be easily distributed. I'm working up to developing simple GUI CRUDs with them to see how practical the process is. I'm still looking for something that will replace what I used to do with Delphi.

Sometimes the language ends up really growing. I did that with Elixir very early on, and now Elixir is a solid choice for new dev even for a company. It's still a little bit niche, but I think it's just at the beginning of major growth. Frameworks like Phoenix and Nerves already make it great, but with first-class machine learning libraries coming and LiveBook, it's headed toward being seriously attractive even for later adopters.