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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?

#381

Post by pyinstallwoes »

pilgrim0 wrote: post #374
zarathustreal wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say this, so I entirely agree. I found Forth and the concept of concatenative languages after deep study of the fundamentals of computing, specifically studying Lisps and the Lambda Calculus. Eventually found combinators and the Iota combinator. Finally hit the bottom of the rabbit hole! It really does give the lightbulb moment. “Don’t try to generate code, that is impossible. Only try to realize the tru…

I went through a similar path! Concatenative appeared to me like the most economic paradigm one can possible come up with, a ultimate reduction, for which there’s practically no path to further downward abstraction. It feels more like a primitive building block than anything else. I always admired the design of Unix pipes, and flow oriented programming in general, then you realize that these things are just natural t…

Are you using Forth day-to-day? And in what form?

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

#382

Post by koonsolo »

creativenolo wrote: post #366
koonsolo wrote: post #310

The Haxe programming language ( https://haxe.org/ ). It's insane how unpopular this is compared to its value. "Haxe can build cross-platform applications targeting JavaScript, C++, C#, Java, JVM, Python, Lua, PHP, Flash, and allows access to each platform's native capabilities. Haxe has its own VMs (HashLink and NekoVM) but can also run in interpreted mode." It's mostly popular in game dev circles, and is used by: No…

Second time I see Haxe mention. I have had a ‘google’ (with Brave search) but I am still wondering why. Is it just the multitude of platform or is it something like: ergonomics, flexibility, productivity, tooling, ecosystem, production readiness, etc etc

It stands out because of the multiplatform targets. There is nothing comparable as far as I know.

For the rest it's a very nice language with the usual tools.

The multiplatform part is probably why it's so popular with game developers, since you can target so many client plaforms with only one codebase.

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

#383

Post by koonsolo »

JoeyJoJoJr wrote: post #368
koonsolo wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kha is awesome! I'm using it for https://rpgplayground.com

Wow that is really impressive! What other libraries are you using. And do you have you have much experience with using the non-web targets?

I'm also using box2d for collisions and simple physics. And the rest is custom written.

No experience with other platforms yet. Probably iOS will follow at some point, but I want it to be more feature complete first.

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

#384

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

corethree wrote: post #346
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two problems: a) Unless you literally write everything in one language, you will have to deal with learning, supporting and fixing bugs in N different package/environment managers instead of just one. b) If you have a project that uses several languages (say, a Python webapp with C++ extensions and frontend templates in Typescript), then Nix is the only solution that will integrate this mess under one umbrella.

a. Using nix in place of a package manager means dealing with libraries specific to that language. It's still managing different apis. And more potential for bugs and unforeseen problems in custom 3rd party APIs as opposed to the official one. Admit it, you hit tons of problems getting everything to work fine with python. b. C++ is the only one that would benefit from nix here because C++ dependencies are usually ins…

a. you hit tons of problems getting everything to work fine with python - of course, but the maintenance burden is an order of magnitude lower than integrating all this manually.

b. No, docker is not a solution. Docker is another problem and a separate maintenance nightmare.

(Nix solves maintenance problems at scale, Docker explodes them exponentially. I would not ever recommend using Docker for anything except personal computing devices you don't care about.)

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

#386

Post by 6510 »

DennisP wrote: post #371
6510 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would many thousands of entities, who confirmed hundreds of thousands of previous results be preferable over hundreds of thousands of entities, who confirmed many thousands of previous results?

I think I'm pretty much ok with either one.

How few executions (or partial?) could one get away with?

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

#387

Post by pricci »

yeck wrote: post #50

Nix package manager's `nix-shell` is something I wish more people knew about. Nix is gaining some popularity, but people often think of using it has to be a really big commitment, like changing your Linux distro to NixOS or replacing your dotfiles with a Nix-based one (using the Nix package manager). What I wish more people knew was that you don't need to do those things to get value from Nix. Create project specific…

Although I haven't really used it, jetpack.io's Devbox [0] is an abstraction over Nix for the usage you describe.

[0] https://www.jetpack.io/devbox

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

#388

Post by entropie »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #377
entropie wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mediawiki is huge and very complex. Why not something more simple like instiki? Personally I would prefer a wiki with git backend. I wrote one [1] but I dont recommend using it. https://github.com/entropie/oy

Fossil, the bespoke VCS used by sqlite includes a wiki & web server out of the box. It's not normally what people think of in this domain but I've used it for that purpose and it works great for it. https://fossil-scm.org

This is really cool. Thanks for pointing to it.

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

#389

Post by taxcoder »

1letterunixname wrote: post #292

- IPv6 - It's 2023 and it's still not deployed correctly and universally. Github, Github Copilot, Chromium-based browsers, and Amazon Alexa give up in the presence of IPv6. - DNSSEC+DANE - It's half-assed deployed but there's a lack of end-user UX - wais - search before gopher - afs - distributed fs - discard protocol - basically, a network-based /dev/null - humans.txt - Not around as much as it was - makeheaders - A…

Upvoted for Ocaml. They are making progress on using on Windows.

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

#390

Post by yeck »

pricci wrote: post #387
yeck wrote: post #50

Nix package manager's `nix-shell` is something I wish more people knew about. Nix is gaining some popularity, but people often think of using it has to be a really big commitment, like changing your Linux distro to NixOS or replacing your dotfiles with a Nix-based one (using the Nix package manager). What I wish more people knew was that you don't need to do those things to get value from Nix. Create project specific…

Although I haven't really used it, jetpack.io's Devbox [0] is an abstraction over Nix for the usage you describe. [0] https://www.jetpack.io/devbox

I've played around with it a little bit, but not enough to make any judgements on it. Something like devbox could be the sort of thing to make nix-shell accessible enough to see wider adoption.
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