Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#31

Post by AlchemistCamp » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #5

Non-existent to a close approximation (maybe more Elixir stuff out there than the others you listed but still very rare). Learn those languages if you’re interested and curious but if the goal is to get a job with a new to you language, stay as far away as possible from them. Not only are there very few jobs but also the niche languages will distract you from learning stuff that’s in demand.

It really amazes me how often I see this fallacy.

The total amount of supply doesn't matter much. What matters (both for the employer and the job-seeker) is the ratio of supply to demand.

E.g., let's say JavaScript has the most demand of any language and there are 2 zillion job openings. This sounds great for job seekers initially, but what if there are 5 zillion JS devs seeking jobs? In that case job hunting might be very difficult. Similarly if there are 100 remote positions open in Pony, but only 10 Pony devs available to fill them, job hunting might not be so difficult.

There are some liquidity advantages in absolute scale, but for the most part it's the ratio of supply to demand that matters and not the raw numbers.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#32

Post by pharmakom » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #15

Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving. Thinking of yourselves as someone who is a writer of a certain programming language is self constarining and missing the point.

I think this is true, but writing code in certain languages (e.g. Java 8) drives me a bit crazy. It’s like running a race with your arms tied to your sides.

I put certain languages in a general negatives bucket along with noisy offices, stack ranking, heavy process, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#33

Post by a6chris » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

dom96 wrote: post #22

a6chris wrote: post #14

I wondered similar, though for Elixir not for Crystal. For the UK jobs market: https://highestpayingjobs.co.uk/it/elixir https://highestpayingjobs.co.uk/it/nim Fair warning, it's my site - was an experiment in learning NextJS so fairly rough around the edges. I will add Crystal when back home.

where are you getting the jobs data from? I'm surprised there are this many Nim jobs tbh

yeah... tbh it's looking like a bodge on my part :(

It's scraped data from four UK jobs boards, de-duped where possible but as above it's rough.

Having just searched the jobs boards manually, I can see "nim" comes back with "National Intelligence Model (NIM)", so for sure that will be a false positive.

Sorry :(

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#34

Post by pharmakom » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #2

There are more jobs in non-niche languages. Have you checked out anything else. C#, Java, Python, PHP, Golang, Typescript are all better than js.

Better on what dimensions? Quite the sweeping claim. Is C# better than JS for writing a web front end? It’s possible but it’s hardly better.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#35

Post by pharmakom » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

greggyb wrote: post #18

phtrivier wrote: post #3

The market is obeying the law of supply and demand. Hardly anyone knows those languages, and there is no big player backing them, so you have to dig inside each community to know which shop is active. For elm, you can try noredink. For f# and closure there are a bunch of Fintech. For elixir, well, if you're willing to relocate for south west France, DM me ;)

Funny you mention F# and Clojure, as these were the only contenders for a product I am building with a partner. We went with F# and are quite happy thus far.

F# has the backing of Microsoft and the big ecosystems of .NET and JS (via Fable). This makes it the best supported niche language and a great pick.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#36

Post by thr0wawayf00 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #15

Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving. Thinking of yourselves as someone who is a writer of a certain programming language is self constarining and missing the point.

I used to think this way and wound up completely exhausted in my career. Coming from web dev, I used to volunteer to dive into a Objective C repo to fix some random bug in a mobile app and then a week later my boss would ask me to build a big feature in that app. I'd spend a few weeks getting up to speed on the language and build the feature, and then I would never use what I learned again. My boss would ask me to dive into another tool I don't really know and the cycle would repeat ad nauseum. In hindsight, I've wasted so much time digging into tools that I've never used again.

I definitely learned some good lessons and recognized some patterns along the way, but I think the "just pick it up and learn it" attitude contributes to poor code quality in a commercial context since jobs usually time-box things. I'm a fan of picking something up that I can get expert feedback from, which there again, requires expertise.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#37

Post by akudha » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:51 PM UTC

dom96 wrote: post #20

blocked_again wrote: post #15

Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving. Thinking of yourselves as someone who is a writer of a certain programming language is self constarining and missing the point.

Precisely. Any good company won't care what programming language you are specifically proficient in. They care about how proficient you are in learning new things. I have created a lot of Nim projects and implemented much of its stdlib. My full-time job isn't using Nim, but the experience I gained through my work in Nim has helped my career significantly.

Any good company

The keyword here is good. Even then, this isn’t largely true. It is quite hard to convince companies to hire for a skill that you already don’t have experience in. In most cases, there are gatekeepers - those lovely recruiters who don’t know the difference between a computer and a washing machine.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#38

Post by egberts1 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:53 PM UTC

joe8756438 wrote: post #10

What is it about js you dont like? is it really about the language? a lot of the complaints i hear about js have more to do with “the community”, “the team”, “the application”. here’s the thing: there is _so much_ built in js. i think theres a better chance you find what you want in a mainstream language (js or otherwise), but you first have to identify what your values are.

The biggest detractor of JavaScript isn't so much about its language’s:

- lack of strong typing (unlike Ada),

- lack of a standard framework (VueJS, NodeJS, Angular, React, Ember, Mithril, Aurelia, Backbone, Polymer)

- lack of consistent control of packaging (embedded or HTTP[S]),

- lack of consistent naming convention (wild west of competing function names, unlike libc library to name one language),

- lack of unit testing (JS? nah),

- lack of correctness for thread procedure theorem (unlike Nim, Ada),

- lack of memory access security (unlike Rust),

- lack of JMP/goto at lower intermediate representation (LIR) level (unlike many programming languages) thus making direct LLVM more difficult and the least portable.

- lack of robust error handling (unlike many)

JavaScript is a runaway language with not much forethoughts being put into server-side security that continues to must have

- a wider access to local filesystems,

- a large, shareable memory block capability set that allows for JIT switching between executable and writing, heap-spraying for kernel addresses, SPECTRE-like capabilitiies (that will continue to be fileless malwares’ favorite haunting ground for decades to come).

JS did however introduce a “stack-less” just-in-time compiler that is small enough to get embedded into so many things (my pet peeve is JS of LG smart-TV that is still borked to this day) that no one single anti-virus company can ever hope to cover all those bases.

But it’s common, and wide-spread, thus got its adoption rate going for it (much like BASIC variants did during multiple decades) but it sure ain’t going to be healthy.

Of course, just flapping off my mouth here toward the incoming tsunami of flotsam against my hardcore cybersecurity values.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#39

Post by shaftoe444 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:54 PM UTC

I program backend Java Spring CRUD stuff. I love learning (and building) niche languages in my own time but I would always be suspicious of using these in real production. Need a really compelling case not to use something boring that just works when your job is on the line.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#40

Post by auslegung » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

I’ve had 4 engineering jobs in 5.5 years. Two have been Elm/Haskell jobs. It took a couple of months of light searching to find my current Elm/Haskell job.

Setup alerts on job sites, join appropriate subreddits, Slack teams, Discord servers, language-specific job sites, etc. You will find a lot more jobs than you might expect.