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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?

#61

Post by giraffe_lady »

mysterydip wrote: post #43
bluedays wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously thought I was the only one. I could spend hours refactoring and organizing code

I find it's also a great way to procrastinate. "Trying to fix this elusive bug or design this new feature is becoming time consuming and boring... but I bet I could shave a few cycles off my rendering loop (again)"

the core protocol implementation is 90% there but in a way that prevents the entire project from functioning? time to refactor an unrelated state machine for the third time.

literally a decision I made on a side project a few weeks ago.

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

#63

Post by zelphirkalt »

It is usually niche languages, which are ahead of their time and coming up with interesting ideas or get rid of annoyances of entrenched languages. I want to be free of the annoyances of the languages, which I use on the job. I want elegance in expression and to be able to do things very cleanly.

There is also the aspect, that many only learn some mainstream language and do not look further. This in turn limits what is used in many workplaces. It is simply people not further exploring and educating themselves. I do not say, that they have to do that in their free time, but I myself, in my free time, do not want to be limited by mainstream choices, like I would be in most places at work.

I also need new interesting things in my software life. The ordinary stuff bores me. I try to learn more things. There are many things to learn from niche or at least non-mainstream languages.

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

#64

Post by egberts1 »

Bro, i meant, Zeek.

Wrote a lot of fancy packet captures in that language.

Most favorite capture was Quantum where some unknown source tried to hijack one of my TCP connections, and Zeek caught it and reported it … dutifully.

https://zeek.org/

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

#65

Post by mehphp »

throwamon wrote: post #38
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?

It's nothing specific about Elixir itself, it's just that I don't use it for literally anything else (nor do I see that changing). So, for me, it's just another tech stack to keep up with when I could have just stuck with the tech stacks I already know and work just fine.

I still think Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView are great technologies, but I don't think they offer me anything professionally that the current stuff doesn't; at least not for my use cases.

There was an opportunity cost to making the switch too, and I feel like that was a poor use of time.

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

#69

Post by ushakov »

alin23 wrote: post #54

I 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…

i love Crystal too!

one downside for me is the development speed, compile time is definitely noticeable if you come from an interpreted language

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

#70

Post by bingo-bongo »

alin23 wrote: post #54

I 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…

Crystal is great!

After ~10 years with Ruby, I decided to try out Crystal for my latest weird hobby project (a modern style bbs) and I have enjoyed it so much!

Considering the relatively short lifespan of Crystal, I was positively surpriced how good the documentation was and how fast, easy and stable the language it already is :)

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