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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)?

#221

Post by nickjj »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #220
nickjj wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you try asking on the forums? https://hexdocs.pm/net_address/IP.Subnet.html

> Did you try asking on the forums?

Nope, I only looked up the Elixir solution for the sake of my reply here. I haven't worked with Elixir in like 9 months.

Based on the docs it says IP.Subnet.is_in only supports IPv4. The Python and Ruby solutions transparently support both. That kind of sums up my Elixir experience (ie. something might partially exist but to really use it will require a lot of extra work). It's also impressive at how infrequently the Elixir docs come up in Google searches. It's strange considering how many words are there and it's the official source of information for the language.

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

#222

Post by throwawaymaths »

nickjj wrote: post #221
throwawaymaths wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try asking on the forums? https://hexdocs.pm/net_address/IP.Subnet.html

> Did you try asking on the forums? Nope, I only looked up the Elixir solution for the sake of my reply here. I haven't worked with Elixir in like 9 months. Based on the docs it says IP.Subnet.is_in only supports IPv4. The Python and Ruby solutions transparently support both. That kind of sums up my Elixir experience (ie. something might partially exist but to really use it will require a lot of extra work). It's als…

IP.subnet.is_in is a guard, so there are different constraints. You could still use the `in` keyword.

Honestly my experience with python has been "the solution you're looking for probably exists, but using it will require a lot of effort, and heaven help you if you need to debug someone else's code", but I have mostly dealt with Django which is a nightmare of hidden code and tensorflow. Maybe it's just I've worked with shitty python devs and on the other project Google's notoriously bad engineering practices in some of their public facing OS projects (angular, tf)

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

#223

Post by adventured »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #215
bowsamic wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't spell it wrong, you are suggesting a different idea. Own up to it rather than using a lame linguistic deflection tactic. It is beyond fair compensation, because the standard of living is fine in Europe, even though I know a lot of americans think we live in squalor. The pay in the US is beyond what can possibly be expected in other developed countries.

You'd be singing a different tune if you were a US citizen with our complete lack of socialized safety net, inadequate health care system, etc etc. I'm sorry as a non-US citizen that you're so poorly compensated, but clearly the market and corporations can afford to pay much better than they do in Europe.

> our complete lack of socialized safety net

The US spends a larger share of its GDP on its social safety net than Canada does.

What you're confused about is the difference between what a nation spends and what it gets for that spending. The US doesn't lack a social safety net, it has exceptionally incompetent government systems at the state and federal level while simultaneously spending a very large sum on its mediocre social safety net. US Government systems spend like European welfare states and the US doesn't get the same results from that spending.

If the poorest 1/4 of the population being covered by wildly expensive (for the taxpayer), free healthcare isn't part of a social safety net, then what qualifies exactly?

EBT (free food for the poor, aka food stamps) and Housing First are two other prominent social safety net programs. The US spends an enormous amount of money on EBT ($111b just at the federal level for 2021). The US housing first program was so successful it brought the US homelessness rate down to approximately where France and Canada are at.

Social Security and Medicare are social safety net programs, and the two largest by cost in world history. Neither program pays for itself properly, it's subsidized by taxpayers (and more so by the day).

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

#224

Post by yomkippur »

2c2c2c wrote: post #209
yomkippur wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yeah the novelty aspect of tech is always very alluring. still remember building on top of Meteor.js and thinknig 'this is it, this is the future'

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

#225

Post by yomkippur »

shocks wrote: post #110
rrdharan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just googled phtrivier and got no results. Seems kinda weird

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

#226

Post by nickjj »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #222
nickjj wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you try asking on the forums? Nope, I only looked up the Elixir solution for the sake of my reply here. I haven't worked with Elixir in like 9 months. Based on the docs it says IP.Subnet.is_in only supports IPv4. The Python and Ruby solutions transparently support both. That kind of sums up my Elixir experience (ie. something might partially exist but to really use it will require a lot of extra work). It's als…

IP.subnet.is_in is a guard, so there are different constraints. You could still use the `in` keyword. Honestly my experience with python has been "the solution you're looking for probably exists, but using it will require a lot of effort, and heaven help you if you need to debug someone else's code", but I have mostly dealt with Django which is a nightmare of hidden code and tensorflow. Maybe it's just I've worked wi…

> IP.subnet.is_in is a guard, so there are different constraints. You could still use the `in` keyword.

Does that mean you can do something to make it transparently support IPv4 and IPv6 even though the docs mentions it only supports IPv4? Will it be more than 1 line of code?

> Honestly my experience with python has been "the solution you're looking for probably exists, but using it will require a lot of effort..."

I found it to be the opposite approach. The last time I wanted to increment a counter outside of a nested loop in Elixir it sprawled into a multi-week conversation with the author of Elixir, a git repo with 100+ programming language examples to solve the same problem[0] and a proposal on potentially altering Elixir itself to make this process a bit easier. The Python solution was about 2 minutes typing into my code editor and moving on with life.

Elixir solution: https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal/bl...

Python solution: https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal/bl...

I'm not saying either language is better than the other but there's certain things that can done a lot easier in Python and on the flip side I'm sure there's things you can do a lot easier in Elixir.

I found in practice for me personally when building typical web apps I kept running into roadblocks left and right with Elixir where as I never had these issues with Python or Ruby. That's why I stopped using Elixir.

> I have mostly dealt with Django which is a nightmare of hidden code

I think that'll happen with any big framework, especially if you haven't contributed a ton of code to it. The Rails code base can be intimidating too and Phoenix's code isn't any more approachable to someone who isn't already at the high end of expert with the language.

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal

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

#227

Post by pcthrowaway »

lkschubert8 wrote: post #80
GuB-42 wrote: 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:…

I think "any experienced programmers should be able to pick up a language in a few days" is true for a lot of surface level things, but expertise is entirely different. A language isn't just the syntax and runtine, but the idioms, patterns, package ecosystem, and tooling that surround it, which you will likely not learn in a few days.

Is it really expected to be able to learn even the syntax and runtime in "a few days".

I've been using Javascript for 20 years and I'm still learning new things (though it helps that the language keeps changing)

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

#228

Post by ecshafer »

bowsamic wrote: post #173
wiseowise wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially in the US salaries are extremely inflated. Funny way to spell "fairly compensated".

I didn't spell it wrong, you are suggesting a different idea. Own up to it rather than using a lame linguistic deflection tactic. It is beyond fair compensation, because the standard of living is fine in Europe, even though I know a lot of americans think we live in squalor. The pay in the US is beyond what can possibly be expected in other developed countries.

If I as an Engineer bring in $1M to the company in a year, and I make $50k a year. Where did that other $950k go? Sure there is some overhead: taxes, hr, accounting, management, etc. But the fact is that in the US engineers are currently just getting more of the share of value that their labor created. European developers should be fighting tooth and nail to get more.

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

#229

Post by akudha »

bowsamic wrote: post #173
wiseowise wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially in the US salaries are extremely inflated. Funny way to spell "fairly compensated".

I didn't spell it wrong, you are suggesting a different idea. Own up to it rather than using a lame linguistic deflection tactic. It is beyond fair compensation, because the standard of living is fine in Europe, even though I know a lot of americans think we live in squalor. The pay in the US is beyond what can possibly be expected in other developed countries.

How is it fair to only compare raw salary numbers? There is nearly zero safety net in the U.S. Two weeks paid leave at best, you're expected to work long hours, healthcare is a mess... Compared to Western Europe, where there is affordable healthcare, saner labor practices etc.

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

#230

Post by czbond »

microtonal wrote: post #163
czbond wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Thank you for the informed response - really helpful
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