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If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

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Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#121

Post by badman_ting »

stiff wrote: post #105

This idea that a software engineer picks a language as his "favourite" and becomes a "Ruby developer" or a "JavaScript developer" ever since is completely misguided, and I'm sad to see it cherished further in this article. Languages are tools, and tools should be picked depending on the project: its application domain, performance requirements, availability of libraries for important subproblems that have been identi…

If you want to point out that the way the world works is crazy - well, alright. But the rest of us have to make a living, and the way hiring works is that organizations hire in part based on your experience with a certain language or platform. "Well, they're doing it wrong". Okay, let's say I agree. Then what?

"Right tool for the job" is getting to be a very tiring orthodoxy. It seems to come around whenever people don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of comparing tools. I say stop the handwringing, pick something that feels right to you, and start doing stuff.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#122

Post by Iftheshoefits »

MoosePlissken wrote: post #102
Joeri wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can remove the word mobile. Web apps are still heavily inferior to native desktop apps. The answer to 'why mobile web apps?' is the same answer as to 'why desktop web apps?'

Depends on your definition of inferior. I can count the number of desktop apps that I use on a daily basis on one hand, and they're all development tools. I have more than twice that number of pinned tabs in my browser that are open at all times.

Are those pinned tabs all running applications or merely displaying information (websites)? Are you sure the ones running apps would not run better were they written as a native/desktop version? Are the apps trivial (e.g. to-do lists)? There's a lot of context you left out.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#123

Post by pestaa »

chriswarbo wrote: post #66
collyw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of SQL, are there any mainstream declarative languages?

I hear that HTML is becoming popular these days.

It's more like a markup language, though.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#124

Post by stcredzero »

The sweet spot for Bang for the Buck, for a typical programmer, would be Go -- then use it in a functional style. (Except for in strictly delineated circumstances, the entire code base should have zero side-effects outside of the current function scope.)

This gives you a safe, easily concurrent language, plus most of the benefits of functional programming, but without as shallow a learning curve. (Meaning not as hard. Learning curve is not an analogy for a steep road! Height = stuff learned!) You also get very good debugging. (gdb and cgdb in particular)

I'm writing my current project in Clojure, however, because it has most of the advantages of the above, but the available GC technology for the platform is far superior. (You'll have to learn some new debugging tricks, however.)

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#125

Post by millstone »

bad_user wrote: post #87
gonehome wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose in your case you're choosing between two bad options. The iOS app is an example of how much better a native app can be from the web app - and the new paper app even more so. I remember the android one being terrible when I had android phones a couple years ago - but I thought that was because it was basically a wrapper around a web app.

You kind of missed the point. What if history repeats itself? What if iOS will in the end fail in the marketplace, reducing its share to a single digit? What if Apple continues against all odds to develop and support it, like it did with the Mac OS? What if you'll still use it? Wouldn't you be happy then that there's a web interface available? And from a developer's perspective - you could say that you want to target…

Facebook, Twitter, and Google are fair examples, but in each case, what makes these things hard is the server components.

Now consider what it would take to build the next Final Cut Pro. You could try to do it as a web app, and you might even get some casual users who don't need much capabilities. But you are not going to displace existing professional tools on any platform.

Being available everywhere just means you're not better anywhere. Java apps discovered this last decade.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#126

Post by smrtinsert »

DanHulton wrote: post #120
macspoofing wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's just JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. No it's not. Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries. So you go and pick from a menu of Backbone/Marionette, Angular, ExtJS, Ember, Kendo, jQuery or etc. - some of them work together, some of them don't. Most of those get you part of the way there, you may still need to pull in things li…

It's javascript, angular, and jQuery. Seriously, jQuery > all the other "low-level" libraries out there combined, and Angular > all the other frameworks out there combined, several times over . If you want to interview practically anywhere, learn those three and you're solid.

And what a depressing job that would be.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#127

Post by millstone »

bad_user wrote: post #70
forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there." "Whoever can make the Google of app discovery might make a temporary splash, but i bet that, not long after, people will return to plain old Google Search." You remember me to Kodak's "people will return to make analog photos, people want to hold something in their hand". You are deluding yourself, and you can't s…

> "In the browser is like 500 if we were to do things on javascript." That's more like 1.5x: http://asmjs.org/ http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/12/gap-between-asm-js-and-nat... > "Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so." Google hasn't tried deep integration of web apps with Android. Th…

You linked to the HTML5 Unreal Engine demo to demonstrate that JavaScript is competitive with C. But Unreal Engine is not written in JavaScript. It is written in C++.

Do you mean to say that this is the future of the web: software written using traditionally native languages, delivered in a compiled blob that the user can't inspect, but that has good performance?

This sounds more like native software encroaching on the web than the other way around.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#129

Post by leishulang »

crazygringo wrote: post #86

If you're looking to maximize your choice of companies to work at, one piece of advice could be to focus on front-end instead of back-end. I'm equally proficient at front-end and back-end, but the last time I did a whole bunch of interviews, I advertised myself as a front-end programmer (since there aren't too many full-stack positions around). Why? As a back-end developer, you're limited to picking companies that ma…

most boss think front-end programmer as code monkeys, and back-end guys as architects. Good luck.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#130

Post by pouzy »

pouzy wrote: post #128

I like Python. It took me a while to get out of PHP, so I guess I'd drop PHP to jump directly in Python. But most of all I'd learn how to fix a car. They are such a pain when they break.

Ho, and most definitely mobile languages. That will all put us out of our job if we can't move into that field.
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