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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)?

#161

Post by yomkippur »

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 ;)

> relocate for south west France

that itself is a huge turn off for many developers who don't speak French. You will face discrimination even if you speak fairly fluent level. Not to mention the insane income/corporate tax brackets.

Unless you operate directly with the French market, there is little to not reason to move there to do a startup or start a career there.

Many young French citizens have left it and they are not coming back. Brain drain is very real there.

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

#162

Post by afarrell »

unnouinceput wrote: post #125
sys_64738 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My boss would ask me to dive into another tool I don't really know and the cycle would repeat ad nauseum. There is power in saying No.

There is power in saying "Yes, for this price" too. Explain the problem and the damage to your mental health if you do that, hence the price.

Your first sentence is correct. Your second sentence would be better revised to "Explain the problem and the fact that the client will be signing on for a long timeline and high level of schedule-risk. Then work at a pace which does not damage your mental health."

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

#163

Post by microtonal »

czbond wrote: post #95
oneplane wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For Rust and ML, are the tooling libraries available to any quantity in Rust that are present in Python? I was under the impression Python has such an advance runaway any other languages will be hard to catchup (eg: Go has been trying, R , etc)

There are obviously fewer ML libraries than for Python (sometimes worse quality, sometimes better), but if you are willing to invest time, it's definitely doable. E.g. I made a multi-task transformer-based syntax annotator in Rust using the tch Torch binding:

https://github.com/tensordot/syntaxdot

In my current job I do NLP with Python, Cython, and some C++. I don't think implementing ML stuff in Rust was much more work. Once you are beyond the stage of implementing a small research project or toy model, most systems are going to contain a lot of custom, specialized code. You will have to do that work in any language.

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

#164

Post by wiseowise »

bowsamic wrote: post #122
mattyb678 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that the salaries of developers outside of the US, and western countries, pull down the averages

Almost any other western country other than the US and Switzerland will massively pull down the average. Especially in the US salaries are extremely inflated. I know academics in physics who are effectively chained to the US because they are so used to the huge amount of money. In Germany for example you cannot expect to make more than 70k euro max, probably more like 50-55k euro a year even as a senior software engi…

> Especially in the US salaries are extremely inflated.

Funny way to spell "fairly compensated".

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

#165

Post by EddySchauHai »

weatherlite wrote: post #154
EddySchauHai wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found a lot more career happiness with focusing on a long-term domain (networking), long-term expertise (testing), and a stable tech stack (python, c, etc). Got pretty close to burnout chasing the latest libraries in the latest languages a few years ago but now I'm very happy making sure the product is cutting edge but the tech stack is stable.

This is what I'm trying to do as well now (move from full stack web dev to something more in the lines of what you're describing). Any tips you can remember on how to make the move?

I spent a bit of time practicing these tech stacks in my own time and fitting them into prior jobs where I could, but honestly it’s worth just getting out there and applying.

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

#166

Post by neilv »

This question is dear to my heart, having been a pre-popularity adopter of a few language ecosystems that did and didn't become popular (including C++, Java, and Scheme/Racket).

You can search job listings on LinkedIn, Angel.co, etc.

But if it's only a small number of search hits, also consider the possibility that even some of those might not be genuine opportunities, so you have to look at each one. Examples of why:

* A hiring manager/lead is an enthusiast of the fringe tech., and the kinds of people it attracts, but not actually using it. Or not an enthusiast, but has heard it's a way to get the attention of some of the best developers. (I have done this, and been clear about it.)

* Startup (maybe more likely to choose fringe tech because the tech cofounder happens to know/like it) that is trying to look like they're doing well enough to be in a position to hire, when they're not yet.

* Recruiters trying to keep the funnel full, so candidates ready as soon as openings available.

* Mandated postings, when the org already knows it wants to hire or promote a particular person, so that person's resume gets turned into an overly-specific job post.

* (I've not confirmed this one in the wild, but it's similar to other growth hacking, and you could see how it might appeal in a market heavy with resume-driven development.) Promoting some tool or platform by faking job posts for it.

Note that this doesn't mean the fringe platform is without merit, and sometimes the merit is self-defeating. The norm in one fringe ecosystem I was involved with, on the rare occasion an established company used it, was for one super-productive person to quietly do a team's worth of work, and... the org never really needed to hire more. (And if that established company got refocused on faster growth, then an MBA is probably going to think they need to switch to a more popular platform, so that they can hire a large number of people "who can hit the ground running", fast.)

Maybe also relevant: consider the risks of investing career in a fringe ecosystem, which was the topic of my first Ask HN post (from an engineering lead ethical perspective): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655604

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

#167

Post by Stevvo »

jasfi wrote: post #12

It's not good for Nim, unfortunately. The language is great, but the community isn't that big. If you're looking for a web framework with an ORM for Nim, check out Nexus: https://github.com/jfilby/nexus

I've heard good things from guys working with Nim at Nimbus/Status; precisely because the community isn't that big they have great communication with the language maintainers and can even influence future language features/development.

But that is predicated on you finding a job first!

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

#168

Post by ParetoOptimal »

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.

> 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.

Some languages contort and constrain your thinking in bad or silly ways.

> Thinking of yourselves as someone who is a writer of a certain programming language is self constarining and missing the point.

I find this view tends to lead to only using popular languages anyway because you don't seek out any specific language, so the effect of this belief itself is self-constraining.

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

#169

Post by wtetzner »

patrickthebold wrote: post #99
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 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'…

You may be right about many companies’ decisions, but I will say that Clojure is a very practical language. I think you’d just need to ask them why they chose it, and decide for yourself if you think it was a wise decision.

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

#170

Post by StrayM »

nickjj wrote: post #146
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.

This is very true but there's still is a very big difference between knowing languages like JS, Python, Ruby or Go but then jumping into a place that uses Elixir or a niche language that's different than a lot of other popular languages. For example I took a position to do mostly infrastructure work. Most of their services are written in PHP which I haven't used since the early 2000s. I wouldn't classify myself as a…

> For Elixir? Well you have to use a 4 year old+ third party dependency

Can we please stop using “4 year old+” as a generally applicable rule to reject libraries?

I know “4 year old” seems like forever ago in Ruby or Node (I can’t talk about Python or PHP), but other ecosystems such as Go and Elixir take compatibility seriously and “4 year old” libraries most often just mean they are done: they work for their intended purposes and there are no breaking changes in the language or tooling forcing frivolous updates.

I have used 8 year old Erlang libraries in the past with no issues whatsoever.

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