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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?

#111
post #40

Not sure if you're looking for things as "trifling" as programming languages, but I do wish more people knew about Nim. It's fast, statically typed, reads more or less like Python, has a great effect system, etc. It's a joy to use. I've been working through writing an interpreter in it: https://youtu.be/48CsjEFzyXQ

I was using Nim for some of last years Advent of Code problems. I was mostly liking the syntax. Was a bit bother by the standard library have a snake case and camel case reference for each function (if I'm remember that correctly). At the time nimble also required me to have NPM to install the the Nim package manager, Nimble. This was not ideal, but looking at [the nimble project install docs]( https://github.com/nim…

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

#112
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow; this is extremely nice for quick prototyping!

I use it in production. Handling roles and permissions in the DB is a game changer.

But beware row-level security. It's great, but the query planning is a huge mess, and you can end up with serious performance issues real fast if you're not careful.

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

#113

Most people know about MediaWiki even if they don't realize they do, because it powers Wikipedia, but I wish more people used it for documentation. You can create highly specialized templates in Lua, and there's a RDBMS extension called Cargo that gives you some limited SQL ability too. With these tools you can build basically an entirely custom CMS on top of the base MW software, while retaining everything that's gr…

Like any documentation system, its success depends on its audience. As an administrator, I wish MediaWiki had a built-in updater (bonus points if it could be automated).

> As an administrator, I wish MediaWiki had a built-in updater (bonus points if it could be automated).

I get that by using the container distributions. I just mount My LocalSettings.php and storage volumes in the appropriate places and I get a new version.

And since I run on ZFS and i take a snapshot before updating if something goes wrong I can rollback the snapshot, and go back to when stuff just worked (and retry later).

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

#114
post #99

temporal.io

Also Orleans

Heh. https://github.com/bottledcode/durable-php is a semi-faithful php port of Orleans, borrowing some ideas from similar things too. I’ve actually been working on some really neat FFI things for this the past few weeks.

It’s fun.

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

#116
A company I used to work for used to use the Versant OODBMS (object-oriented dbms).

It was truly interesting. Long story short, you stored your objects in the database, along with other objects. No object-relational mismatch.

Queries meant taking a subset of a graph (of objects). It was fast and performant, and fairly solid.

It's essentially the result of asking "what if database development had taken a different turn at some point?".

Of the owning company would release it under some kind of open source license (maybe open core, BSL or one of those new revenue-friendly licenses) it could probably get very very popular.

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