It's not a hot technology ( read as overhyped ), but if you're in the analytics space and not using Python/PyData tooling then definitely check that out. It's certainly as mature, if not more so than R.
Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
41–50 of 138 posts
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#42Give Lua some love. Learn the language, learn the VM. Learn to integrate it with a set of libraries and so on. Lots of bleeding edge stuff runs on Lua and its a fantastic stack of technology to learn ..
The only problem with Lua is how slow it is. I'm quite fond of LuaJIT, though, because it isn't slow.
Right, that is of course the truth: LuaJIT is fast.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#43Elixir. While Rust and Go get way more exposure lately, they're mostly designed for systems programming. Many more of us do web development, and it's really amazing how fast Elixir has become a very cool and mature environment for developing great web apps. Elixir is a really cool language, and also a great way to learn functional programming. But more than that, it gets all the non-languagy stuff right. The build sy…
I'm a web developer currently learning Haskell. Would you recommend learning Elixir instead?
As someone that hasn't heard of Eilxir before but has done a bit of Haskell. Haskell is mind expanding on it's own right.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#44If you don't know python and you're interested in analytics you should solve that. IMHO you'll become a far better developer if you devote the majority of your time to learning advanced algorithms, ml, and ai as opposed to the new hot framework.
No one asks for those in job specs though
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#45I'd recommend learning how to learn. Making learning and curiosity a part of your every day existence will have more of an impact that the latest hot language or framework.
I am compelled to agree with you, inasmuch as the irony of "what is the newest thing to learn" wouldn't be much of a hipster position if it weren't borne on the fact that must learn new things, always. Always. Since the beginning of social computing - when we've all had access to the same degree of technology - our languages, tools, and frameworks have always been changing. It is one reason for the existence of an ivory tower - sometimes you need to wizard-out, just to get peace from the noise. Trouble is, you inevitably end up casting new spells. There is no such thing as 'a brand new thing' to learn, alas the truly hipster edge can't be learned yet. ;)
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#46Rust is awesome if you want to follow along and see how the bread is made. One of the best things about being involved in Rust since it was announced is being able to recount all the different paths it's taken and the reasoning behind them. It has taught me a lot about good language design, validated and sometimes destroyed some of my ideas about programming concepts and overall provided a great environment for questioning how things work.
I come from a C background however which is a little closer to Rust than Java/Javascript/R but I don't think you would hvae that much trouble if you put your mind to it. Java is a similarly large language if a bit removed from the metal.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#47What's recommended for an experienced "back-end" developer who wants to dabble in front end and web development, but never spent much time in it? It seems like there are a million options for web stack components, and a lot of tutorial resources are geared towards total non-developers.
JQuery. I have been trying to do the same (when I get a chance) for the last few years. Angular, Backbone, etc are a lot to learn, while JQuery lets you get basic stuff done.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#48Get yourself a Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and/or a Beaglebone.
You wouldn't believe how much playing around with these units will help to influence your design and development decisions in other areas.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#49Elixir. While Rust and Go get way more exposure lately, they're mostly designed for systems programming. Many more of us do web development, and it's really amazing how fast Elixir has become a very cool and mature environment for developing great web apps. Elixir is a really cool language, and also a great way to learn functional programming. But more than that, it gets all the non-languagy stuff right. The build sy…
I'm a web developer currently learning Haskell. Would you recommend learning Elixir instead?
For me, learning Haskell was a supremely educational experience. There is no better way to learn functional programming techniques and you will not regret learning it. That said I can count the number of times I've used Haskell in a non trivial application on one hand.
Elixir lets me use a lot of the stuff I learned with Haskell, and I've already used it building a real time component for an app I'm working on.
Take from that what you will.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#50The hype for Go/Rust is really just on HN. If you are involved in data analytics then you could always immerse yourself in the Hadoop stack e.g. Cascading, Spark, Mahout etc. It's a platform that is increasingly become a fixture in enterprise companies and plenty of new technologies. For me the future will be "container driven development" where everything will be deployed as a container and dynamically wired togethe…
I would have to disagree. If you think it's just hype, try and calculate the enormous waste of both time and money from memory leaks caused by code written in C and C++. Rust solves this, and it's only going to get better once we're on the other side of Rust 1.0, and the library ecosystem grows.
> Try and calculate the enormous waste of both time and money from memory leaks caused by code written in C and C++. Rust solves this...
This seems like an unusual language feature to highlight --- don't most modern programming languages solve this problem with various implementations of GC or memory management? N.B. I am not at all familiar with Rust and so maybe I'm missing some important context...