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Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#31

Post by cglong »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #8
firebaze wrote: post #6

Quoted post unavailable.

This is a site for programmers, not a world affairs site. "Discussing pet languages" is entirely within the scope of the site. There are about a zillion other places on the web to discuss current events. Maybe try one of them instead? (edit) From the FAQ: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute a…

I disagree with GP, but one of my favorite parts about HN is that it isn't just "a site for programmers" :)

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#32

Post by smoyer »

noodles_nomore wrote: post #12

I enjoy cleanly organizing code more than getting things done. I can't help it.

I tend to do the same thing but try to remember the adage that "perfection is the enemy of good". I might also be guilty of trying to write tests that are a small amount of code but cover lots of edge-cases.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#33

Post by nickcw »

Nine 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 :-)

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#34

Post by sprior »

I thought it would be interesting and appropriate to write the high level behavior code for a home automation system in Prolog so I did. It has evolved a lot, but has been running things in the house for almost 20 years now. It currently sends commands and receives stimuli via MQTT and is running in a Docker container.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#37

Post by henning »

Rust is picking up momentum with industrial use but is overall still pretty uncommon. rayon (https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon) makes it easy to use all your CPU cores. for simple cases, it can be literally a one line change to turn a single-threaded loop into a parallel one.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#38

Post by throwamon »

mehphp wrote: post #29

I converted my (profitable) side-project to Elixir because I fell in love with the language. While I still like it, that has mostly worn off and I regret rewriting it for the most part.

Would you mind expanding on why you regret it?

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#39

Post by pedrovhb »

sprior wrote: post #34

I thought it would be interesting and appropriate to write the high level behavior code for a home automation system in Prolog so I did. It has evolved a lot, but has been running things in the house for almost 20 years now. It currently sends commands and receives stimuli via MQTT and is running in a Docker container.

I'd love to see this!

That exact idea has been tingling through my mind for a while. I did some experiments, but Prolog (and anything logic programming, really) is a bit of a pain to integrate nicely with Python, which is what I'm building my system with.

I'm looking to make things declarative as much as possible, but having Prolog manage the automation rules would be next level. I imagine it abstracts away a lot of the boilerplate and unnecessary implementation details.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?

#40

Post by ufmace »

To actually do work on a hobby project, I have to find something about it actually interesting. Building yet another CRUD app in a standard language and framework for a Business Factory may be productive, but it's kind of dull. Meh unless you're paying me market wages for it. I usually try to pack things that are interesting to me into hobby projects. Maybe the business goal, or using a language or framework that's new to me, or an interesting deployment technique, etc. Maybe I'll learn something actually useful to me, or maybe the new thing will be a dead end. If the end product is useful enough to me and the language etc turns out to be a dead end, I might rewrite it in something more maintainable, rather than just let it die.
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