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Ask HN: Did you ever fall out of Love with a Programming Language

by CloseChoice on 9/6/22, 2:21 PM with 17 comments

• by chewz on 9/6/22, 2:30 PM

  Sure. Python. Two scripts stoped working for me recently, I just have re-written them in Go... I see no point of using Python anymore...

  It is the opposite of my experience with Perl. I used to write some scripts in Perl just for fun long after Perl got stucked.

• by lovelearning on 9/6/22, 4:15 PM

  Yes, with Java.

  Compared to (Visual) C++, it was so damned easy to develop basic CLI and desktop applications. Lots of batteries included in the default JDK. By a happy coincidence, it was also a time when Java was being used for lots of shiny enterprisey stuff like "big data" and "application servers" -- Hadoop, Spring, Spark, Storm, etc. So I found myself in a profitable ecosystem at the right time with the right skills.

  But I had also slowly started using Python regularly. Compared to Java, I found it far less verbose and with even more batteries included. Data processing, text processing, ML, DS, hardware interfacing, using native frameworks - everything's so damned easy! I think the introduction of Raspberry Pi around 2011-2012 had a lot to do with my liking Python. Moreover, that kind of tinkering actually helped me regrow a love for programming itself after a difficult time career-wise.

  Python's been my default language for everything from 7-8 years now - CLI, desktop, and web app backends. I still work with Java on Solr/ES search nowadays but it's not my default language for anything. I have tried working with Node and Go and learnt a little bit of Rust but I still prefer Python.

• by adrianmsmith on 9/6/22, 8:01 PM

  In the 90s I was very into Objective-C, I thought it was a great programming language. You could drop down to C for performance critical sections, but for the 90% which wasn't performance critical the OO was much nicer to use than C++ IMHO.

  I even moved countries because in the 90s NeXT wasn't a really popular platform, and there weren't many jobs. Most jobs were C++ jobs.

  It took me a year and a half of pain at my first job to finally decide it wasn't for me.

  - I developed a system using WebObjects, all in compiled Objective-C. If I had a single user in the office using it, normally my server would crash after about 15 minutes of usage. Double-free or use-after-free. I had already spend time tracking down memory issues but I spent a whole day looking for more and finally found one. Proudly deployed the software. It stayed up longer. Crashed after about 30 minutes. There were more memory bugs. It was just basically impossible to get right IMHO.

  - Nulls. You look at the result of a piece of code and the result is null. Why is it null? [foo bar] (or foo.bar() in more conventional syntax) if foo is null, no NullPointerException is thrown, the result is just null. So if the result is null, ONE of the inputs or return values from a function or something was null before. Which one? Don't know.

  The second job of my career was Perl. Perl might not have been perfect but it solved both those problems and I was happy. Debugging time was a lot shorter due to better null handling (if something's null you learn about it closer to the source of the problem), some hunting for memory cycles which the GC couldn't find but that was rare, basically it "just worked".

• by manojkumarsmks on 9/6/22, 5:55 PM

  Yup, was in love with Java!

  I learned programming on 8051 microcontroller, Assembly Language. Loved it It took awhile to get over it and learn C, which I loved. During a networking course I took, 600 level course, I did my first couple of assignments in C and damn it took a while to finish this assignment, this was during my master and then when my best friend introduced me to Java!!

  I fell in love with it and have been working on in for last 8 years, but recently I started working on JS and Node, they are even better. It depends whom you talk with, based on my experience I would not want to be an expert in one language, I want to learn the upcoming technologies.

  Falling in love with a language (Java) and also may being arrogant that I know all the programming concepts kind of made it difficult to learn Node, specially thought java has callbacks, I wasn't used to it and my brain wasn't ready to understand those concepts well when I was learning in JS.

  Moral : Go in to learn as if you don't know anything.

• by dgunay on 9/6/22, 7:49 PM

  Used to really like PHP.

  I liked it because it was my first serious programming language out of college. I worked in it every day at my first job. I followed its progress closely and advocated for migrating to PHP 7 ASAP. I wrote numerous hobby projects in it (including one that ironically helped me get my current job, years after I had stopped using PHP).

  I stopped liking it as much after I just got more exposure to all the different languages out there and what they were good at. PHP doesn't deserve its reputation anymore but there are some things it will just never be great at, and that's OK. I stopped liking dynamic languages as much in general, and started preferring statically typed ones.

  I learned so much about general web standards and core backend web dev skills by implementing various services in PHP. HTTP, FTP (and its various flavors), JSON, XML, regex, etc.

• by mikecoles on 9/7/22, 4:52 PM

  BASIC, Pascal, and C in school. BASIC was because it was the first I picked up. Pascal was more organized. C operates in the same manner as I do.

  C and Go the last few years. Go makes quick solutions possible. I'm not a coder, just need some glue at times. C is still the go-to for microcontrollers (in my world).

• by bcrl on 9/7/22, 12:12 AM

  Back in the mid 1990s I had a summer job porting a map engine from Visual Basic to a Java applet running inside of Netscape. It ended up being a performance optimization nightmare. Because $reasons, the database stored polygons as strings, and parsing strings in Java to get the coordinates needed to draw the polygons was ridiculously slow when doing it the Java way. I ended up having to write my own custom string parsing code to avoid all the overhead associated with object creation and garbage collection when using the Java string libraries to get barely passable performance drawing the simplest of maps. It probably didn't help that computers were still only running in the hundreds of MHz at the time, but that experience ended up souring me on Java for just about anything else.

• by daltont on 9/6/22, 7:20 PM

  I was really into Scala from 2007-2011. I even presented at conferences. Still like it, but after a while it become apparent that is will always be a niche language and Java 8 and Kotlin (which I think of as kind of a 'Scala--') was functional enough for my tastes.

• by aristofun on 9/7/22, 2:34 AM

  I was in love with java in 00-s as my first professional language, 10 years later I’ve grown up.

  The world has then moved forward to web, open source and more lightweight environments and mindsets.

  But java stayed essentially the same verbose corporate heavy monster.

  And i left that old, arrogant and picky lady to hang out with young, pretty and more open minded alternatives like ruby, typescript etc.

  Looking back now I think i fell in love not with java, but rather the team/project i worked at and the bright future java was promising.

• by ffhhj on 9/7/22, 1:01 AM

  Pascal was the thing in the 90s, specially with Turbo Pascal and Delphi. For me that was the golden decade of programming with WWW opening a whole new world.

• by dafelst on 9/6/22, 6:38 PM

  Yeah, Ruby. Wonderful, expressive language, but oh my God, so slow.

• by schappim on 9/6/22, 7:42 PM

  Yes, the age old falling out of love with PHP when I tried Ruby.