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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)?

#231

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.

Typescript almost does!

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

#232
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean to be quite honest I remember this problem and all I could think of was "this being hard is a sign that the data structure is poorly designed. But I also remember giving you a four line code sample using the process dictionary that you could have used, because this was "clearly an exceptionally pathologic data structure".

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

#233
post #7

In my experience the job market just revolves around business needs combined with transferrable skills for an affordable price. Most business needs are a cheap version of CRUD+Business Rules. As a result, the biggest languages (keep in mind that most businesses have large amounts of existing code) are also relatively old (except Go, C# and Swift which are relatively young). Languages I see with my current clients and…

Weird. I don’t see a lot of pure CRUD in enterprise development. It’s almost all dumb data transformation. Take data off a queue, add/remove/change, drop it in a db, pass it along.

Maybe take “REST” requests for reads or POST instead of dropping on another queue/topic.

Legacy code is C/C++ and PL/SQL. Java since 1.6 or so. JS/TypeScript now for frontends.

And a ton of RPC being called a REST API.

Python is exploding for all the ML/analytics being introduced. But that’s really it’s own thing. Doesn’t read like Python in any other domain. Just a wrapper around math libraries.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 medi…

The US also has a large incompetent population, compared to Europe. Europe only recently got a huge surge of under-skilled refugees, and this should weigh down on the system (some countries like Italy/Spain are already near bankruptcy).

The US also spends a lot on its military, which is part of the social safety net. Europe ignored military for other expenses and is now paying heavily for it.

That being said, the US does not make good use of its resources. But it's a much harder problem that you'd expect.

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

#235
post #95

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)

The most comprehensive current view of the Rust machine learning ecosystem at the moment is probably at https://www.arewelearningyet.com/ (I sometimes help maintain this site)

Rust has a weird mix at the moment, and not one that's likely to significantly change within the next 12 months, at least. Certain tools are genuinely best-in-class, especially around simple operations on insane amounts of data. Rust kills it in that space due to its native speed and focus on concurrency.

There's also growing projects like Linfa [1]. that while not at the level of scikit-learn, have significantly increased their coverage on common data science/classical ML problems in the past couple years, along with improved tooling. The space does have a few pure-Rust projects coming down the pipeline around autodifferentiation, GPU compute, etc. that are likely to yield some really valuable results in deep learning, but that aren't quite available and will take some time to pick up some traction even once they're released. At the same time, areas like data visualization are unlikely to reach parity with something like matplotlib/pyplot in the near future.

Python is the de-facto standard, and will be for some time, but Rust's ability to build accessible high-level APIs on top of performant, language-native libraries is attracting some attention and I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing ingress in the certain areas over the next few years, where instead of the Python/C++ combination, it's just Rust all the way down.

[1] https://github.com/rust-ml/linfa

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

#236
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'm using Clojure at my day job as well. Though, my employer is not on the list there.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I have no idea why, but it seems like software engineering salaries in the UK (from what I've seen in job listings for remote work as an American) are near the lowest in the first world (yes, even when adjusting for GBP/USD exchange rate).

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are organizations that generate forgotten apps that are basically used but unmaintained. These are tarpits for developers. You don't want to be the person they fling at every forgotten codebase. They tend to be sideshows - if they really brought in the money, or the users, the business would invest in them and have people who know the language. There's value in being able to go in, fix a little problem, and mak…

Refactoring old codebases into something nice to work on is comfy though. It’s basically what I do in the startup world I just use less niche languages. Although I’d suspect there isn’t a lot of refactoring going on in some of those code bases you describe.

I think this is a healthy and productive career path. If you can identify when a dead codebase is about to become fertile, and how to clear the debris to support new development, you can make a lot of money, have a lot of fun, gain a lot of respect, receive a lot of autonomy.

You just don't want to be the person tasked with work that's only done because some contact got signed. Identifying the difference is hard.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that learning a niche language like Clojure should demand a higher salary but it doesn't. Companies realize they can get an existing experienced developer to learn it. It's also not wise to jump ship to a niche language like this unless you really have the funding for it and even then, the talent pool is much smaller and you find yourself its not an employers market in that niche. So as a business owne…

I've heard the argument that using niche tech is a good way to retain good engineers who you'd pay a lot anyways

The Haskell community refers to this as "the Haskell tax," although I think all niche languages suffer it.

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

#240

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.

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.

How do you quantify that $1M? What about the product manager, designer, and QA person that were involved in the features you coded? What about the account manager and customer support rep that will now need to provide on-going support for your code?
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