It feels like anything is mowed down on the internet. I’ve been a dev for a long time too, and I never feel sure when I chose a stack for a new toy project (in my day job I rarely get to chose, so that’s a non issue there)
Typescript with ts-node the only viable language
Everything else subject to some other influencers whim. Unless you can join front end with backend, they are all for children and thus destined to failure
Only half /s
Run what you want. Understand that Typescript has what you need, in general. And break out when you can justify it. And you probably can’t!
I thought I loved ts-node, since it’s a good patch over some annoying issues in node.
But I retried deno a few months ago (after having first tried it when it first came out) and I realised that I only ever liked ts-node, and that I actually loved deno.
Deno just ran ts as if it was ts-node without needing a dependency, or startup time, or any prior setup, and it did it so fast I thought something was wrong. It was great.
As a society and as individual computer scientists, none of us actually know what a computer is or how to use them. All programming languages are guesses, mere attempts to encode our natural-language reasoning and philosophy in the purely syntactic and formal fashion required by computers. Don’t let yourself become biased in favor of specific languages; instead, understand that all languages are bad in different ways.
And don’t forget, that much of what people criticize isn’t the language per se, but the community/ecosystem around it.
NPM is objectively bad, but Javascript is by no means coupled to it.
Java projects are often very “verbose”, but that’s a choice by the developer of the libraries and apps, not so much Java itself.
Ecosystems matter, though. In fact, I think they’re the hardest part to learn for most languages.
You can try to get away from NPM, but you’ll always run across instructions on how to do a thing in NPM. Do it any other way, and you’re on your own.
You can try to write Java in a less verbose way, but the standard library will fight you before we even talk about third party libs.
Python is for some reason darling of many, sometimes it has almost religious connotations. Meanwhile differences from e.g. PHP are mostly superficial and each has their strengths and weaknesses.
Bourne shell is orders of magnitude worse clusterf*ck than JavaScript, yet it’s rarely criticized.
Rust rarely gets criticized which isn’t necessarily a problem, since it’s IMHO a good language for its intended use case. But people tend to recommend it for things where the trade offs come out negative. (apps not needing max. performance)
In general I wouldn’t follow the trends on social media, it’s all a huge groupthink, mostly focusing on (easily avoidable) warts, and ignoring strengths.
Bourne shell is orders of magnitude worse…
PowerShell is to bash what a fighter jet is to a model airplane, but you don’t dare mention it or you’ll get chewed out.
I prefer it to python too, I must be the antichrist.
That’s because PowerShell blurs the line between programming language and scripting language. By accessing the entire .NET library, of course it’s going to have more features than a basic scripting language that relies on open source utilities installed on the system.
The reasons people hate it are because they hate Microsoft, it breaks from traditional shells too far, and it’s a pain in the ass to type (verbose). To use PowerShell effectively, you almost need to write full software programs. At that point, just use C#.
As for you preferring it to Python… I think you don’t know Python. I’m trying to come up with every way possible to make PowerShell sound better than Python, and I got nothing. Maybe you don’t like whitespace? I cannot understand your point of view here. Help me out
I use both ALOT professionally. I can say I prefer Python over PowerShell anyway… Except for Windows automation, where PS is actually pretty dope. Bash is okay, I’ve seen folks write shit in it that should have been done in Python, or GoLang, or literally anything else.
That being said, I won’t go near Rust, not because it’s a bad language feature wise, but my brain hurts when I try and read Rust code.
Bourne shell is orders of magnitude worse clusterf*ck than JavaScript, yet it’s rarely criticized.
Both have their place. Bourne shell scripts are great as a container for connecting the various tools you have around - and for that kind of relatively simple script is way easier to use than something like Powershell. If you use it for something more complex you’re probably an idiot.
Same with Javascript - if you need to annoy someone with popups on a website, or have something dance around in the window it’s a great language. If you use it for something else you’re probably also an idiot.
There is a good quote from Bjarne Stroustrup for that “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”. I think for hobby projects it’s the best to use languages that interest you
This for sure. At work (fe dev), I need to get things done quickly and reliably, so I use Svelte. At home, I’m just playing around, so I’ll try things that are out of my wheelhouse or strange, eg rn I’m rebuilding the site I always rebuild in Qwik, Go, and Surrealdb - why? Because they seem neat. (Though I might just rm rf that to build something on Bun, because is there anything is can’t do?)
Haven’t heard a bad thing here about COBOL (yet).
