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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?

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I introduced it to our Python projects at work and it's been great. Partially because of poetry2nix, and partially because it makes it easy to include other stuff like a specific version of Redis for testing purposes. Everybody gets the exact same dev environment, reducing a ton of "works on my machine".

virtualenv is the python way. For things like redis and other external web stuff, docker is the standard.

Sure, that works. Or I can have it all in a single shell.nix file that covers everything and is super simple to use. It's great for handing off to coworkers that don't usually use Python.

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

#123
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I introduced it to our Python projects at work and it's been great. Partially because of poetry2nix, and partially because it makes it easy to include other stuff like a specific version of Redis for testing purposes. Everybody gets the exact same dev environment, reducing a ton of "works on my machine".

Presumably it also can fill the role of conda/mamba i.e. also managing C/C++ libraries in the same way in the nix environment, isolated from the system libraries?

Yep, it can lock down exact versions of those libraries as well, which is great for not mucking about with lib versions between even different Ubuntu versions, not to mention distros or macOS.

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

#124

In case you don't fancy visiting all the links: - Tarantool is some sort of in-memory DB with optional persistence - Red is a programming language that has made the odd syntax decision to use {} for strings and [] to define scopes - U++ is one of those all-encompasing C++ frameworks like QT - Lazarus is a Pascal(?) IDE - And FASM is a toolkit for building assemblers I'm struggling to find the common thread across the…

Thank you for summing it up. The common is things from developer's perspective I feel they should be checked out (not just programming languages)

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

#125
Asciidoc lightweight markup can be used in place of ANY complex XML-based CCS (component content system), i.e. DocBook, DITA, S1000D, 40-50-something MIL-STD "specifications". Asciidoc can do anything they can, and can do it cheaper, faster, and better. With standard tooling that's everywhere you have a computer.

I'm not sure I can type out, with trembling fingers, how many dollars have been flushed down the toilet of CCSs by businesses that either had no business experimenting with componentized content, or businesses that didn't have resources for training up staff, or vendors who literally evaporated like morning dew after they'd gotten their initialization fees. So just one single story: one prime aerospace vendor I worked with had started their road to S1000D publishing in 2009. Today - at the end of 2023, and more than twenty million dollars later, with a garbage truck full of sweat and blood - that system has not released a single publication to the end user. Not one.

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

#127

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 have always found sphinx challenging, in usability or syntax :( It could be probably much more advanced, but I went for pdoc3 for api docs and mdbook for documentation in general.

What I really hope that exists, is a system where I can reuse the documentation (sections) in other pages, ergonomically

I built that system multiple times to do preprocessing with things like including parts or special linking or referencing images from anyhwere

https://github.com/xmonader/publishingtools/tree/development...

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

#128

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.

I had experience with OpenResty, I was so proud to kill it in one of the projects, I didn't know Lua/MoonScript good enough, tooling and debugging wasn't that great. While the idea is nice, everything around it was too much for me.

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

#129
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used my work email and then forwarded it to my g mail.

If you have concerns about doing that, you can just download it from my website at

http://eddiots.com/UVTE_WINDOWS_11.4.1.zip (You may have to cut and paste this link into a new tab. HN doesn't seem to like this.)

If you have any problems or need the UNIX version, just reply here or contact me. email on my profile. Let me know how it goes.

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

#130
post #12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system This has accounted for about 90% of everything I've built since 1985. Pick code generates my side project: https://eddiots.com/1

this project is AMAZING

Thanks, aredirect!

My next phase is to put the PICK-generated svg into codepen and provide links to show how to draw the art with code.

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