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

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

#51

Post by rco8786 »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #36
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 di…

> I've wasted so much time digging into tools that I've never used again.

Don’t think of it this way. Learning new tools is almost never a waste of time, you just don’t know when you’ll need the lessons learned next. But you will.

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

#52

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

BryanBeshore wrote: post #46
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

Having done the merry go round of different languages, it also feels great gaining expertise in an individual language and to utilize new (release) capabilities of that the language.

Absolutely. Conversely, it's frustrating to deal with a build and release system that's subpar compared to what you're used to working with, but I recognize some folks probably feel that way about my preferred tools. That's just where I've chosen to invest my time I guess.

I was shocked at how hellish compiling and releasing a large iOS app was compared to deploying a web service, not to mention setting up the development environment and installing dependencies.

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

#53

Post by spyremeown »

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 don't think that strategy works best. Most of people I know that get paid very good amounts are specialists in a given framework or language, like knowing the ins and outs of PHP for example.

I rather say "be a generalist on the long term and a specialist on the short term".

This is all my opinion and comes from my personal experience, though. Take it with a grain of salt.

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

#54

Post by compumike »

I’m only guessing, but the best path for Crystal might be to find a Ruby job (which are relatively plentiful!) and, if/when a situation arises where you need an especially high-performance microservice/component, you might be able to suggest bringing in Crystal to the team.

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

#55

Post by rtlfe »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #36
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 di…

That's pretty excessive. I've switched languages whenever I get a new job, every 2-5 years. I think this is more what OP had in mind.

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

#57

Post by casion »

ptttr wrote: post #43

I do definitely recommend Clojure - I've switched to it in 2019 coming from Rails and JS and never looked back. Clojure's job market is great, there's no shortage of offers, even for newcomers and it has been the top paying lang in stackoverflow surveys for years https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-... However, the most important part is that Clojure is a very powerful piece of technology that…

I can second this. I've worked in the industry in academia, enterprise and industrial. Switching to Clojure not only has me at my highest salary ever, but I'm consistently working with some of the best people I've met in my entire career. The community is incredible, the job market is open and the people who seem to be attracted to the ecosystem are fantastic engineers and generally great people.

30 years as a professional dev, and I've never been happier.

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

#58

Post by ghaff »

oneplane wrote: post #27
CoastalCoder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall point. I think the outlier might be Rust. Somehow it's managing to gain traction despite the headwinds you mention.

Oh, that's right, I knew I forgot one! It's even gaining traction in ML for some reason, we've been using it in an image processing pipeline because performance and safety-wise it simply had the best results. Edit: I even forgot to list Python. Maybe I should just look up some language popularity list and use that instead.

This is a pretty widely-quoted list. https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2022/03/28/language-rankings-1-2...

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

#59

Post by ydnaclementine »

PG has a really old (2004) blog about how python programmers are smarter than other programmers. Basically it comes down to the python programmers being ahead of the curve by learning a less popular language (at the time), and they must be using python because they believe helps build better software or whatever. Meaning they're less likely to simply be 9-5 programmers just doing it for the money, but will have opinions on language X or design pattern Y.

I would imagine the python programmers had programmed in java prior, and were able to see the downsides to java versus python, so they had the full experience of why the old tool didn't work and how the new one solves some of those pain points.

PG blog because he says it much, much better: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

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

#60

Post by ghaff »

frogulis wrote: post #17
CoastalCoder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall point. I think the outlier might be Rust. Somehow it's managing to gain traction despite the headwinds you mention.

I guess it fills a niche that companies really need filled

A lot of it's legacy but there's a lot of C/C++ out there. So something that can be used as a system-level language and that also (for the most part) has memory safety is going to be of interest to quite a few people even if they have to learn a new language.
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