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

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101–110 of 273 posts

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

#101
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cute theory, but the reality is most employers want you to be relatively efficient from day dot. I work in a team with a codebase split 50/50 between C# and C++, and if you're not proficient in one of those then the chances of you getting hired, even if you're an incredible programmer, are slim.

Having a C# codebase and being unwilling to hire Java developers seems like unnecessarily constraining yourself.

Depends a lot on what type of software is b ing written. The people that keep beating the drums that Java = C# have not worked with the language extensively enough. So many things outside of basic languages constructs are different. Tooling is also a big hurdle to change too.

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

#102
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…

These salary numbers in the survey are so low it seems like a joke.

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

#104

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.

This feels good intuitively but is not born out by my experiences and observations. The notion that "high paying/good software engineer" are two aspects of the same outcome is wrong. To the OP, the answer is "pays beter with less demand and more risk". Example: we're struggling to find Elixir developers and thus paying a premium for good (not great) talent; we're also looking to switch to Node which will reduce our demand for Elixir devs.

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

#105

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.

This feels good intuitively but is not born out by my experiences and observations. The notion that "high paying/good software engineer" are two aspects of the same outcome is wrong. To the OP, the answer is "pays beter with less demand and more risk". Example: we're struggling to find Elixir developers and thus paying a premium for good (not great) talent; we're also looking to switch to Node which will reduce our d…

I'm currently looking for an elixir contract gig! Feel free to email at hydratedchia@gmail.com :)

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

#106
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 love clojure, and would love a clojure job, BUT my hesitation comes from the companies choosing clojure or any niche language. Choosing a niche language seems like a very risky move, to me. My fear is that that its a small company and someone senior and technical (CTO?) just wants to have fun in a new cool language because they are bored. Don't get me wrong, I also want to have fun in a new cool language because I'…

Ask them during the interview stage.

Sometimes a strange/obscure language is the correct choice for a very good (and fun/interesting!) reason.

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

#107
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the cross platform / native story for F# (for real) ? Can you build a relatively efficient binary that just runs and does not take an hour to open a gui window ?

Our work is incredibly i/o-bound, so we would probably not see much of a performance difference no matter what language we chose. Additionally, our presentation layer is served directly from an in-memory, columnstore database and is divorced from our back-end by a batch ETL process.

To give a high-level overview of what we are doing, we call a series of APIs which can provide current-state metadata about a SaaS platform. We poll those APIs on a schedule and diff the results over time, providing to our customers a view of this change over time. So our work is to schedule these API calls, wait for the results, persist the results to storage, and then identify the deltas. Once this is done, we load into our presentation layer for customers to interact with.

We run an independent process per customer and use OS permissions to isolate these from one another, and plan to containerize these processes for further isolation. Customers each get a local ZFS dataset and a separate blob storage container. Isolation is a big deal for us, as the permissions we require to call these APIs for our customers end up being a de-facto global admin (this is a limitation of the SaaS vendor, not us). The dataset-per-customer model allows us to lose a single (and backed up, so not really single) encryption keyfile to forget everything sensitive from that customer.

This last paragraph only emphasizes that the language is not the most significant consideration for our work. We could probably orchestrate the API calls as effectively in shell pipelines. The diffing process is a bit hairier, and my current focus.

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

#108

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.

This feels good intuitively but is not born out by my experiences and observations. The notion that "high paying/good software engineer" are two aspects of the same outcome is wrong. To the OP, the answer is "pays beter with less demand and more risk". Example: we're struggling to find Elixir developers and thus paying a premium for good (not great) talent; we're also looking to switch to Node which will reduce our d…

Seriously, pay the premium. You'll waste the delta endlessly searching through the chaff of node developers, and then pay another cost when your node architecture needs to be de-spaghettified or your node developer decides to create another layer of tech debt by switch to using next.js from redux, or starting to use aws lambdas, etc. Etc etc.

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

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the cross platform / native story for F# (for real) ? Can you build a relatively efficient binary that just runs and does not take an hour to open a gui window ?

I had severe performance problems with F# async, but this may be fixed in F# 6.0

I would be curious to hear more about this. My response to a sibling explains how we do not have huge performance considerations right now (and our i/o-bound nature). Due to the primary work of our product, we are utilizing async workflows extensively. We are on 6.0, and evaluating if we want to chase the 7 series release or just hop to the next LTS.

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

#110

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?

Litmus test I guess.

Parent is fairly trivial to contact if you can use Google.

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