I started learning Lua for a WoW add-on. Not even making my own add-on, just tweaking someone else’s.
I learned Minecraft’s data pack language for the same reason. 20w14infinite needed a Portal gun, I found a working one, but tweaked it to my liking
I wanted to make a scripted version of pinochle because my friends and I play it a bunch on tabletop sim and there was nothing available, so I learned LUA
“Gods, that’s stupid. Why is it being done this way? Have they never heard of naming conventions? Is the language really that awfully designed?”
Learns PHP to find out more.
“Yup…”
HEY! Is PHP ugly? Yes. Does it use stupid naming conventions? Also yes! But it’s an awesome language when you want to get shit done. There’s no other languages out there where you can just write some code in VIM directly on the server through SSH and immediately see your results without any further setup. No frameworks required, no packages, no imports, no buzzwords and hubub, just pure unadulterated utility.
Nonsense, there are tons of systems like that now. I’ve been playing with Deno & Fresh, it’s great. Trivial to install, a pretty great language, Fresh doesn’t force everything to be client side - you can easily write old school completely server side rendered sites if you want but you get to use TSX which is waaaaay superior to the old text based templating systems we used to use (Handlebars, Jinja, etc.).
It also has built in hot reloading by default so even faster than PHP. Literally hit save and you see the results.
What’s this install nonsense? I just looked up Deno and it’s part of an NPM stack. With PHP you just
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Open an Apache server
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Write code
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???
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Profit!
Write code
???
Profit!
Accurate PHP mindset on so many levels
I just looked up Deno and it’s part of an NPM stack.
It’s not. It supports NPM modules for backwards compatibility, but the whole point is that it doesn’t inherit the NPM tooling mess. You can go from a new Linux install to a running Fresh project in 3 commands.
Okay, I’m interested. What stack is it part of? What kind of servers does it use?
There’s two things:
Deno: this is a replacement for Node and NPM and prettier and some other tools. So one aspect is that it’s a more modern Node, using standard web APIs instead of Node specific stuff. And the other aspect is it is more streamlined modern tooling - no node_modules, no complicated build steps, built in Typescript support, etc. In fact you can use a single file as a script, similar to Python… but unlike Python you can use third party dependencies, which makes it fantastic for stuff like CI scripts, etc. where you might have suffered with Bash or Python before.
Fresh: this is just a web framework targeting Deno. Honestly I haven’t used it much but I really like what I’ve seen so far. I always found React to be confusing and overkill for most sites, which should really be rendered server side, but also I really like the way you can compose components with JSX/TSX in a real language with full type checking. Fresh gives you both!
but unlike Python you can use third party dependencies,
In what sense does python not have third party dependencies?
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PHP is native in Linux then?
How is that different to something like powershell?
You can’t run a website off powershell. PHP can render HTML to the browser, so it’s perfect for website development. 99% of the web was PHP back in the wild West days.
Incorrect. Perl does the same just as well, and it’s a language that actually makes sense while also being uglier.
In my experience Perl is a write-only language. Coming in behind someone else and fixing or writing their code is often slower than just rewriting it
Perl is definitely a WORN language.
Write Once, Read Never
Perl is partially readable, provided that it’s your own code. The one thing perl coders hate the most, is other people’s code.
Source: Am a perl coder
I’ll admit, I have zero experience with Pearl. I do like the uglier point you made though. 50+ DKP
R. because it’s really easy to work on spreadsheets. i know there’s pandas for python but at that time RStudio made it look really attractive. i will do anything not to work on excel.
When I took biostatistics in college I asked to use python instead of R to do my assignments and they said no
My only real complaint at the time was using <- to define variables but I felt really strongly about it and that I wanted to use fancy snake language
PHP is a scourge. I wish less server software were written in it. You’ll stumble upon some opensource project with a cool UI, run into a problem and find out the docker container has apache, postgres, and PHP in it. Debugging PHP is such a pain and setting up a developer environment is such a hassle because they haven’t discovered docker for dev envs yet.
Terrible experience all around.
To understand memes
A man of culture
I was going to learn !hare@programming.dev just because it is called “Hare” and I like rabbits, but then I saw that I am not on a supported OS.
God. I didn’t knew that Drew was such a language nazi. If you want to write a Go clone, it must be useful for everyone. Even Emacs is available on Windows officially.
What a harebrained comment.
…Sorry, it felt like such a waste not to say it!
But, language Nazi? It must be useful for everyone? Why? I also think it’s a bit silly and hinders growth, but it’s their project. It’s well within their right to choose whether they put in the effort to support a platform or not, regardless of the reasoning and how much effort it’d actually take.
They don’t even seem to be against it, they just don’t care enough to be the ones to do so right now:
According to DeVault, while there’s currently no plan to support non-free platforms like macOS or Windows, a third-party implementation or fork could try to make that work. The Register
Even Emacs is available on windows, you say? I think some context is needed, here. See what GNU has to say about the availability of Emacs on proprietary systems:
However, GNU Emacs includes support for some other systems that volunteers choose to support.
To improve the use of proprietary systems is a misguided goal. Our aim, rather, is to eliminate them. We include support for some proprietary systems in GNU Emacs in the hope that running Emacs on them will give users a taste of freedom and thus lead them to free themselves.
