9 ms·

How I fell in love with a programming language

58 points by braythwayt 10y ago

astrobe_ 10y ago
You know you love something when you can't help but coming back to it. I love a terrible language - it's ugly, it's stupid, it's mean. I dumped it again and again, but after a few months I end up missing it.
- keypusher 10y ago
  That's not love, that's an abusive relationship.
  - dashoffset 10y ago
    Or capture-bonding.
- coltonv 10y ago
  What language?
  - astrobe_ 10y ago
    A home-made dialect of Forth.
partisan 10y ago
I really want to try Kotlin out. I want to give it a chance. The problem is that I can't help but feel it will become abandonware in the future. Somebody will buy JetBrains or they will start cutting costs and then Kotlin will be no more. Am I being unreasonable here? As an aside, I've felt that same "love" feeling with Scala, Clojure, and Nim. It's a great feeling because you start to imagine what can be.
- sago 10y ago
  I don't think you're being unreasonable. In my experimentation I concluded that Kotlin was largely chasing a subset mindshare of Scala, so I see it being at a long term disadvantage. That said, one killer app can make a language, so who knows. But if you want a typed expressive hybrid-paradigm JVM language, it seems Scala is the obvious choice.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    I agree with you, however currently JetBrains is making sure Kotlin works reasonable well on Android, while no one really cares about Scala on Android. Yes many in the Scala community do care, but there isn't an ongoing effort with Android Studio tooling integration as in Kotlin. So this could be a way for it to pick up steam, but it remains to be seen if the Android team still keeps the "We care only about Java" attitude at the upcoming Google IO.
    - sago 10y ago
      Good point, and one I've got a blindspot for because we're not coding for Android (other than via Unity). So yes, that could be enough of the 'killer app', if Android stays with Java. Do you have any intuition for why 'nobody cares about Scala on Android'? Not doubting you, just curious.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        I doubt they would move away from Java, in spite of the ongoing trial. The question is officially supporting other JVM languages. There are some people writing sbt plugins for Android development, but that is not the same as the full Android Studio development experience.
    - airless_bar 10y ago
      Android integration works fine, and the SBT builder is so much better and faster than Google's Gradle one. In fact SBT + ProGuard is faster than Gradle + no ProGuard.
apo 10y ago
http://try.kotlinlang.org/ http://try.kotlinlang.org/
galfarragem 10y ago
Then there is that situation when you hate a language. In my case is JS or Java. They are clearly languages to learn -it could simplify my life- but I don't feel like even to start.
crabasa 10y ago
I can't believe someone wrote an entire post about falling in love with a programming language and didn't include a single line of code from that language.
- bsaul 10y ago
  I think it's on purpose. He doesn't want to talk about kotlin in particular, but rather about the feeling of loving a language.
  - golemotron 10y ago
    Let's not turn HN into a feelings confessional. Please.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - crabasa 10y ago
    It may have been on purpose, but it just felt very hollow. The author didn't even bother linking to the resource [1] for trying Kotlin that apo helpfully shared in a comment below. I think if you embed the famous "mind blown" animated gif in your blog post, you owe it to your readers to say quite a bit more about what's so amazing. [1]: http://try.kotlinlang.org/ http://try.kotlinlang.org/
bluejekyll 10y ago
This is exactly the feeling I've had with Rust. I love programming in it, it is so much more rewarding than any other programming language. I nearly felt this way about Swift, and Kotlin looks like it would be great too. But Rust reminds me so much of how much I love C and how little you needed to get going, all the OS tools at your disposal, etc. I haven't had the same pleasure in learning Go or any other language. But I totally agree, even if it's in your spare time, find the language you love and start contributing to the open source community for it.
ak39 10y ago
Just wait a month or so when it'll sound like a rebound relationship that went horribly wrong.
ktRolster 10y ago
Alan Perlis famously said, "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." A lot of times you can learn something in a new language, and then bring it back to other languages. For a simple example, programming in Python might give a programmer the insight that she doesn't need to write a factory for every class; or writing in Haskall might give him the idea that immutability is a good idea. Then when the programmer returns to her original language, she can use those techniques, adapted to the original language.
- kerkeslager 10y ago
  This is definitely a good reason to learn new languages, but it does have its limits. Examples: 1. Erlang has done a lot of work to make their actors lightweight. In Erlang it's not only common to spawn a new actor for everything, but it's generally a good idea that organizes your code flexibly and results in transparent scaling onto multiple cores. On other systems that support actors, the actors aren't as lightweight, so while they're useful for organizing your code in some cases, using them pervasively will result in cripplingly slow performance and, depending on the language, completely exhausting thread/process resources. 2. Some schemes support CPS conversion and TCO, which allows you to use recursion at relatively little cost and without worrying about exhausting the stack. However, in languages that support TCO and not CPS conversion, it takes some work to be sure that your recursive calls are tail calls. And in languages that don't do either CPS conversion or TCO, deep recursion performs poorly and infinite recursion breaks outright. This is why it's not only important to learn patterns in new languages, but to learn how those patterns are implemented under the covers.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
> I could barely comprehend how little I wrote to get something to work. There's a subset of developers that really fall in love with this idea. I try and understand where they're coming from but really have a hard time. The more involved with code reviews I've become through my career the more I recoil with fear when I hear this, recalling all the time I spent unbundling nested with nested within nested operations. In the end I believe less LOC as an end goal is largely for the satisfaction of the single engineer writing the code. It feels good at he time. Over time the super compact lines of code decay into hieroglyphics that cast a curse to the unlucky explorer that disturbs their tomb.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Someone 10y ago
  One man's hieroglyphics are another man's bread and butter. It is all about shared culture. You don't write empty x repeat a times repeat b times add an item to x count the items in x but the hieroglyphical x = a × b Because "everybody knows what multiplication is". And even the explicit loop has lots of shared culture, for example in the idea what variables are, what a loop is, where it ends, that we do not use × but asterisks for multiplication, etc. Modern languages may require more cultural background, but if that is useful for program comprehension that in itself isn't reason to say that disqualifies them. If it did, we would never have moved towards languages with malloc/free, garbage collection, or classes, the weirdness of IEEE floats, to mention a few things. So, any discussion about new terminology/language constructs should mention costs and benefits. Also, which of them is greater will often depend on the target audience.
- pbreit 10y ago
  How can you not understand that all things equal, less code is better? Clear and concise code is good. We're not talking about fancy, unintelligible minimizations. Have you coded in Python? Give it a try.
  - matt_wulfeck 10y ago
cdnsteve 10y ago
Whoa all the jetbrains projects are using this and they are the main backer of the language. Very interesting.
LyndsySimon 10y ago
I can relate to this. The first language I did any significant work in was PHP - and not modern PHP, which for all of its warts is at least usable, but 4.0.6. It was nasty, but I spent about three years writing it every day. Then I picked up Python. It was hard to grok for a few days, especially when I learned things that didn't quite click like "strings are immutable" and "this is a comprehension". After a month of working with it in my free time, one day things just clicked - and suddenly, Python code was no longer something I had to read line-by-line pausing to understand each action, but something I could skim quickly and understand without expending conscious effort to do so. It was glorious. That moment was about a decade ago, and I could probably write a book now on all the intricacies that I love about the language. I've toyed with other languages on the side, but I always come back to Python. I don't know if it fit the way my mind already approached problems or if it has changed my mental processes to conform to it - but it works for me.

