HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are the best technologies you have worked with in 2013?

29 points by domaniac ↗ HN
I have spent about a year away from writing code and I miss it. I want to learn something cool and fun in my leisure time.

What are your recommendations HN?

45 comments

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lmm
Scala and Wicket. Writing web apps is a dream. And I'm worried I won't get to do it in 2014, because the world has moved over to javascript, whose type system is 10 years behind scala's.
workhere-io
the world has moved over to javascript

I'm not so sure about this. Python and Ruby seem to be just as popular as Node (if not more) for new projects, and as far as older projects go, PHP is still king.

playing_colours
My experience with Berlin startup scene is that Node.js took its niche and its popularity is not growing so rapidly now. There are more projects in Ruby and Python. I see there are couple more Scala jobs appeared and even saw 1-2 in Go.
kbudinoski
I am wondering how you are tracking Berlin wanted technology stack?
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workhere-io
Flask (Python). It's a joy to work with.
IanChiles
Go has been an absolute blast to use. It's incredibly fun to write, and manages to still be fast after that.
playing_colours
Scala - great language with an expressive type system (many evenings and nights spent reading blogs/books/code trying to adopt its power), I also enjoyed learning functional programming with it.

Akka - Scala/Java actor framework for better concurrency.

Angular.js - very powerful js framework with dependency injection, 2-way bindings. I am more a backend guy so I haven't dived deeply into its Tao yet.

FurrBall
New? I'm still going headfirst down the Emacs rabbit hole. You can never escape wonderland.
orchdork10159
Laravel is "the PHP framework for web artisans." It's powerful, yet easy-to-use CLI makes development, testing, and deployment a breeze! Check it out at http://laravel.com
Patrick_Devine
I just started a stats course on Coursera and it's being taught with R. R is pretty fun, and super easy to create vectors and matrices.
namarkiv
Titan graph db and the tinkerpop stack.
JoelAnair
You're going to hate this answer, but after a couple of years of Node/Express development I'm really enjoying writing Asp.NET in C# using Visual Studio 2013.
chidevguy
I'd love to hear your reasons for this, as I've been looking at moving away from the Microsoft stack. Thanks!
JoelAnair
I like the IDE (a lot). I'm not reinventing anything, just doing web development. Visual Studio gives you every tool you need to get the job done in one package that's frequently updated and runs stably and consistently (on my machine). The individual tools may not be better than their OSS equivalents, but as an overall ecosystem they are fairly well-tested and work together extremely well in my experience. NuGet is very cool and easy to use.

The end result for me has been that I spend significantly less time wondering why things aren't working (almost none, really) and more time actually writing and improving my code.

If you are doing something groundbreaking or way-out-of-the-box, Visual Studio is probably not a great choice. But for workaday web developers like me it's reliable, easy, and has objectively made me more productive compared to Node/Express/Backbone.

gesman
Can't argue with the best set of development and debugging enterprise tools under single umbrella.
saravanaj
Web Forms or MVC?
weavie
He says he's enjoying it, so it must be MVC.
JoelAnair
Yeah, MVC. WebForms look a little painful, but most of the pluses of Visual Studio still apply IMO.
kbudinoski
I have been using Microsoft technologies for many years, and I don't believe I will change it. Microsoft technologies are quite mature.
kyrre
Scalding, Scala and Tornado
cheald
I've just started using ZeroMQ, and it's been a whole heap of fun. I really like the idea of opinionated sockets.
squeed
I finally made the jump from Python to Clojure when I needed to really chomp on some data.

The world is a better place for me now. Paredit is an absolute dream, and the JVM has shown itself to be truly worthy.

nyan_sandwich
LuaJIT. The FFI is really, really, cool (inline low level access to memory and C in a high-level garbage-collected dynamic language? Yes please.)
mcrider
Meteor.js. I'm surprised at how young it still is but its got an active community and heading in the right direction.
relaunched
Glass - It's paradigm altering and has an endless array of possibilities, most of which are new.
ioddly
Redis. I got back into web programming this year and looked over all the NoSQL databases and it was the only one that really stood out to me. I've even read a bit of the source code and it's all very well done and nice to use.
scottyallen
I definitely would concur, and would add that we're using it as a queuing/messaging bus, and we like it way better than the *MQ options out there. Far more comfortable to work with, way easier to administrate, and plenty performant for our needs.
hashtree
Are you using the reliable queue or circular list pattern?
the_concussed
Knockout, AngularJS, NodeJS, NPM, MongoDB, Redis, Google Analytics, Github, AWS, ConcussionJS
bliti
Objective-C. I've worked with C, C++, and C#. But objective-C seems to fit my thoughts better. I like how it reads. Currently building iOS/Mac apps with it.
goyalpulkit
Mobile Development with Objective-C (for iOS) and Java (for Android). Objective-C has already been mentioned, so I vote for Java. I know I am inviting rants writing Java here, but using Java for Android app development is a lot of fun.
beat
Neo4J. Graph database is awesome, it'll change how you think about data back to how you should think about data in many cases.
hashtree
Check out Titan, if you get time. You are spot on about it changes how you think about data stores.
dustinrcollins
Vagrant, Chef, AWS CloudFormation. Writing your infrastructure as code saves you a ton of time and headaches.