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

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81–90 of 273 posts

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

#81

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.

[deleted]

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

#82

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 t…

JavaScript was originally intended for form validation and preloading images. Everything else was an accident.

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

#83

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.

> 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.

I'm not sure becoming a high paying/good software engineer are necessarily relevant to the stated goals of the OP's question. There can be inherent reward in working with a set of less popular, well crafted tools. Yes you might grow faster as a professional by working with a group of industry best JS programmers, but working with a small team building in Elixir and moving fast without ever hitting a NaN can be a pretty rewarding experience.

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

#84

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.

Let me demonstrate how subjective this is with my next statement.

They're all bad as none of them have algebraic data types.

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

#85
I'll echo much of what others have said, once you become a decent software engineer, the language shouldn't be a deal-breaker. Deal-breaker

It does make onboarding much easier though, for example, if I join a shop that uses NodeJS I'm not going to have to ask for help getting set up. If I join a C++ shop...

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

#86
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is not. Multiple sites report < 10 jobs in the uk for any of the two, while c#, java, node, python are in the thousands each.

<10 jobs is still significant.

How's that? 10 jobs is basically a rounding error for any other category. There are orders of magnitude more Java jobs.

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

#87

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 ;)

I often see people saying “DM me” or “PM me” on Hacker News but they have no contact information in their profile and HN doesn’t offer a direct messaging feature.

Is this just because people forget which platform they’re on? Is it because they don’t remember what’s in their profile? Or is there some other way to DM people that I don’t know about?

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

#88
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

<10 jobs is still significant.

How's that? 10 jobs is basically a rounding error for any other category. There are orders of magnitude more Java jobs.

But there are jobs, and people work in them. I, for instance, use Elixir in my day job, and so do 100+ other engineers at my company alone. I’ve also been approached by recruiters on LinkedIn for other Elixir jobs. So yes, there is a significant amount of jobs in Elixir

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

#89
post #66

Does language really matter? Any experienced programmers should be able to pick up any language in a matter of days if he knows the underlying concepts. Similarly, the language is not what makes a job interesting. I mean, what don't you like about JS? Is it the syntax or is it the environment? The code base? The framework? Maybe web dev is not for you? Maybe you are asked to do thing you personally disagree with (ex:…

Yes, but the problem is non-technical recruiters. They want to be looking for a "Java programmer" or an "Elixir programmer". If you tell them that a good programmer is a good programmer in any language, and that they need to look at what the person has actually achieved, they won't be interested. Keyword-matching on Linkedin is a lot easier.

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

#90

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…

Sounds like a dream job! No joke.
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