Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 273 posts

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

#201

Post by banashark »

phtrivier wrote: post #44
greggyb wrote: 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 ?

I've been developing F# things on linux for close to a decade now (though my last official position doing so was ~7 years ago, it's just my default hobby language that I know best).

I have zero trouble developing on linux.

Building GUI or non-GUI software works fine. I use Rider and work on web systems, a handful of scrapers that feed some data I collect, as well as various small GUI systems.

I think F# might have _the highest number of viable ways_ to build a GUI application if that's what you're looking for.

You can go the fable (F# -> JS transpiler) route and use any of the js tools (electron, nodegui, etc). The popular one's (react, preact, svelte, etc) have type definitions that folks have already written.

F# works with most of the dotnet gui libraries just fine, though I don't know for sure the story about winui, but from people I know working on production systems using it, they recommend to avoid it. So you've still got WPF, etc.

For the newer cross-plat stuff, there is Avalonia, Uno Platform, Xamarin (with the natives) or the newer version MAUI.

---

The thing here is that there aren't really limitations to almost all of the things I've listed above. Transpilation targets work fine, as do the dotnet targets. Almost every one of these also has "Elmish" frameworks (Functional Reactive Programming state management) suited for the purpose:

* React -> Elmish + Feliz * Avalonia -> Avalonia.FuncUI * MAUI -> Fabulous etc

---

I've never felt constrained building GUIs in F#, other than some of the dumpster fire that was Xamarin.Forms and the Xamarin build tools (native targets never gave me any problems that I can remember).

I took a partial Fabulous 1.0 (Xamarin Forms) application that I had only worked a couple days on, and out of anger with Xamarin build tools lifted and shifted to a react-native application. Almost my entire elmish (view-logic layer) was preserved, and I just had to change the view elements out from Xamarin.Forms elements to React Native elements.

---

I don't work with F# too much in an official capacity these days, but it's a decent tool to have as a default.

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

#202

Post by rtlfe »

wizofaus wrote: post #192
rtlfe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed at probably 15+ companies over the last decade, and none of them had language requirements or tests. Honestly I see those things as red flags. If you can find somebody with good problem solving skills and proficiency in any language, they'll be able to pick up your language no problem.

I'm guessing that's not typical for most devs and most job openings. Recruiters in particular seem to assume they need to find devs experienced with particular stacks, and for companies who need to quickly re-fill roles after losing staff, a good dev with experience in the stack/ecosystem you've been working with is always going to get up to speed faster than one without that experience. I'd also say convincing hirin…

> most devs and most job openings

I'm not sure. I'd guess very few companies that hire more than 20 devs a year would have any language requirements. But I don't know what % of jobs are at companies of that size.

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

#203

Post by 62951413 »

pharmakom wrote: post #32
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.

The latest LTS version is JDK17 (e.g. records and switch expressions) and has been for long enough to be production ready. I reckon half of the people on this forum didn't even work in software when JDK8 was released.

Yes, Kotlin/Scala would stop driving you crazy. No, I don't see nearly enough Bay Area companies deprecating Java in their favor for new services :( They are probably betting on the next LTS to come soon enough (with pattern matching and hopefully Loom).

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

#204

Post by sterlind »

There's a lot of niche languages for niche specialties. Like Ada/Spark for aviation/defense/safety-critical systems, Coq and Isabelle for formal verification, FORTRAN and Julia for scientific computing, Mathematica for pure/applied math, Prolog for logic programming/planning/expert systems, R for stats, MiniZinc and TLA+ for modeling, Racket for compiler work, etc.

Ideas in these fields come through clearer/more cleanly in these languages. Learning the language is easy, the field is harder, but ideas of the field are reflected in the language.

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

#205

Post by wizofaus »

rtlfe wrote: post #202
wizofaus wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that's not typical for most devs and most job openings. Recruiters in particular seem to assume they need to find devs experienced with particular stacks, and for companies who need to quickly re-fill roles after losing staff, a good dev with experience in the stack/ecosystem you've been working with is always going to get up to speed faster than one without that experience. I'd also say convincing hirin…

> most devs and most job openings I'm not sure. I'd guess very few companies that hire more than 20 devs a year would have any language requirements. But I don't know what % of jobs are at companies of that size.

In my own city I'm not sure there are any such companies. But I was involved in helping out with a hiring round for Thales recently that were looking for 15 devs. They had very strong language requirements.

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

#206

Post by EddySchauHai »

sterlind wrote: post #204

There's a lot of niche languages for niche specialties. Like Ada/Spark for aviation/defense/safety-critical systems, Coq and Isabelle for formal verification, FORTRAN and Julia for scientific computing, Mathematica for pure/applied math, Prolog for logic programming/planning/expert systems, R for stats, MiniZinc and TLA+ for modeling, Racket for compiler work, etc. Ideas in these fields come through clearer/more clea…

I'd love to work with Ada some time. The language I find most interesting.

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

#207

Post by bitwize »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #199
ld_bic wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write COBOL I work 24hrs/week I make $15k/week I also can’t center a div on a web page or do much of anything other then what I do. Specialization IMO is key to highest job satisfaction and highest salary in this industry

Interesting- this is contrary to what many people responded when I AskHN'd recently: > Ask HN: How do I learn real-world COBOL? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31906829 How does one learn to do what you do (write COBOL in the real world to make a great living)?

Those people wrote that because they're making $15k/week and don't want to tank their market value.

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

#208

Post by tikhonj »

My experience has been that roles in less popular languages are rare but they also substantially help match up candidates and interesting opportunities. I've been interested in functional programming and Haskell since college and it's specifically helped me get roles I would not have gotten otherwise:

• I got an internship at Jane Street thanks to my Haskell and OCaml experience—I doubt I would have been considered at a similar company like Two Sigma

• I got onto a cool operations research/AI team at Target thanks to my Haskell experience—I wouldn't have considered them and they wouldn't have considered me without it

• at Target, I saw first-hand how using a non-standard language massively helped with recruiting highly skilled engineers

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

#209

Post by 2c2c2c »

yomkippur wrote: post #160
2c2c2c wrote: post #115

Elixir is at a different level than the other languages you've listed. I learned and built stuff for fun using Elixir around 6 years ago while in college, and dropped it on my resume in the pile of technologies I know around then. In the past 2 years, as my yoe hit 5 years, I now get the hoard of specialized Elixir recruiters who filter by 'elixir' and '5 yoe'. These amount to 75%+ of the people who contact me about…

Curious what your TC was and # of employees. Were they all startups or were there any established companies hiring Elixir/Phoenix ? The technology is very interesting but I find that it has the same issues as clojure: limited talent pool, questionable cost/productivity gains. LiveWire is very interesting but its now emulated to a large degree in other more popular languages enough that I could put off learning Phoeni…

I've never taken any of the offers and have never used Elixir in a professional context. Most of these are small startups and can range from 100-200k + equity, and the only decision behind using elixir was probably the novelty, not beam or the success stories behind discord and whatsapp suggesting its utility for at scale throughput

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

#210

Post by baby »

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 have a different approach, I have a blacklist of languages I refuse to work with (for example, Java)
Post reply on HN