Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

[toddkazakov]

I feel that I've been procrastinating a lot in my free time and it's time to learn something new.

I see the hype around Go and Rust and I believe I'm missing a lot in my professional development. I'm involved with my start-up and I am facing a lot of challenging data analytics and software development problems during the day. I am using Java/JavaScript/R on a daily basis, but these are mature languages that have been around for a while and I have a hard time learning new frameworks that are beyond my work scope.

So what (hot) languages/frameworks are you learnin/using now, that give you the warm feeling that you get a lot of useful knowledge out of them, that's widely applicable?

[skrebbel]

Elixir. While Rust and Go get way more exposure lately, they're mostly designed for systems programming. Many more of us do web development, and it's really amazing how fast Elixir has become a very cool and mature environment for developing great web apps.

Elixir is a really cool language, and also a great way to learn functional programming. But more than that, it gets all the non-languagy stuff right. The build system is amazing, your code hot-reloads out of the box, dependency management is very well done (source-only, git-friendly, project-local, etc), the community is very friendly and going fast.

And code scales by default. I might exaggerate here, but sometimes it feels like need to really try to write code that's hard to spread across servers. If you consider it's non-trivial to even use all your CPU cores on Node.js, the Erlang VM will blow your mind.

[juliangregorian]

I know what you're saying with respect to Elixir's distributed programming features (it seriously is great) but it's not that hard to use CPUs in Node: http://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html#cluster_cluster

[Kiro]

I'm a web developer currently learning Haskell. Would you recommend learning Elixir instead?

[wildmXranat]

I guess a lot of the benefits listed are a result of erlang vm.

[corysama]

http://elm-lang.org is a functional and reactive client-side (js target) language that is still young and getting great very fast. http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2014/12/19/getting-started-w... The idea of combining Elm with Elixir or Yesod (Haskell) on the server side seems exciting.

Another interesting project is Snabb Switch. If you want to learn networking at the lowest level and highest speed possible in software, Snabb a great platform for experimentation.

Finally, I'll throw in http://terralang.org. It's not networking related. But, I think it's terribly interesting and not getting any attention.

[elementai]

And even Elm with Clojure/CLJS https://github.com/jamesmacaulay/zelkova

[threeseed]

The hype for Go/Rust is really just on HN.

If you are involved in data analytics then you could always immerse yourself in the Hadoop stack e.g. Cascading, Spark, Mahout etc. It's a platform that is increasingly become a fixture in enterprise companies and plenty of new technologies. For me the future will be "container driven development" where everything will be deployed as a container and dynamically wired together. Loads of new technologies e.g. Docker, Consul and plenty of challenges still around.

None of what I wrote is around languages/frameworks though mainly because I think that the majority of them won't be really used in 5-10 years.

[alfiedotwtf]

I would have to disagree.

If you think it's just hype, try and calculate the enormous waste of both time and money from memory leaks caused by code written in C and C++. Rust solves this, and it's only going to get better once we're on the other side of Rust 1.0, and the library ecosystem grows.

[ribs]

You know what language Docker is written in, don't you?

[sz4kerto]

If learning is going to be a hobby, then learn something different (because that gives you perspective), but also something that has some connections to what you already know (because if you learn something part-time, then it's good if you don't need to re-learn all tools, environment, etc.).

I would not care of the 'hot' stuff too much - frameworks come and go.

I'd try some Clojure (you're familiar with the JVM and IDEs, but one should learn a bit of Lisp once in life). Or Scala.

[toddkazakov]

You're totally right the frameworks come and go, but on the other hand they come for a reason. And when I am learning a new framework there's usually something more I gain than just something to put in my CV. For example when I started with Spring I learned a whole lot of IoC and AOP. It was quite long time ago, but the principles that stand behind a framework might be very influential in the long term.

I like the Scala suggestion, because the last time I was involved with functional programming, I was using Haskell which I found quite difficult to grasp to a level that's useful for real-world projects.

[christensen_emc]

Elixir!

