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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?

#111

Post by sundarurfriend »

alin23 wrote: post #54

I 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…

Did you know Ruby before learning Crystal? I've been looking into it on and off, but it seems the documentation is mostly written as an "on top of Ruby docs" thing, as in it seems to assume you mostly already know the Ruby way of doing things and mentions only where things are different. That makes it harder to figure things out in the language, having to search the Crystal docs and then Ruby docs and figure out which one applies where. (I mean this for the very basic syntax and semantics of the language, nothing fancy yet.)

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

#112

Post by mbrodersen »

e-dant wrote: post #48

I often feel like my primary language, c++, is somewhere between niche and mainstream. It leaves ample opportunities to do something in a niche way. I am often disenchanted after reading many open-source, ostensibly high-quality c++ libraries — namely Apple’s WebKit and a few parts of Google’s Filament. That said, there are a few gems of c++ that I can’t describe as anything but archetypally niche. Nlohhman’s JSON li…

There are 5+ million C++ programmers out there. And the number is going up. So I think it is safe to say that C++ is not a niche language :)

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

#113

Post by mbrodersen »

siknad wrote: post #17

I enjoy writing code with Agda. I like writing APIs that can't be used incorrectly and dependent types are so much more powerful that anything I knew before. Also unicode/custom mixfix operators (if_then_else_) are fun to use. Other languages I've seen just can't offer these things. Probably it is not the best choice to create something you want to run as its ecosystem is not quite developed though, but I also like t…

I enjoy programming in Agda as well. However I can’t decide whether to focus on Agda, Idris, LEAN, Coq, F* or Isabell/HOL. There is a lot of overlap but none of those choices seems to have it all.

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

#114

Post by stanski »

mehphp wrote: post #65
throwamon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind expanding on why you regret it?

It's nothing specific about Elixir itself, it's just that I don't use it for literally anything else (nor do I see that changing). So, for me, it's just another tech stack to keep up with when I could have just stuck with the tech stacks I already know and work just fine. I still think Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView are great technologies, but I don't think they offer me anything professionally that the current stuff doesn'…

Your brain probably thanked you for the mental exercise so it wasn't all for nothing.

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

#115

Post by mbrodersen »

jmmv wrote: post #84

I guess it's not niche anymore (was it ever?) but I'm coding my hobby projects in Rust. I don't get to use the language at my $dayjob but I find it aligns with my personal opinions on how a native language should be, and it pushes me in interesting ways to learn better idioms to write safe code. Also, does it count if I'm writing a niche language as my side project? :-) Check out EndBASIC ( https://www.endbasic.dev/…

I consider a programming language to be mainstream if there are more than 1 million programmers using it professionally. By that measure Rust isn’t mainstream yet AFAIK.

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

#118

Post by mijoharas »

alisonatwork wrote: post #88
loxias wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guilty of spending hours of paid time laboring over pedantically correct variable and function names. Often, old dictionaries are involved, archaic words...

Are you the person who came up with the "delenda" tables at one of my old jobs?

Where else would you keep data relating to Carthage?[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est

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

#119

Post by wnolens »

As a c++/java guy, my side project is in typescript (as it was meant to be a web app).

I.. don't love it. I often am using the ! operater to say "yes, I'm sure there will be an object here" in an array and having to get too particular with type specification (i.e. for keys in a map). I'm not sure it adds all that much value to my project.

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

#120

Post by wazzaps »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #78
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 :-)

I was happy to find that with Go, I can target my low-end NAS, which runs a Marvell Armada CPU. The binaries run just fine. (If this is easy with other compiled languages, let me know. Maybe gcc?)

Pretty easy with gcc: https://toolchains.bootlin.com/
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