Taken from the official download and install page.
It is their project, but no company will use it if it’s broken on Windows.
Sure, and that matters because…? You seem to be treating hare as something it doesn’t want, nor care to be.
I like to describe Hare as a simple, conservative, modern update to C, with a FOSS ethos. It doesn’t try to break computer science ground, or promise to solve a million dollar problem.
And upstream Hare will not support non-libre operating systems. That’s a lot of conviction, but Hare isn’t trying to take over the world. It will coexist with the diversity of languages out there, and thrive in its own niche. In short, the Hare project develops for a libre future and for the deliberate programmer, not the corporate, the ephemeral and the reckless.
From Torres, one of the core contributors.
Your metrics for success aren’t the same as theirs.
That is such a sweet reason! Whimsical decisions like this can be some of the best. Life demands a little whimsy every now and then.
Hey, thanks for the suggestion! I was considering firing up a VM just for Hare, but thanks for bringing this option to my attention.
I inherited a C# code base that had a custom runtime loader for APL modules. Over half of the app was actually written in APL with C# just hosting the API… so yeah, had to learn that. I don’t recommend it but some people seem to really love the language. Those people are statisticians, not programmers.
To get a career in IT.
That’s a pretty solid reason.
Close your eyes to feel it
I wanted to be a game programmer. 15 years on, I haven’t touched a video game in over a decade, and I find them pretty boring.
I became a Game Programmer. Job market sucks right now, so I’m cleaning toilets and taking out trash at a grocery store.
But hey, on my days off I sometimes have time to work on games.
I wanted to get into creating video games.
I ended up in software engineering for financial companies. It killed my hobby love of programming but the salary is worth it. Exceptionally lucrative, and I have never struggled for work, with great pay, bonus, benefits, equity
No idea, if this was the case for you, but learning how the magic works can definitely make it less magical…
I had totally forgotten until this post reminded me: I originally started to learn Python in order to fix a crossword puzzle program.
That’s a good reason. I used my Java skills to crack a shareware (a solitaire game) because I had no money.
Now you can use Java to have lots of money
Lemmy UI constantly pissed me off, Photon didn’t quite do what I wanted, so I forked it and learned Svelte. lol
dubvee.org and tesseract
I needed some context, but woah this is super slick lemmy. Awesome project, like the work I’m seeing on the moderation side.
Maybe not dumb but I’ve definitely been forced to at least partly learn a few terrible languages so I could use some system:
- PHP so I could write custom linters for Phabricator. Pretty successful. PHP is a bad language but it’s fairly easy to read and write.
- Ruby so I could understand what the hell Gitlab is doing. Total failure here, Ruby is completely incomprehensible especially in a large codebase.
- OCaml so I can work on a super niche compiler written in OCaml. It’s a decent language except the syntax is pretty terrible, OPAM is super buggy, and I dunno if it’s this codebase or just OCaml people in general but there are approximately zero comments and identifiers are like
ityp,nsec,ef_bin… The sort of names where you already need to know what they are.
Learned Python to try and hack into a porn site.
Well, were you able to hack into the porn site? Python seems like an odd choice for hacking a website.
This was over 10 years ago, maybe 20. I wanted to pick up a new language and I seemed pretty driven, at the time, to hack a certain site. I think I gave up on it and as usual I enjoyed writing the code more than using the app.
It didn’t use webscraping or anything too sophisticated. I just applied a few dictionaries I found online and ran everything through a series of anonymous proxies. Very brute force.
Ha! I tried the same thing with some random sites like 20 years ago. I managed to get into a few of them and emailed the registered owner that they needed better security.
I almost did this for a different reason, people choose python because it has some pretty good web automation/scraping libraries to work with.
I learned Python and regular expressions to download hundreds of pictures from 4chan. Good times.
Ah, the good ol’ regex html parser.
Because I couldn’t find any dev to help me make the game I wanted to make.
This is actually reasonable. You didn’t know what work is needed to make a game, but your reason to learn a programming language because you couldn’t get help is absolutely not dumb in my opinion.
Actually I did know the amount and kind of work it required, as I have being working on game projects before (I’m sound designer, music composer and game designer).
It’s not really dumb yes, but a bit sad when you think about it.
Ok, it makes it juuuust a little bit dumb, I give you that! :D (just joking). I like that you was determined to do it, even if it meant to go through all of this.
Once Miyamoto said (I have a book with interviews of Game Designers) that a Game Designer should understand programmers, in order to be efficient. Or something with those lines. So don’t think it is sad, make it a positive power you would have missed, if that would not happen. Sorry if I’m a bit too optimistic in my views.
You’re right, but it wasn’t how I took it a the time.
The underlying message I receive was that if you don’t pay enough or you don’t make people dream Steve jobs style, you won’t get anyone to work with you.
I’m lucky, I do have the drive and I can take the time to learn news things and I get to meet some wonderful people along the way. But that’s just me being lucky.
Sorry for venting, but I do think curiosity should be on both side.
Learned flash in the 90’s to make terrible games.
Ruby because it was the first popular Japanese language. I wrote a few useful scripts and it was nice. Then it was swallowed by Rails, and killed by Python. No one uses it around me but it was fun.
