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Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
121–130 of 172 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#122Nine years ago I started my hobby project in Go (round about when v1.0 came out). I thought the language looked interesting, kind of like C without the hard parts and with the added benefits of concurrency and I was excited to learn it despite no-one having heard of it. 9 years later Go is not such a niche language. Rclone is doing ok too :-)
Another really nice feature of Go is that the language preserves backwards compatibility. If you built a hobby project in some other 1.0 languages, you’d be pretty out of luck (ahem, looking at you, Dart).
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#123No side projects yet, but I chose to learn Pharo [0] because I believe it'll make me hyper productive for certain side projects [1]. The reason: I use the debugger and REPLs a lot when programming. Pharo is a language with a debugger + REPL + language reflection tools on steroids. Also, I want to see up close what Alan Kay went on and on about. From what I've seen, Pharo has a few things that would make Bret Victor p…
I would also really like to use Pharo more. I tried it for Advent of Code last year [0]. However, I just can't get over the unmanageable custom windowing system going on within the main window. Their isn't an easy way to iterate through windows, find windows, close windows and stop them from overlapping with each other all the time! It would be great to have some kind of Jetbrains/VSCode/modern IDE style layout where all the ancillary structures become panes that are always in a particular position and can be toggled on and off.
That and the lack of a vim editing mode (sorry, but I find it very hard to write code in an editor without vim style bindings, even though I don't use vim itself most of the time), make it a pretty painful experience.
In general, while Smalltalk the environment is a great idea, I think its UI could use some improvements and be much more keyboard driven.
Also, namespaces/modules please.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#124No side projects yet, but I chose to learn Pharo [0] because I believe it'll make me hyper productive for certain side projects [1]. The reason: I use the debugger and REPLs a lot when programming. Pharo is a language with a debugger + REPL + language reflection tools on steroids. Also, I want to see up close what Alan Kay went on and on about. From what I've seen, Pharo has a few things that would make Bret Victor p…
I would also really like to use Pharo more. I tried it for Advent of Code last year [0]. However, I just can't get over the unmanageable custom windowing system going on within the main window. Their isn't an easy way to iterate through windows, find windows, close windows and stop them from overlapping with each other all the time! It would be great to have some kind of Jetbrains/VSCode/modern IDE style layout where…
Would https://github.com/unchartedworks/SmalltalkVimMode help with your vim needs? (I'm not into vim so I have no idea if that's the best place to start.)
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#125I've been enjoying learning some new niche languages over the past year, Nim and V, using my favorite types of hobby projects to do so. I started learning Nim a few years ago, and came back to it last year after seeing it had improved in a number of areas. I started working on a practical utility, a self-contained document uploader system that could be customized for certain departments at work. Eg, take a Word docum…
If you used to use Delphi then why not use freepascal and Lazarus? Seems like an ideal match for your needs.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#126Re: niche languages—Hacker News is written in a dialect of Lisp called Arc: - https://github.com/wting/hackernews - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
That explains the stable feature set :)
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#127Not sure if Clojure is considered niche, but anyway I do it because it's the most fun programming language for me.
Clojure is absolutely niche. The only non-niche languages are COBOL, Fortran, C, C++, Python, Java, Javascript, Go.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#128Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#129I did the licensing server for Lunar ( https://lunar.fyi/ ) in Crystal. It’s been a joy to work with it! The standard library for working with strings, JSON, YAML and XML is top notch. Type safe and extremely fast, very important characteristics for a licensing server that is queried hundreds of times a second. I used the super simple Kemal HTTP server library which I like for APIs where most of the logic happens on…
Did you know Ruby before learning Crystal? I've been looking into it on and off, but it seems the documentation is mostly written as an "on top of Ruby docs" thing, as in it seems to assume you mostly already know the Ruby way of doing things and mentions only where things are different. That makes it harder to figure things out in the language, having to search the Crystal docs and then Ruby docs and figure out whic…
I didn’t know Ruby, and yes, some things had to be figured out through old Ruby knowledge. But that wasn’t as much of a barrier.
Every language that gets a little creative will have these features that you probably never saw, have no idea what to do with them and when is a best practice to use them.
Things like fibers, or the ways to do iteration without a for-loop, or the do…end closure syntax. They’re new and weird for non-Ruby devs, but they have their advantages, and you just have to try and use them a few times and they’ll become as common as your previous language.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#130Because I can't get a job writing Haskell without having a PhD and some 5+ years of experience in the language even though I've been in the SWE field for 10+ years, so I have to get the fix for my addiction from somewhere else.
Need haskell help pls ping email in profile