58 points by braythwayt 10y ago

You know you love something when you can't help but coming back to it. I love a terrible language - it's ugly, it's stupid, it's mean. I dumped it again and again, but after a few months I end up missing it.

keypusher 10y ago
That's not love, that's an abusive relationship.
- dashoffset 10y ago
  Or capture-bonding.
coltonv 10y ago
What language?
- astrobe_ 10y ago
  A home-made dialect of Forth.

partisan 10y ago

I really want to try Kotlin out. I want to give it a chance. The problem is that I can't help but feel it will become abandonware in the future. Somebody will buy JetBrains or they will start cutting costs and then Kotlin will be no more. Am I being unreasonable here? As an aside, I've felt that same "love" feeling with Scala, Clojure, and Nim. It's a great feeling because you start to imagine what can be.

sago 10y ago
I don't think you're being unreasonable. In my experimentation I concluded that Kotlin was largely chasing a subset mindshare of Scala, so I see it being at a long term disadvantage. That said, one killer app can make a language, so who knows. But if you want a typed expressive hybrid-paradigm JVM language, it seems Scala is the obvious choice.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I agree with you, however currently JetBrains is making sure Kotlin works reasonable well on Android, while no one really cares about Scala on Android. Yes many in the Scala community do care, but there isn't an ongoing effort with Android Studio tooling integration as in Kotlin. So this could be a way for it to pick up steam, but it remains to be seen if the Android team still keeps the "We care only about Java" attitude at the upcoming Google IO.
  - sago 10y ago
    Good point, and one I've got a blindspot for because we're not coding for Android (other than via Unity). So yes, that could be enough of the 'killer app', if Android stays with Java. Do you have any intuition for why 'nobody cares about Scala on Android'? Not doubting you, just curious.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      I doubt they would move away from Java, in spite of the ongoing trial. The question is officially supporting other JVM languages. There are some people writing sbt plugins for Android development, but that is not the same as the full Android Studio development experience.
  - airless_bar 10y ago
    Android integration works fine, and the SBT builder is so much better and faster than Google's Gradle one. In fact SBT + ProGuard is faster than Gradle + no ProGuard.

apo 10y ago

http://try.kotlinlang.org/ http://try.kotlinlang.org/

galfarragem 10y ago

Then there is that situation when you hate a language. In my case is JS or Java. They are clearly languages to learn -it could simplify my life- but I don't feel like even to start.

