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Programming language agnosticism is the only way to move forward in life

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Programming language agnosticism is the only way to move forward in life

#11

Post by skydhash »

austin-cheney wrote: post #8
skydhash wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things I'm learning away from is "magic". Magic methods, reflection, and configuration with code (JS world, Gradle). Especially when such magic is powering conventions. The only exception is lisp macro as it's mostly code that produce code with a simple mechanism: quoting. IDEs are places you'll find such magic. To write a simple mobile app, you'll need GBs of SDK because they couldn't bother coming up wit…

Yeah, I just like simple light weight code editors that open quickly. Notepad++ is super old, but its still incredibly popular and maintains a faithful following. VS Code is super popular because it tries to not be an IDE like the actual Microsoft Visual Studio IDE. Its also why I never liked Eclipse, because it just feels really slow. At any rate, I was thinking about what I wrote earlier. Why is it that there is a…

You don't even have to start from a clean slate. There's a lot of materials that outline design choices and their impact. I believe it's mostly not applying YAGNI. They come up with the kitchen sink, and then proceeds to have breaking changes shortly as they always make a mistake somewhere. And then you have people cargo-culting the sink and piling more on top of it.

Complex problems exists, but any complex solution I've seen is something that tries to solve many problems at once.

Re: Programming language agnosticism is the only way to move forward in life

#12

Post by amano-kenji »

moomoo11 wrote: post #10

The only people who obsess over languages are the core contributors (1%) or the guy who has been a mid level senior for 20 years and kind of stopped growing/learning years ago (95%) Everyone else is the SWE turned entrepreneur who doesn’t give a fuck and just wants fastest ROI. Aka using a hammer instead of a saw to put in a nail.

Initial speed matters, but sustainable speed matters as well. Your choice should be based on initial speed and sustainable speed.

Initial speed matters more, but sustainable speed can't be ignored.

Re: Programming language agnosticism is the only way to move forward in life

#14

Post by moomoo11 »

amano-kenji wrote: post #12
moomoo11 wrote: post #10

The only people who obsess over languages are the core contributors (1%) or the guy who has been a mid level senior for 20 years and kind of stopped growing/learning years ago (95%) Everyone else is the SWE turned entrepreneur who doesn’t give a fuck and just wants fastest ROI. Aka using a hammer instead of a saw to put in a nail.

Initial speed matters, but sustainable speed matters as well. Your choice should be based on initial speed and sustainable speed. Initial speed matters more, but sustainable speed can't be ignored.

Right, that's why I always suggest anyone doing "actual" product work to use something like node-TS and Go.

node-TS for insane developer productivity (hella libraries, who really gives a fuck about NPM issues? just patch and move on) and ability to scale easily (95% of CRUD IO workloads for most companies). Need computational horsepower? Use Go for that thing, compile binary, call binary from node..

Honestly, just that alone is able to scale to millions of users and is super easy to maintain (granted the code is architected well). 95% of companies aren't really doing anything crazy, and 99% of companies are not unicorns.

Re: Programming language agnosticism is the only way to move forward in life

#16

Post by Bolwin »

> Are you trying to have fun with programming languages? Or, are you trying to get things done quickly in programming languages? Speed is infinitely more important than fun.

I mean what if I am trying to have fun?

I'm only half joking. For work, your philosophy is correct. But at home, it's fine to give up a little convenience if you have more fun with a different language.

Re: Programming language agnosticism is the only way to move forward in life

#18

Post by hshdhdhehd »

moomoo11 wrote: post #10

The only people who obsess over languages are the core contributors (1%) or the guy who has been a mid level senior for 20 years and kind of stopped growing/learning years ago (95%) Everyone else is the SWE turned entrepreneur who doesn’t give a fuck and just wants fastest ROI. Aka using a hammer instead of a saw to put in a nail.

Im i. the P95 perpetual mid levellers, but I also dont obsess about PL (but would avoid for example a PHP or VB6 job) but yeah Go, Node, C#, Java, python, whatever!

Re: Programming language agnosticism is the only way to move forward in life

#20

Post by ivape »

moomoo11 wrote: post #10

The only people who obsess over languages are the core contributors (1%) or the guy who has been a mid level senior for 20 years and kind of stopped growing/learning years ago (95%) Everyone else is the SWE turned entrepreneur who doesn’t give a fuck and just wants fastest ROI. Aka using a hammer instead of a saw to put in a nail.

I don’t agree with this. If you found your favorite type of car, then that’s your preference. Each car can take you to roughly same place (unless you have a specific use case like off-road). If you a preference for a language, but your use case needs another language, then use case trumps preference. It’s silly to belittle a language preference given the facts.

Some languages and ecosystems are delightful to work with and people absolutely make reasonable trade offs to stay in them.

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