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Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#81

Post by kaycebasques »

lrobinovitch wrote: post #68
kaycebasques wrote: post #59

Sphinx [1] gets my vote. It's the docs system that powers most sites in the Python ecosystem so it probably looks familiar to you. I call it a docs system rather than static site generator because the web is just one of many output targets it supports. To tap into its full power you need to author in a markup that predates Markdown called reStructuredText (reST). It's very similar to Markdown (MD) so it's never bothe…

A Sphinx plugin[0] allows for writing in markdown, and I'd heavily encourage using it if you're looking to get widespread adoption of sphinx on a project or at a workplace. Rst is fine once you learn it but removing barriers to entry is useful. [0] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/markdown.html

The value prop of Sphinx goes down a lot if you're not using reST because you can't use the extensive catalog of directives, such as the ref directive that I mentioned in my first comment. If you must use Markdown then there's not much difference between Sphinx and all the other Markdown-powered SSGs out there. In other words there's not a compelling reason to use Sphinx if you've got to use Markdown.

From Sphinx's Getting Started page:

> Much of Sphinx’s power comes from the richness of its default plain-text markup format, reStructuredText, along with its significant extensibility capabilities.

https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/quickstart.html#g...

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#82

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

edw519 wrote: post #56
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first job involved working on a Pick system. The system started life on a Prime mainframe and was migrated to UniVerse on Solaris. I seriously miss it. Every once in a while I try to get back into it. Usually it takes the form of trying (and failing) to get a demo/personal version of UniVerse, but lately I've been poking at ScarletDME a little bit. I'd even pay money (not much since this is just hobby stuff, but s…

Thanks, Mister_Snuggles, for reminding me I'm not the only one left. I HAVE to code in PICK. "Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it." - Charles Burkowski (Funny, they named the current support company "Rocket".) Here's the link to the current Universe trial version (free and good until 04/2025. Get it, install it, and make somet…

Yup, this is exactly where I get to when I try and fail to get UniVerse.

What's the trick to making that form work? It won't accept my @gmail.com address, and I don't really want to use my work email address and potentially mis-represent things. Especially since my work used to use one of Rocket's products.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#84

Post by simpleandnice »

gal_anonym wrote: post #74

I wish Lua Server Pages (LSP) were more widely adopted. It's similar to PHP, but utilizes Lua instead. I dream of a CMS akin to WordPress, but developed in LSP. Lua is lean, with minimal syntactic sugar, and it feels like a 'complete' language. Therefore, we don't anticipate any additional bloat in the future.

Lua in OpenResty is one of my favorite ways to ingest events. I publish them into Redis and then have some Python workers subscribed to process them.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#85

Post by sam_lowry_ »

Dansvidania wrote: post #75

Camunda and Zeebe would be my pick. MS architecture could be so much simpler.

I struggle to find a use case for Camunda, especially after they somehow discontinued embedding in Spring. And I really tried.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#86

Post by nunez »

mmillin wrote: post #24

GnuPG/PGP and the web of trust[0]. A lot of things I see blockchain being used for today (e.g. NFTs) seems like it would be better solved using standard OpenPGP signatures with no backing chain. Additionally, as machine-generated content proliferates, I think having services use something like the web of trust concept for membership would be super powerful. The problem is, of course, the terrible UX of cryptographic…

GPG is great. It also makes it really easy to encrypt environment dotfiles that safely reside in your source code repository. This is my favorite way of storing sensitive app configs. You don't even need a PGP private key in your keychain to do it. You can use a passphrase.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#88

Post by jjgreen »

kaycebasques wrote: post #59

Sphinx [1] gets my vote. It's the docs system that powers most sites in the Python ecosystem so it probably looks familiar to you. I call it a docs system rather than static site generator because the web is just one of many output targets it supports. To tap into its full power you need to author in a markup that predates Markdown called reStructuredText (reST). It's very similar to Markdown (MD) so it's never bothe…

I've used Sphinx quite a bit, the syntax is a bit fugly. For markdown's

   [text](url)
one uses

   `text `_
...

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#89

Post by lrobinovitch »

kaycebasques wrote: post #81
lrobinovitch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Sphinx plugin[0] allows for writing in markdown, and I'd heavily encourage using it if you're looking to get widespread adoption of sphinx on a project or at a workplace. Rst is fine once you learn it but removing barriers to entry is useful. [0] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/markdown.html

The value prop of Sphinx goes down a lot if you're not using reST because you can't use the extensive catalog of directives, such as the ref directive that I mentioned in my first comment. If you must use Markdown then there's not much difference between Sphinx and all the other Markdown-powered SSGs out there. In other words there's not a compelling reason to use Sphinx if you've got to use Markdown. From Sphinx's G…

Myst has parity with most reST features and is equivalent to markdown for users not using those features: https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/v0.13.7/using/syntax.h...

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#90

Post by nunez »

Gomplate is a super easy templating tool that wraps golang's template library with some useful built in functions. It's not as extensive as starlark but it is dead simple to get going with.

Also, my company (VMware) has a really powerful YAML templating engine called ytt. I originally hated it and dunked on it constantly but have grown to love it. It makes creating composable and modular YAML really easy, which is extremely unfortunate that this is a real thing, but when you need it, you need it.

Lastly, Cucumber isn't _unknown_ unknown, but I wish it was more widely used. Behavior testing is really useful even if the program has great test coverage underneath. Being able to express tests in pure English that do stuff is powerful and can be a bargaining chip for crucial conversations with product sometimes if done correctly. I mean, yes, we have GPTs that can write tests from prompts written in your language of choice and GPT Vision can manipulate a browser, but Cucumber is an easy stand-in IMO that is cheap and free!

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