I would love to use a niche language, but I am targeting the web with my side project (along with ajax and websockets), which relegates me to javascript one way or another.
Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
71–80 of 172 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#72I would love to use a niche language, but I am targeting the web with my side project (along with ajax and websockets), which relegates me to javascript one way or another.
there's always WASM
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#73Elm may be niche (even if The Elm Architecture no longer is), but it's pretty great to code with. Especially since the backend is Go (nice enough, but way less fun).
I'm convinced statically typed functional languages are significantly more productive.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#74I would love to use a niche language, but I am targeting the web with my side project (along with ajax and websockets), which relegates me to javascript one way or another.
there's always WASM
I'll have to look into it more, but I'm not sure how networking is possible through WASM. I could see some external hooks in an API of some sort but not sure how you'd compile to access it.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#75I would love to use a niche language, but I am targeting the web with my side project (along with ajax and websockets), which relegates me to javascript one way or another.
You could use Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView and virtually eliminate the need for JS development on your part. You could probably to this with the latest version of Ruby on Rails too, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#76I know a lot of different languages, but I use Elixir exclusively on my web-based hobby projects because it makes me happy. I use Crystal for command line utilities for the same reason.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#77[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#78Nine 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 :-)
I was happy to find that with Go, I can target my low-end NAS, which runs a Marvell Armada CPU. The binaries run just fine.
(If this is easy with other compiled languages, let me know. Maybe gcc?)
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#79Because 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.
> Because 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
I got a Haskell job and don't even have a degree.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you programming your hobby projects in a niche language?
#80Agree with the OP that it is a dopamine hit to find something that's niche, which also agrees with your sensibility or mental model, or to find the "sweet spot" to use a sport analogy.
For day job I code in high level languages like: javascript/typescript, python, and back in the day: ruby, perl, and php. Never was comfortable in C/C++ but always wanted to get more proficient. And felt like to be honest programmer, I need to know a systems language.
Lately I've been learning Zig https://ziglang.org/ and I'm quite happy with the developer experience, despite it's only at version 0. It's kind of a whole new world I didn't think even possible: C level performance, but with great ergonomics and just basically: it's fun to develop in! Like C, but fun and safe(er).