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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?

#91

Post by urthor »

nickmain wrote: post #60

There 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 programmi…

Practicing in a highly focused single paradigm language (Haskell/F#, Smalltalk et al) translates well on the resume when you shift to a multi paradigm industrial language (Python/Javascript/C#)

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

#92

Post by bbertelsen »

nickcw wrote: post #33

Nine 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 :-)

rclone is wonderful. Really excellent software. Thank you for that!

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

#93

Post by ExtremisAndy »

For me, I just really love how using a different language helps me to think differently about problem-solving in general. For example, I learned enough Prolog to make a very simple expert system (that no one on Earth would have possibly found useful... but I enjoyed the project), and when I made a much more useful expert system-like chatbot (for answering medical questions) in Python, my earlier experience with Prolog absolutely informed how I approached the problem in Python.

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

#95

Post by JimmyRuska »

Decabytes wrote: post #81
JimmyRuska wrote: post #57

If 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 optio…

I’ve had my eye on gerbil since it was announced. I’m very interested in it’s goals

Gerbil looks a lot like what one very prolific and opinionated hacker calls home. There's an incredible amount of work just by 1 author https://github.com/vyzo/gerbil/graphs/contributors

Whereas racket looks steered mainly by the academic group working on it, with some attention shifting to the new Rhombus project https://github.com/racket/rhombus-prototype

These days everything looks like it's using json/yaml and trying to add logic/constraints to it to make it declarative, either through logic controllers (eg kubernetes operators) or by embedding it in the syntax, eg terraform HCL, declarative UI frameworks.

Scheme DSLs are a good alternative and could be used to generate code or glue between the components you use.

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

#97

Post by turndown »

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)

It's funny - I actually found Hacker News just because I had tried out another website, named Hubski, that was written in Arc.

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

#98

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Visual Basic and PHP are the first languages I learned for desktop and web development respectively. While I can and do code in other languages, I've found I can get to a working state faster with them because of that long-standing familiarity.

So for hobby projects where nobody else can tell me what to do, I still use one of the two, regardless of how dated they tend to be perceived.

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