Ask HN: What is the killer app/library of your favorite language?

16 points by lquenti 4y ago ↗ HN

I liked the idea of [1] that many languages just get popular because they have killer apps. The prime examples are - Wordpress and PHP - Rails and Ruby

What are the killer apps of your favorite language? You can go for any language if you want to as well.

For me, Haskell has 3 great apps/libraries:

- PostgREST: An awesome way to create a REST-API from PostgreSQL tables

- Shellcheck: A static analysis tool for Shell scripts

- Pandoc: A parser/converter for various formats

How about you?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4

11 comments

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thesuperbigfrog 4y ago ↗

Linux / Unix and C

rwmj 4y ago ↗

On the subject of PostgreSQL and although I haven't had to use it in several years, I'm quite fond of the OCaml extension I wrote which integrates PostgreSQL statements directly into the language.

Values are type-checked across the boundary, SQL commands are validated at compile time, and proper prepared statements get generated (also at compile time).

It's a little bit like MS Linq in concept, but it works quite differently - by using PGSQL "DESCRIBE" to send the statement to the PostgreSQL server when compiling the code to do the validation and get the types. It really made writing database-baked websites less of a grind. https://github.com/darioteixeira/pgocaml

ncmncm 4y ago ↗

Pandoc, anyway, is essential. Many rely on Git-annex.

The only essential Rust program I know of is Blake3.

I don't know of any essential Java or .Net programs; anyway, I have no runtime for either. Maybe Minecraft and KSP?

Are any in Ada? With no runtime (as for Rust), we might not be forced to notice.

I have not encountered any in Erlang.

TheMonarchist 4y ago ↗

The interesting languages are those that don't need killer apps to succeed.

deathtrader666 4y ago ↗

For Elixir -

[1] - https://livebook.dev/

[2] - https://livebeats.fly.dev/ built with Phoenix Framework

[3] - Discord

lquenti 4y ago ↗

Stupid question: What are some cool things about Livebook that Jupyter is missing? Besides the language obviously, although Jupyter supports custom kernels as well

yucky 4y ago ↗

Not a knock on WordPress at all, since it is ubiquitous. But for PHP I would say the "killer app" is actually Laravel.

lquenti 4y ago ↗

I get why you think that, but I'd say that Wordpress was a different time.

Back when your Squarespace/Webflow/Wix didn't exist yet, this was a "great" no-code solution

yucky 4y ago ↗

I still think WordPress is great (far better than those other options in the space), I just think Laravel was what PHP needed to legitimize it to developers. You can build anything with Laravel as a framework, it's great.

forgotmypw17 4y ago ↗

Perl: No breaking changes since October 17, 1994.

santa_boy 4y ago ↗

Copilot from Github is proving to be a huge killer addition to the my programming work in node.js

Despite limited enterprise level programming knowledge, Copilot is helping me write pretty good code vs. doing the copy, paste, modify from Stack Overflow.