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I'm also an infrequent developer in many languages. I find this is a really important article especially for new languages (Go, Rust, F#). If your language has

by carlmr 9y ago

I'm also an infrequent developer in many languages. I find this is a really important article especially for new languages (Go, Rust, F#). If your language has less adoption most of your developers will be infrequent developers. There won't be many companies purely building on this one technology. You will have a lot of people dabbling in small side projects to see whether the language fits their needs. So it's important to have an easy way to update your whole toolchain or install the toolchain easily whenever needed. E.g. updating my Rust toolchain means runnning rustup update and updating VSCode (the RLS extension updates automatically) cargo does everything automatically for builds with a very simple project structure. It's also best if you can avoid the need for specific tooling (I use VSCode as my main editor anyway). Another thing that should be thought of is that commands should do similar things like in other languages in order to not surprise people unnecessarily. If you want to go against the flow, you should have a good reason for it.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
I sometimes wonder if the tooling should be different for infrequent tasks. I might update the build scripts for my desktop software just once or twice a year, given the infrequent use it would make sense to use a GUI for this rather than a text editor.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Indeed - infrequent tasks should be low-friction, or infrequent turns into "never".
  - carlmr 9y ago
    I'd say low friction tooling even helps a famous language. It's essential for convincing the dabbler though.
sevensor 9y ago
This was definitely a problem for me with F#. It took me a solid 4 hours to figure out that the best way for me to build the tiny program I was working on was just to run fsharpc from the command line. It seemed like there were a number of quite complicated ways to structure F# projects, but I couldn't figure out what problems they were trying to solve.
- carlmr 9y ago
  I was using it mostly with VSCode and fs(harp)i/fs(harp)c as well, because I didn't have Visual Studio Professional (you can't use community at work) on my company computer. With VS it's quite easy to manage projects. The cool thing about Rust is that the Cargo system works well from a simple text editor. And with cargo init you get an empty project set up.

by carlmr 9y ago

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

I sometimes wonder if the tooling should be different for infrequent tasks. I might update the build scripts for my desktop software just once or twice a year, given the infrequent use it would make sense to use a GUI for this rather than a text editor.

pjc50 9y ago
Indeed - infrequent tasks should be low-friction, or infrequent turns into "never".
- carlmr 9y ago
  I'd say low friction tooling even helps a famous language. It's essential for convincing the dabbler though.

sevensor 9y ago

This was definitely a problem for me with F#. It took me a solid 4 hours to figure out that the best way for me to build the tiny program I was working on was just to run fsharpc from the command line. It seemed like there were a number of quite complicated ways to structure F# projects, but I couldn't figure out what problems they were trying to solve.

carlmr 9y ago
I was using it mostly with VSCode and fs(harp)i/fs(harp)c as well, because I didn't have Visual Studio Professional (you can't use community at work) on my company computer. With VS it's quite easy to manage projects. The cool thing about Rust is that the Cargo system works well from a simple text editor. And with cargo init you get an empty project set up.