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Comment by hackits | Hacker News Reader

Why not Java? I tend to find that anything larger than parsing and data collection Python/Nodejs becomes a bit of a maintainable mess for me.

Java/C# are boring, but once that little script grows into a massive beast you will be glad you can rely on the compiler doing a basic unit test of your program.

This is even considering that even though you have a huge amount of advantage with a dynamic type system most people don't end up using it. (http://neverworkintheory.org/2016/06/13/polymorphism-in-pyth...)

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> once that little script grows into a massive beast you will be glad you can rely on the compiler doing a basic unit test of your program.

Not if I bother to write a few suitable unit tests, which I should really be doing anyway. Typechecking is absurdly far from substituting for checks that my code actually does what I intended it to do.

Tend not to write unit tests as most evidence show they have little or no impact (http://neverworkintheory.org/2016/10/05/test-driven-developm...)

Treat unit tests as a form of documentation in an executable format. It is invaluable in long running or larger projects.

(As opposed to automated functional tests or pure regression tests.)

Also that evidence was comparing test driven against test later, not against no test. That project tested was small enough and short enough to be ran by a single dev.

That is about TDD and not unit testing in general. And there sample population was graduates and undergraduates.

I'd say 90% of developers, which includes a lot of good ones too, never learned to write good unit tests. Poorly written unit tests are worse for productivity and no better for correctness than no unit tests.

I will add though after converting from a huge jpa spring boot rest service to just read since data from a database, node and graphql and plain SQL is a joy... That might have more to do with the fact that I'm starting this thing over and not inheriting design decisions..

Give it time. You can get a lot done with node, graphql and plain SQL. Although when you're working on a project with 50+ developers that is where the Spring JPA, Spring Boost, Tomcat, Maven come in their own managing less skilled developer to contribute to the team.

The other problem is when you're starting out you lose out on a lot of historic perspective. You get smashed over the head with Maven, Spring 1,2,3 (ORM, JPA) inverse versioning code, Hibernate, Transactions, Annotations, Servlet, JSP document/JSP pages.

Each collectively take about a year to get confident to give accurate quotes for large government projects. Let alone figuring what the hell the framework is doing.

This is why Ruby on Rails is running circles around the Java projects.

Free time i use mostly php/python. Havent given Ruby on Rails a go, how does it compare with connection pools? Oracle db connection drivers and Postgres databases?

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