On one hand it has a simple ruby-ish syntax and a solid MVC framework (Phoenix).

On the other hand it has immutability, concurrency through processes and message passing (which is awesome!) and a bunch of other functional goodies.

I'm not sure how widely applicable it is now, as it's still in its infancy, but it's the first "hipster" language I've used in a while that felt like it had legs.

[sparkie]

Kernel is hands down the most interesting language I've used.

The Kernel language is small and simple, yet offers a huge contrast to how you would think about programming in most other languages - namely because other languages have reduced their model of computation to reduction.

Kernel is influenced by the Lisp family, but offers somewhat of a duality to it. In lisp, everything is passed implicitly reduced unless explicitly quoted, then they are passed verbatim. In Kernel, everything is passed verbatim unless explicitly evaluated - the callee then, has complete control over how something is evaulated, rather than the caller. (And consequently, it's trivial to simulate lisp's computational model in it)

Reduction then, is just a special case of a much more general computational model - passing arguments around. Other languages have coupled the idea of argument passing with reduction, such that they need to invent compiler hacks like macros or code generation when it turns out that reduction is not what they want. Or in some cases, we've created languages specifically for template-based programming, where we want to splice bits of code into an otherwise static block of text. Such templates are trivial to do in Kernel.

Another nice feature of Kernel is that of encapsulation types. One can define a new type which consists of a constructor function, eliminator function and a predicate to test for the type - and combined with the powerful information hiding that can be achieved through Kernel's environment model, one can implement sophisticated type systems using very few primitives, and without special compiler support.

[highCs]

Webpage: http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html

An implementation: http://klisp.org/

Others: http://axisofeval.blogspot.fr/2011/09/kernel-underground.htm...

[childintime]

Whoa! Noone mentions elm (elm-lang.org)?!

There is much brewing in language land. Rust brings a set of ideas that other languages will borrow (pun intended). But..

Elm restarts programming, treating events as lists, and this is how programming will change over the next 5-10 years in a most fundamental way.

Taken together programming is climbing out of the miserable non-composable mess that having been stupid bread-and-butter bit-fuckers have put us in. Elm just leads the pack.

You may not understand its ways, that is exactly because you think being a bread-and-butter bit-fucker is a feature, while it most definitely is not. It is a bug and it infests the code you write, up to the point where unlearning is an unsurmountable effort.

When elm's wave is through, the computer will replace you, and with it children will design much better programs than you do. Please stop making sense now.

[wtracy]

How does this differ from FRP in Haskell?

[sshillo]

If you don't know python and you're interested in analytics you should solve that.

IMHO you'll become a far better developer if you devote the majority of your time to learning advanced algorithms, ml, and ai as opposed to the new hot framework.

[olavgg]

I've already started, there is a bigger challenge though. That is, how do you sell this? I can think of plenty of scenarios for the oil and gas industry, which is the biggest industry where I live.

For example drilling for oil in sea is quite expensive, could easily cost over 100 million USD. With machine learning we can predict the seismic ground pattern by predicting the amount of clay, lime etc in different locations and between wells. This can help us to decide if there is a good chance there could be oil/gas underground.

The problem when I present this, is that it quickly sounds like science fiction.

[collyw]

No one asks for those in job specs though

[manca]

It's good to hear that a lot of people are experimenting with functional languages like Haskell and Erlang, but I think we should step back a little and take a look at C++ and its development over the years.

As you probably know C++11 is already around and majority of compilers already support it. What most people don't know is that C++14 is ready to kick some ass too! It introduces for the first time in C++'s history functions as first class objects and allows you to pass them around as function parameters! I think this is really exciting and I also encourage as many people to take a look at this new and very promising developments of C++ language.

On the other hand, Apple's Swift looks promising too - functional elements, type inference, speed, good compiler and so on. Not to mention it's being used with tons of great frameworks Apple provides for iOS and OS X development. It sure doesn't hurt to take a look into it too.

All in all, it really is an exciting time for us developers. There are really tons of cool tools and languages that allow us to get things done at the speed never imagined before.

