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One thing which I noticed during the Stripe CTF, where Node, Scala, and Go were all first time languages for me, was that the baseline experience of getting a d
by patio11 12y ago
One thing which I noticed during the Stripe CTF, where Node, Scala, and Go were all first time languages for me, was that the baseline experience of getting a dev environment assuming you have a Linux box is, in 2014, really freaking awesome. I was doing Java in 2004, and think it would probably take me half an hour going from zero to "minimum viable Java dev environment." I was hello worlding after maybe three console commands in Go/Node/etc.
This is partly a technology problem, partially a philosophy problem (Java does not have a scripting language heritage which counsels e.g. having a REPL or really obvious options for program invocation), and partly a marketing problem. I rather doubt that anyone at Oracle has the job "Make people's first experience with Java suck less." Web devs thankfully have standardized on "batteries included; max five minutes to install" for new platforms in the last few years (Rails strikes me as the conspicuous first example, and ironically is harder to install now than it used to be).
- glimcat 12y agoIt still often takes me 30+ minutes to set up the environment for a new language, but that's mostly spent doing some reading on how to set it up "right" vs. just executing an apt-get. Most of which comes down to the fact that official documentation for first-time users is somewhere on the spectrum of nonexistent to crappy. Many languages have pretty good tools for managing virtual environments and dependencies and such these days, but odds are that a new user won't find out about them for quite some time unless they know to go looking.