crabasa 10y ago

I can't believe someone wrote an entire post about falling in love with a programming language and didn't include a single line of code from that language.

bsaul 10y ago
I think it's on purpose. He doesn't want to talk about kotlin in particular, but rather about the feeling of loving a language.
- golemotron 10y ago
  Let's not turn HN into a feelings confessional. Please.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- crabasa 10y ago
  It may have been on purpose, but it just felt very hollow. The author didn't even bother linking to the resource [1] for trying Kotlin that apo helpfully shared in a comment below. I think if you embed the famous "mind blown" animated gif in your blog post, you owe it to your readers to say quite a bit more about what's so amazing. [1]: http://try.kotlinlang.org/ http://try.kotlinlang.org/

bluejekyll 10y ago

This is exactly the feeling I've had with Rust. I love programming in it, it is so much more rewarding than any other programming language. I nearly felt this way about Swift, and Kotlin looks like it would be great too. But Rust reminds me so much of how much I love C and how little you needed to get going, all the OS tools at your disposal, etc. I haven't had the same pleasure in learning Go or any other language. But I totally agree, even if it's in your spare time, find the language you love and start contributing to the open source community for it.

ak39 10y ago

Just wait a month or so when it'll sound like a rebound relationship that went horribly wrong.

ktRolster 10y ago

Alan Perlis famously said, "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." A lot of times you can learn something in a new language, and then bring it back to other languages. For a simple example, programming in Python might give a programmer the insight that she doesn't need to write a factory for every class; or writing in Haskall might give him the idea that immutability is a good idea. Then when the programmer returns to her original language, she can use those techniques, adapted to the original language.

kerkeslager 10y ago
This is definitely a good reason to learn new languages, but it does have its limits. Examples: 1. Erlang has done a lot of work to make their actors lightweight. In Erlang it's not only common to spawn a new actor for everything, but it's generally a good idea that organizes your code flexibly and results in transparent scaling onto multiple cores. On other systems that support actors, the actors aren't as lightweight, so while they're useful for organizing your code in some cases, using them pervasively will result in cripplingly slow performance and, depending on the language, completely exhausting thread/process resources. 2. Some schemes support CPS conversion and TCO, which allows you to use recursion at relatively little cost and without worrying about exhausting the stack. However, in languages that support TCO and not CPS conversion, it takes some work to be sure that your recursive calls are tail calls. And in languages that don't do either CPS conversion or TCO, deep recursion performs poorly and infinite recursion breaks outright. This is why it's not only important to learn patterns in new languages, but to learn how those patterns are implemented under the covers.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

> I could barely comprehend how little I wrote to get something to work. There's a subset of developers that really fall in love with this idea. I try and understand where they're coming from but really have a hard time. The more involved with code reviews I've become through my career the more I recoil with fear when I hear this, recalling all the time I spent unbundling nested with nested within nested operations. In the end I believe less LOC as an end goal is largely for the satisfaction of the single engineer writing the code. It feels good at he time. Over time the super compact lines of code decay into hieroglyphics that cast a curse to the unlucky explorer that disturbs their tomb.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Someone 10y ago
One man's hieroglyphics are another man's bread and butter. It is all about shared culture. You don't write empty x repeat a times repeat b times add an item to x count the items in x but the hieroglyphical x = a × b Because "everybody knows what multiplication is". And even the explicit loop has lots of shared culture, for example in the idea what variables are, what a loop is, where it ends, that we do not use × but asterisks for multiplication, etc. Modern languages may require more cultural background, but if that is useful for program comprehension that in itself isn't reason to say that disqualifies them. If it did, we would never have moved towards languages with malloc/free, garbage collection, or classes, the weirdness of IEEE floats, to mention a few things. So, any discussion about new terminology/language constructs should mention costs and benefits. Also, which of them is greater will often depend on the target audience.
pbreit 10y ago
How can you not understand that all things equal, less code is better? Clear and concise code is good. We're not talking about fancy, unintelligible minimizations. Have you coded in Python? Give it a try.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago

cdnsteve 10y ago

Whoa all the jetbrains projects are using this and they are the main backer of the language. Very interesting.

LyndsySimon 10y ago

I can relate to this. The first language I did any significant work in was PHP - and not modern PHP, which for all of its warts is at least usable, but 4.0.6. It was nasty, but I spent about three years writing it every day. Then I picked up Python. It was hard to grok for a few days, especially when I learned things that didn't quite click like "strings are immutable" and "this is a comprehension". After a month of working with it in my free time, one day things just clicked - and suddenly, Python code was no longer something I had to read line-by-line pausing to understand each action, but something I could skim quickly and understand without expending conscious effort to do so. It was glorious. That moment was about a decade ago, and I could probably write a book now on all the intricacies that I love about the language. I've toyed with other languages on the side, but I always come back to Python. I don't know if it fit the way my mind already approached problems or if it has changed my mental processes to conform to it - but it works for me.