Now, we should also look back at the fundamentals and ask ourselves could we design, not only program? That's not the skill you can pickup in couple of days reading bunch of tutorials and forums about your next cool language. I think, learning how to think about particular problem and how to approach it is more important than barely know how to code the first solution that comes to your mind in the new ultra fancy language. Think about it...

[jordigh]

Git is not the final word in DVCSes... Take a look at Mercurial, in particular, the Mercurial Evolve feature. It's an innovative way to collaboratively polish commits. Imagine pull requests that could be rewritten with the history of the rewrites being easily accessible as you see them, well, evolve. Evolve is basically a way to record and use distributed meta-history of the editions of your commits. It's like a beefed-up git reflog.

[meowface]

The problem is that in the open source world, most projects use Git and most active old projects using SVN or CVS are slowly moving to Git. Many people out there who greatly prefer Mercurial to Git admit to using Git much more than Mercurial due to the ecosystem.

See: https://fuzz.me.uk/git-vs-hg/

From Eric Raymond:

>git won the mindshare war. I regret this - I would have preferred Mercurial, but it too is not looking real healthy these days. I have made my peace with git's victory and switched. I urge the Emacs project to do likewise.

[pmoriarty]

Reading these replies just makes me sad. There's plenty of value in and plenty to learn from older technologies like Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, and Forth.

Sure, there's a lot of hype around newer technologies. There's never a shortage of hype. But the glow around virtually all of them will fade, probably sooner rather than later.

Ruby and Python are no longer considered hot and new, but not so long ago they were. Java and Perl had their share of hype back in the day, but the luster has certainly wore off by now.

Too many people involved in the tech field are endlessly chasing the next shiny thing.

[rjberry]

It's definitely possible to learn things from those languages. But languages that are trendy today (at least from my experience in the London job market) - Clojure and Scala - are really amazing, too, and have a lot of interesting ideas about concurrency, immutable data structures, and functional programming. Scheme, when compared to Clojure, seems a bit outdated now IMHO, although its extremely simple, small core makes it great for teaching.

[JoeAltmaier]

Too pessimistic. The new learns from the lessons of the old. I'd advise a new student to start with tools that reflected advancements in thought and practice. It might be cool to use the old tools because they are part of history; but its not helpful to the new student.

[_wmd]

Just as a side comment, the reason languages/tools are fun to learn is because it's usually quite easy to do so. You say you know R, but the depth of packages available for R is insane, and most of it requires a level of math that few possess.

I'd punt on learning a new language and instead master a new skill - up your stats knowledge, force yourself to learn how some algorithm works, whatever,.. these things are all infinitely reapplicable skills, whereas a pretty compiles-to-JS language or prettier-C-derivative generally aren't so much.

[hootwoot]

If your self-admitted problem is that you "have a hard time learning new frameworks that are beyond my work scope", it probably means your experience is deep but narrow.

If that's the case, you don't need to learn a hot/new technology, you need to cast a wide net and get a better grasp on today's software ecosystem in general, until picking up new things is no longer hard.

You could nonetheless kill two birds with one stone if you hacked on something current but wide. Docker and its ecosystems come to mind.

[eps]

C is a pretty nice language, have a look ;)

[stephenheron]

I found this video series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ntGDm6hOs) very interesting. It is someone (Casey Muratori) building a game from scratch using C.

The intro videos really opened my eyes to how powerful C is. Being able to directly access memory seems crazy for someone who is just used to dealing with languages that really remove you from the hardware.

[bjoe_lewis]

+1. Learning C is not about learning a language. It's more about how to think like a computer.

[rjdagost]

This was my first thought as well- it's tough to go wrong by learning C. For me learning C was a brutal struggle (driven by necessity), but no other language taught me more about what is going on under the hood in software. C has withstood the test of time and will ground your programming skills better than any fad language or framework.

[scrapcode]

I second this. After using PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript and various frameworks within each, "The C Programming Language" was very refreshing. It's fundamental, and made me think differently when using standard libraries in other languages, such as how they may work, etc.

