The Hard Part of Learning a Language

Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by moreaccountspls on Saturday May 30, 2020 @08:28AM (#23360685)

You're entitled to your opinion, but most of it is 100% bullshit in my eyes.

I'll use Haskell as example. The ecosystem is a mess. `stack` is admirable effort to make development palatable, but it's ultimately a technical solution papering over a cultural issue: The community [including the language designers!] have 0 respect for backwards compatibility.

The node ecosystem is seems to be the worst at this. Not only is there no real respect for backwards compatibility, but it seems that the real purpose for a lot of the stuff is created is to 1) bolster the creator's resume and status or 2) to get funding from a VC. Certainly all ecosystems have that to some degree, but node just feels like the worst, by far.

I've written all the major languages with this problem professionally [except node]. It's not that I don't understand. It's that I did spend my time on understanding this and it was such a complete waste of time in retrospect. The solution isn't to spend more time learning the tooling. It's to only work in ecosystems that don't waste your time.

edit: Any ecosystem that has some notion of a "langauge version manager" is a big clue to me that I'm about to spend a lot of time learning a bunch of non-portable information.

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by mettamage on Saturday May 30, 2020 @08:52AM (#23360818)

Which ecosystems don’t waste your time, according to you?

Just curious.

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by moreaccountspls on Saturday May 30, 2020 @09:01AM (#23360857)

Java is pretty good. Go. C because of the nature of how libraries are shipped. Just as an example:

"0 - libcurl 7.1, August 2000

1 - libcurl 7.5 December 2000

2 - libcurl 7.7 March 2001

3 - libcurl 7.12.0 June 2004

4 - libcurl 7.16.0 October 2006"

"During the first seven years of libcurl releases, there have only been four ABI breakages.

We are determined to bump the SONAME as rarely as possible. Ideally, we never do it again."

This is the attitude of what I want out of my dependencies.

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by sitkack on Saturday May 30, 2020 @09:56AM (#23361219)

Have you had an experience with Cargo, the Rust package manager? It is an absolute joy to work with, clean repeatable builds, and fast for what you are getting (speed of C++ with the correctness of Haskell).

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by moreaccountspls on Saturday May 30, 2020 @10:23AM (#23361387)

Not really. I've played with Rust but haven't used it in anger. One thing I've noticed about my programming style is that I LOVE to learn about new languages and language features. Using a language like Go or Java forces to me concentrate on the problem at hand [which almost always something where GC is fine for what I'm working on]. That said, the Rust ecosystem seems pretty solid [except the edition stuff, that makes me very leery...]

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by qppo on Saturday May 30, 2020 @11:15AM (#23361733)

Editions exist to guarantee forward compatibility, it's actually a really good solution to a hard problem.

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by tome on Saturday May 30, 2020 @02:59PM (#23363665)

It started at major version 7?

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by erikbye on Saturday May 30, 2020 @04:01PM (#23364143)

First release was major version 4, same as curl (using that name) itself.

https://curl.haxx.se/docs/history.html

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by elcritch on Saturday May 30, 2020 @02:40PM (#23363496)

I’ve been happy with the Elixir/Erlang world. Especially as a scripting/dynamic language it’s been remarkably stable from a "don’t waste my time" perspective. Core system features from years back work, and generally work with updated libraries.

Well despite a few major changes to Phoenix, but that was mostly changes to the naming patterns. It also switched to web pack which I consider a pain point of following JS development. With LiveView I only have a dozen JS deps and ~50 lines of JS so now I can get off the JS ratrace too! Well github complains about outdated npm deps. I should make a GH action for that or something.

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Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language by ric2b on Saturday May 30, 2020 @05:13PM (#23364784)

Ruby is quite practical.

It has a decent standard library (so you don't waste tons of time evaluating/choosing libraries for basic things) and has a simple package management story with bundler, which separates what libraries you want (Gemfile) from what specific versions you happen to be using (Gemfile.lock).

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