Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

JS doesn't have first-class environments, so you can't have the same safety guarantees. Added with its weak typing... You could instruct JS to calculate anything.

Visual Programming might possibly be useful for end users, but in most areas, there are better approaches.

Serving limited environments to users is useful in at least these situations:

* nREPL * Database APIs (ala firebase) * Mathematical APIs (ala Mathematica)

Some of these I've needed in production, such as more precise calculations for statistics. (FloNum integrations into pre-existing applications).

My main point was, LISP is unconstrained, but still gives safety to the programmer.

A simple example of a first class environment:

    (eval (read (current-input-port)) 
    (let
      ((add (lambda args (apply + args))) 
        (null-environment))) 

The only function exposed is called add. There isn't a way to break that. It makes embedding Scheme into applications such as GIMP or games much easier.

(Just a side note, antimony [0] seems to be gaining popularity in its niche)

[0] https://github.com/mkeeter/antimony

I'd been coding on the side from 12 years old right up through grad school; many different languages at many different levels. Assembly languages, BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Cobol, Forth, Prolog, Java, etc. Through it all I thought I'd eventually go into robotics where I'd primarily be a Mechanical Engineer building things, and writing software on the side for tools and controlling my creations.

Then a friend offered me a software development job that I couldn't turn down, developing in a language I hadn't used before: Perl. It changed my life. I could never handle large projects before because it was too much code and too much hassle to manage it all, but Perl is so good at letting me express what I want the computer to do that wasn't a problem anymore. Perl allowed me to make software development my career, instead of just one of the tasks I did as part of my career.

Later on, I had a similar experience with jQuery. I had been using Javascript since it first came out, but it was such a hassle to deal with the DOM and cross-browser issues that it was never worthwhile to do anything important with Javascript. The maintenance cost was too high. So we added little nice-to-have enhancements to our webapp, but nothing that had to work. Then jQuery came along and changed everything. It was suddenly much cheaper to develop complex and required functionality in javascript, and client-side web development became a big part of the platform.

I have just started using C# and .NET Core after years of dismissing it when it was only available on Windows. Now it is open source and cross platform! I come from a PHP background but have been writing smaller performance critical code in Go lately.

C# is a pleasure to work with. It's got generics and good support for asynchronous I/O. .NET Core is also very good, it's dead simple to spin up an API serving backend using .NET MVC.

Lastly, I think the community is great. I have jumped into a couple different projects - one is a MySQL driver and another is a MySQL implementation of the EntityFramework ORM. I was able to contribute after just a few weeks of working with C#. Microsoft seems very dedicated to continually improving the language as they develop in the open on GitHub and take user feedback.

for C++ development: The usage of tracing tools like windows performance analyzer or instruments. windows crash/freeze dump analyzer. malloc guard or application verifier to find memory acess violations. Theese tools are often very helpful and speeds up our work to find the culprits for the really hard cases.

Agree on this, and am at the same stage myself; C# is a huge transition from e.g. Php (or ColdFusion). Can't help but be amazed at the doors it opens up though - Pluralsight is definitely one of your friends here. Jon Skeet's walkthrough of C# 4, SOLID, the courses on DDD etc - so much to learn! :) MS Dev Essentials will give you a 3 month sub for free, if you didn't have that already.