[fit2rule]

Give Lua some love. Learn the language, learn the VM. Learn to integrate it with a set of libraries and so on. Lots of bleeding edge stuff runs on Lua and its a fantastic stack of technology to learn ..

[proveanegative]

>Give Lua some love.

Pun intended? LÖVE (https://love2d.org/) happens to be a great way to learn Lua.

[striking]

The only problem with Lua is how slow it is. I'm quite fond of LuaJIT, though, because it isn't slow.

[Xcelerate]

Nobody's mentioned Julia?! I love this language. I do scientific research and high performance computing and have been exploring this language extensively over the past year. Combined with something like iJulia (iPython), it's a very versatile tool for analyzing and processing data.

It's got a few quirks, but the language designers are improving it rapidly and the number of libraries available for it is increasing drastically.

To name a few features I really like about the language: multiple dispatch, flexible type system (use it if you need performance; ignore it if you want pretty code), powerful macro system, extensive debugging system (instantly view AST, LLVM, and native assembly output to optimize), easy parallelizability/vectorization, and just an overall beautiful language design (unlike C++ or Matlab for instance).

Things I dislike about Julia, but that should be changed soon: unintuitive automatic memory allocations (everything seems to allocate new memory by default which is a pain for tight loops because you have to write layers of functions that all take tons of "output variable" parameters), incredibly slow start-up times, and documentation that leaves a lot to be desired in terms of details (I normally have to call methods() in a REPL to figure out exactly what I need to pass into functions). Also, the module system seems a little more confusing than it needs to be.

[colinbartlett]

I'd recommend learning how to learn. Making learning and curiosity a part of your every day existence will have more of an impact that the latest hot language or framework.

[adamzerner]

True, but I suspect that most people already agree with this, and it doesn't address his question.

[fit2rule]

I am compelled to agree with you, inasmuch as the irony of "what is the newest thing to learn" wouldn't be much of a hipster position if it weren't borne on the fact that must learn new things, always. Always. Since the beginning of social computing - when we've all had access to the same degree of technology - our languages, tools, and frameworks have always been changing. It is one reason for the existence of an ivory tower - sometimes you need to wizard-out, just to get peace from the noise. Trouble is, you inevitably end up casting new spells. There is no such thing as 'a brand new thing' to learn, alas the truly hipster edge can't be learned yet. ;)

[mamcx]

"There is no wind that blows right for the sailor who doesn't know where the harbor is."

Decide and have clear what is the question, then look for the answer.

---

For the fun of learn, pick anything you can do and put some time of it. If you are like me, you will read some info about X and and if it pick you interest go ahead.

But without a direction, you will waste time. You will dismiss things that are good and double-focus in things that not..

----

"I am facing a lot of challenging (which ones?) data analytics and software development problems during the day (which ones?)"

"Data analytics (and his not-famous cousin reports)" is far more about re-shape and clean data than do cool algorithms. The last mille is the easy and the 909% (yep, 909%, not a typo!) is the hard, in opposite to normal development.

Having a clean, well defined schema/database/warehouse/etc is the thing here. Run your super-fancy mathy-thingy on it? Others have solved that!

Most likely, non-normal-dev will have a bigger impact on this kind of jobs, so not just focus in tech.. (and I don't drink the fallacy that your selection of tools not matter. But is also a mistake think that are the only thing that matter).

[ChikkaChiChi]

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and/or a Beaglebone.

You wouldn't believe how much playing around with these units will help to influence your design and development decisions in other areas.

[derwiki]

I respectfully disagree. I made lights blink for about a week and then lost interest. The lag time of "wait for something to arrive in the mail" is usually enough to discourage me, and without a coherent, large-ish project to learn on, I just never got that far.

[bratsche]

I don't know that it's particularly new or hot, but I've been learning F# and I really like it. With Microsoft open-sourcing .NET Core and Mono getting a lot of improvements from it, I'd love to see this become a viable platform for doing web development on Linux with F# in the future.