Ask HN: What Niche Language to Learn?
For fun or for jobs if some random opportunity opens up...
Semi-practical fun, Clojure, Racket/Scheme, or other Lisp.
More academic fun, Pony or Clean. Less academic Rust.
Tired of Ruby/Rails or similar frameworks and would like something more distributed/concurrent? Elixir/Phoenix framework.
If you don't have a strong grasp of SQL and a specific database (e.g. PostgreSQL or MySQL), learn it deeply separate from your libraries/frameworks. Want to get off the beaten path? CockroachDB or other NewSQL datastore.
In the absence of context, I would suggest Forth or Prolog, as they are sufficiently different from any mainstream language.
Of course, Lisps and Schemes are always fun, and I think Racket sets itself apart from those with its language making capabilities. Logo is also very fun, but it is essentially a Lisp/Scheme. There are a lot of neat older books using Logo in various domains.
Pharo is also a fun choice.
* APL/J/BQN array programming language of some sort
* Some LISP type language
I'm not a professionally programming, mostly a novice but useful languages I did learn, as at work I'm stuff on Windows, VBA and Autohotkey. I'm proficient in both but no expert.
Stan in particular has a very healthy job market behind it.
There's also Pyro, Infer.NET, Turing.jl and a few others.
Plus lots of things on Linkedin.
Other probabilistic frameworks are also taking off in pharma jobs, e.g. probabilistic + neural + diff eq. Most on Julia and Python.
Stan is used a lot to model things on sports teams, especially baseball and basketball, but also football. I've seen some job ads for that too. It's a niche, but it's quite interesting and not too small.
I think 'probabilistic programming' is potentially one of the next popular paradigms of programming (or perhaps data science), especially with stuff like copilot. In this space, Julia can potentially shine relative to the current incumbents, since the focus on whole language JIT + lispyness really mixes very naturally to the style of the staged programming that is necessary for more complex probabilistic models. It also has one of the nicest libs for it (Turing), which is stan-like, but allows for more advanced models: https://turing.ml/stable/
My Julia-fu is weak compared to my Python or R-fu (or even C++), but the ecosystem is pretty innovative, if still immature (I would love more gradual typing tools).
Turing is very user friendly, but in my experience really hard to scale to large hierarchical (multilevel) continuous variable models, which is what Stan was designed for. It can do lots of other things, like e.g. Bayesian NNs (Turing + Flux). And it's good for learning.
I've prototyped lots of models on Turing, but I have had to eventually migrate them to Stan as I struggled a lot with efficiency once I tried to scale to a massive number of variables (think e.g. a proteomics experiment).
I would definitely try Prolog if you want to open your mind a little..its sad there aren't more general purpose declarative languages.
If you really want to stretch your mind, learn Ladder Logic programming, and VHDL or Verilog.
You should also have a deep knowledge of Excel.
For profit: COBOL.
A quick search for COBOL resources yielded https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... , so it seems possible to learn without access to the hardware.
As far as I know, practically there are no COBOL jobs around me anymore. Big established institutions like telco and bank usually use Java. On the other side, the younger kids usually prefer something like NodeJS or Go.
There appears to be an active community around it, and I'm sure getting help in an apprenticeship sort of way is possible. Again, we're talking about a niche language, so you can't expect the same level of accessibility as NodeJS or Go.
As for finding jobs, they're probably few and far between, but appear to be well paid from what I've heard. Places that need COBOL programmers will announce it, opportunities will likely come up from other contacts in the community, and cold contacting companies you know are using it is always an option.
The set-based paradigm is something that most developers seem blind to.
Its a wacky stack based language, loads of fun, hard to master and almost entirely useless as a general purpose tool.
Although if you don't know sql, just learn that.
It is a w3c standard for e.g. JSON processing