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What programming languages are used late at night?

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Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very rarely use stackoverflow as well. Last time was probably week ago when googling something bash related. AMA

Well, let me ask you the same questions: 1. What is your development environment? 2. What you do when there is an issue?

Ubuntu. IntelliJ +Scala plugin. I write Scala 90% of the time. 99% of the time, before I call any function, I jump "navigate to source" in intelliJ, and have a quick glance on it. Most of the time, type ascription is enough, sometimes I skim through doc, and occasionally, if it's sketchy library, I look at implementation. This is very quick process that takes maybe 10-15seconds. Sometimes when Im not under pressure, while I'm at sources, I check also some similiar APIs, and implementation, to see and learn 'hows' and 'whys'. Using this I quickly gain pretty solid knowledge of libraries I use.

If I'm really stuck, I opened 3d party github, and scan issues, to see if there's something similiar. Lots of times there is issue or something, but I'll admit, lots of time there isn't. This is when I start googling, which sometimes take me to Stackoverflow. If not, I use gitter to ask authors. But this happen very rarely. Mostly all I need to do is dictated by library types I use. Occasionally, with shitty libraries that bring external configuration I have to check their docs on github.

But I think it may be language related. Or experience perhaps. I had to do a bit of javascript with node.js (2 weeks +-), and I visited SO very very very often.

Normally whenever I'm learning new language or framework, navigating to sources is my fasttrack to both language and framework/lib. There isn't a better way to learn what's right way to do stuff than to see authors of battle tested libraries solving difficult problems, and learning from their style. I can recommend that :)

I'll admit your mileage may vary, and this may be specific to my job, but I'm pretty happy with this workflow, and I don't have anything against people using SO or something.

Edit: I had forgotten important part - occasionally I spin REPL and try what library really does there. But that's also one of last resorts, when I'm stuck :) In Scala we have http://www.lihaoyi.com/Ammonite/ which makes it super easy to fetch and use external dependencies etc... so I guess tooling is also important part.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning Haskell has been made much easier with Haskell Book[1]. Unlike LYAH, it actually has a ton of exercises and in-depth explanations so you understand the why behind things as you make progress. That said, it requires discipline to read through. [1] http://haskellbook.com/

will this book be getting a paper release? i don't mind a pdf book, but at $59, i'd like a paper copy. just wondering if anybody knew.

Yes, but ask the author (@bitemyapp everywhere) about when.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#113
post #13

I wish there was one of these correlating gender (actual gender) of the author of the question and language.

Third chart on https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/01/19/women-in-the-2016-stac... , but it's not too interesting.

The differences are very small, and I am not too surprised with the relative popularity of Matlab and R compared to say Haskell, since there are relatively more women majoring in engineering that computer science, as well as relatively high numbers doing quantitative work in the social sciences. I wonder why Rust, though, is such a huge outlier. Maybe it is just noisy because there are so few people asking about Rust at all on Stack Overflow.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the parent, but here's what I'd do (and, indeed, have done): Read the manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html Just sit down one weekend, and read it from beginning to end. The information contained therein is just about exhaustive. Assuming you touch bash scripts daily (as I do), there's really little excuse for not mastering the language. Referring to SO every time you stumble into an issu…

Amen. Writing a bash script? Branch off a separate terminal and type `man bash`.

I have a big distaste for bash, and am happy to copy paste anything similar from stackoverflow. Shame on me though!

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#117
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also, languages with good documentation will be referred to less on SO.

The article is about fluctuating interest dependent on time of day. Unless Haskell's documentation is worse at night than it is during the day, your perfectly parroted talking-point is controlled for.

> your perfectly parroted talking-point is controlled for.

Sorry?

Did I take the jam out of your donut or something?

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#118
post #2

Otherwise written as "what programming languages are being asked about late at night." To me, who rarely pulls up SO, correlating SO questions and page views with usage is a bit biased.

Whoah! The big news for me is that there is a programmer who rarely uses SO. I use it constantly. Can you say more about: 1. What your programming set up is. 2. What you do when there is an issue? I didn't know there was a reasonable alternative. I do the Google -> SO a lot. The only time Google brings up a different page is if the question is REALLY basic like how to use a function. Edit: added this postscript: I ha…

> 2. What you do when there is an issue?

This is fascinating to me. What kind of issues are you finding solutions to on SO? The only times I ever find myself using the programming SO are if I'm learning a new language or looking up algorithm ideas for a problem.

If there's a linking error or something, the solution (if it exists) is usually on a mailing list, not SO. This may come down to differences in tool selection.

Re. question 1 I mostly use Haskell, Python, and C(++).

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#119
post #116
post #108

> C# programmers start and stop their day earlier Maybe because they're often in finance? Why wasn't Java compared?

I can't answer why but if you want to see the Java stats, they shared this tool : https://dgrtwo.shinyapps.io/tag-traffic-hour/

Oh nice. Well, C# still starts earlier than Java. Interesting. I thought they'd line up more.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#120
post #3

"Learning haskell" is pretty much in the same category as "Write that novel I've been thinking about."

Hehe, those have both been on my to-do-one-day-this-time-for-sure-list for quite a while.

I remember Lisp having a fixed place on that list (pun intended?) for a number of years, copious amount of caffeine, weed, and patience eventually allowed me to grok it. Haskell has been more stubborn in that regard. I get the functional part just fine, but the part where you get side effects and I/O and such confuses me to no end. Maybe I should just give up on Haskell finally and try OCaml, which seems to offer many of the same benefits.

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