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I learned seven programming languages

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Re: I learned seven programming languages

#11

Post by rich_sasha »

tgv wrote: post #4

The author's experience is based on toy examples. Programming (and designing) in a professional setting is more than that, though. And the solutions are not the same for everyone: writing an Office plugin has different needs than writing a mobile game. For many of us, the availability of tooling and libraries is crucial. I'm not going to reinvent the web server by building on OS sockets or write a graphics rendering…

I almost chose nim over rust, but then rust is an industrial machine with a ton of weight behind it. Nim may be the better language for my needs but not as good an ecosystem. Sad but true.

Re: I learned seven programming languages

#12

Post by hiccuphippo »

pron wrote: post #6

> most programmer convenience is sacrificed on the altar of "never crash". This makes it a good choice for sending a rocket to space When it comes to safety- or mission-critical software, crashing due to a dangling pointer, a stack overflow or a failed allocation are equally catastrophic, and not crashing but producing a wrong answer due to an algorithmic error is also equally catastrophic. In fact, producing the cor…

Also see NASA's 10 Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_D...

Re: I learned seven programming languages

#13

Post by mettamage »

rich_sasha wrote: post #11
tgv wrote: post #4

The author's experience is based on toy examples. Programming (and designing) in a professional setting is more than that, though. And the solutions are not the same for everyone: writing an Office plugin has different needs than writing a mobile game. For many of us, the availability of tooling and libraries is crucial. I'm not going to reinvent the web server by building on OS sockets or write a graphics rendering…

I almost chose nim over rust, but then rust is an industrial machine with a ton of weight behind it. Nim may be the better language for my needs but not as good an ecosystem. Sad but true.

I came to this conclusion as well.

Ecosystem > language awesomeness

Provided that one ecosystem is huge (e.g. Python) and the other one small.

With that said, learning to write production code in a small language allows for certain better developments in mindset (e.g. Stack Overflow? Forget about it) and better in the quirks of the language, which you will see (to a lesser extent) in other languages.

Re: I learned seven programming languages

#14

Post by matsemann »

tgv wrote: post #4

The author's experience is based on toy examples. Programming (and designing) in a professional setting is more than that, though. And the solutions are not the same for everyone: writing an Office plugin has different needs than writing a mobile game. For many of us, the availability of tooling and libraries is crucial. I'm not going to reinvent the web server by building on OS sockets or write a graphics rendering…

Yeah, languages are "easy" to learn when you already know a few from different paradigms. I can skim through the docs of an unknown language and know enough to start writing in it quite quickly. What takes time is to also learn all the tooling, not just the syntax. How do you build it, debug it, deploy it, what frameworks and libraries should you use, and spend time to learn them.

Take javascript, for instance. If you're used to a C style based language with some functional patterns, jumping into a codebase and understand it is quite easy. But around the language itself you also need to know stuff like npm, webpack or similar, how the browser works, http concepts etc etc.

Or python, need to deal with pip, virtualenvs, perhaps poetry, need to understand the limitations to concurrency because of the GIL and how it affects deployments, perhaps django or some other framework, etc.

Re: I learned seven programming languages

#15

Post by davidkunz »

rich_sasha wrote: post #11
tgv wrote: post #4

The author's experience is based on toy examples. Programming (and designing) in a professional setting is more than that, though. And the solutions are not the same for everyone: writing an Office plugin has different needs than writing a mobile game. For many of us, the availability of tooling and libraries is crucial. I'm not going to reinvent the web server by building on OS sockets or write a graphics rendering…

I almost chose nim over rust, but then rust is an industrial machine with a ton of weight behind it. Nim may be the better language for my needs but not as good an ecosystem. Sad but true.

I agree. I love Nim, it's such a great language but I try to stick to Rust because I have a feeling that's where the industry is headed. And Rust will improve over time, maybe at some point it will be more pleasant to use.

Re: I learned seven programming languages

#16

Post by revskill »

jray wrote: post #2

Try crystal! https://crystal-lang.org/

The problem with small ecosystem, is production-ready toolings is always paid.

Large ecosystems don't have such issue, because what you get is communities, not monopoly. (Look at some toolings like Sidekiq enterprise).

Re: I learned seven programming languages

#17

Post by nigamanth »

I was with you till Julia but why C and C++? They're OG languages but I can't think of one situation where you have to use them for Machine Learning.

Out of Python, R and Julia, just learn ONE for 1y and become the best at it. That way, you can build anything in that language and then use that to build something mind-blowing.

Re: I learned seven programming languages

#18

Post by dunefox »

The criticism of Julia seems strange:

> But the big dealbreaker with Julia is it only complies on the fly. That means you can't just hand a compiled executable to someone. You must give them instructions to install Julia and all your dependencies first. That's no good for anything you want to ship like a desktop app or a game. You also don't want Julia on your server recompiling with every web request.

That's an issue with Python as well, but the Julia team is working on that.

Re: I learned seven programming languages

#19

Post by ergonaught »

xrayarx wrote: post #8

The author tests the seven languages python, julia, rust, c#, swift, c and nim by programming a Yahtzee bot in each and comparing them. The "winner" is nim. Unfortunately the author only provides the code for nim. So it is subjective based on a simple practical project (1000 locs). Unfortunately it leaves out all the other "cool kids" like crystal, zig, v, dart, d and so forth...

There are repositories for the other languages. Look.
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