Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

Pleasure is subjective.

I might enjoy what you find distasteful and vice versa.

Personally, I enjoy using Python and C. I am curious about Rust but haven't had an opportunity to use it much.

Your mileage may vary. I recommend trying a few different languages and see what you enjoy.

Edit: I like C because it feels simple and has a "what you see is what you get" property. The amount of "hidden" code feels like zero.

I like Python because the syntax is elegant and it is easy to get a lot done with a few lines of code.

Pure C*

*Your mileage may vary

How do you define a pleasurable language? Aesthetics? Bug/LoC ratio? Feature by LoC? ROI?

That depends what you want to do and what you see as "pleasurable".

If you just want something to manage a web site with as low effort as possible, go for either Wordpress or Drupal. Every web hoster offers some form of hosting for these platforms.

If you're in for something a bit more fancy frontend-wise, go for ReactJS combined with Parcel - the latter is multiple lightyears better than Webpack or, heaven forbid, Gulp. Seriously, discovering Parcel was an eye-opener. Beware though, a lot of Parcel plugins haven't been updated to Parcel v2 yet - backwards compatibility still isn't regarded highly in the frontend world.

If you're more interested in building APIs and know PHP - dive into Symfony, the progress there has been massive over the last years.

That's very subjective.

Personally I love Elm on the frontend, for being so orthogonal to mainstream platforms. On backend, rust is great but maybe too intense. Go is bland but overall easy-going.

Building a UI is usually tedious irregardless of stack. The fun part is what’s new and creative in the project, which is usually a small part of the overall thing.

My solution is generally to work at many different things in parallell, but that largely works because I’m a senior engineer and I’m naturally pulled to step in and assist in various places. I don’t think there’s an universal answer. Fundamentally, it’s probably not reasonable to expect that all aspects of once work should be thoroughly enjoyable.

As others have mentioned, this is highly personal. My own favorite stack is Elixir and/or full-stack Clojure.

The one that gets the job done the quickest so I can put my feet up and continue contemplating a complete career change.

Pleasure to me means I can sleep at night knowing whatever system I’ve built will remain online when subsystems fail, and will self-heal when infrastructure goes down.

When it comes to a career change I’d focus less on lang/stack and more on engineering culture, approach, practice. A team that builds good software, regardless of language or stack, will be a pleasure to work with.

I think that functional programming ideals lend themselves to this nicely. Specifically: data as a first principle, with actions/mutations/calculations of that data being separate.

pleasure == productivity

ruby on rails is still awesome. But since you might have to work with react anyways...nextjs is a second.

On the mobile side - Flutter is unparalleled. No seriously - im a react guy. And Dart is weird. But Flutter is seriously the Ruby on Rails of the mobile world.

Since you mentioned React Native, I assume you're pointing towards mobile app development. The best stack combination for me has been webview + PWA + webassembly + toucaan to create an intrinsically designed universal mobile-web app. There's something really powerful about deploying just one application on three separate distribution platforms. And it's not even a monorepo anymore!

For me, native macOS with AppKit (Cocoa) and Objective-C is still the best and most productive development environment.

No client/server division to worry about, all of the desktop environment's capabilities developed over decades, insane CPU and GPU power and memory bandwidth (now on Apple's industry-leading ARM chips). Obj-C gives seamless access to both C/C++ APIs and the best desktop GUI with incredibly powerful features like the Cocoa text system.

Frontend: Svelte! (and SvelteKit) Backend: Rails (still! API) Mobile: Flutter

Whatever gets the job done without adding unnecessary complexity.

I believe Rails 7 value proposal ("The one man framework") is designed to lure in people with SPA fatigue. And hell, Rails and Ruby are still fun.

> I remember when Ruby on Rails hit it big, one of its mantras was that it made coding fun. As Rails has waned in popularity, has any other tech stack taken that crown?

I think Phoenix and Elixir are trying to. I like them.

I like Objective-C a lot too. It's a reasonably thin layer on top of C and has a dynamic flavor (which I prefer). The documentation is showing its age.

Rails. Nothing really beats it for the combination of

* Getting something up and running quickly. Something that does what you want.

* Iterating quickly on the thing you're building. Need a library (gem)? There's very likely a pretty good one.

* Building the thing in a fairly clean way (tests, code organization) in a way that's not too bureaucratic and tedious.

* Friendly community of people.

I've done some playing around with Elixir/Phoenix, coming from the background of a long-time Erlang user as well as Rails, and it's fun to learn, but I'm not 100% convinced that it's more productive than Rails outside of some niches. It's certainly not a bad thing to learn, though.

My super subjective answer is SwiftUI. Obviously only applicable to iOS apps, but that's the most fun for me at present.

I still think Ruby with Rails or Ruby with Sinatra are the most pleasurable for me.

In Rails I can spin up very quickly a prototype, either with frontend or without and do some small experiments, consume an external API.

For me is also a great way to find ways to express my ideas in coding as Ruby is a somehow permissive language, allowing multiple ways of doing something thus one can find lets say their "coding voice"

I've been having a wonderful time spinning up small projects using Tcl, Wapp, and Sqlite. Tcl's quoting rules makes it really easy to embed HTML (or anything else, really) inline within a procedure. Simple example:

    # available at /style.css
    proc wapp-page-style.css {} {
        wapp-mimetype text/css
        wapp-cache-control max-age=3600
        
        wapp-trim {
            body {
                background: aliceblue;
            }
        }


    }

    # available at /hello
    proc wapp-page-hello {} {
        wapp-trim {
            <html>
            <head>
                <link href="%url(style.css)" rel="stylesheet">
            </head>
                <body>
                    <h1>Hello HN!</h1>
                </body>
            </html>
        }
    }

I really hope Rails make a comeback.

Older versions of Laravel were superb - but when I went back recently I was shocked at what a clusterfudge had been made of shoehorning a frontend framework in.

.NET framework - framework is complete and IDE (VS) works great. QT - same as above