Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Does language really matter? Any experienced programmers should be able to pick up any language in a matter of days if he knows the underlying concepts. Similarly, the language is not what makes a job interesting.

I mean, what don't you like about JS? Is it the syntax or is it the environment? The code base? The framework? Maybe web dev is not for you? Maybe you are asked to do thing you personally disagree with (ex: ads). Language rarely was the main thing that defined the project, though there are correlations: if you are doing JS, you are probably doing web dev, with a higher chance of front-end work. But chances are that a NodeJS back-end and one written in, say, Elixir, won't feel much different after the honeymoon is passed.

If you want something different to JS, why not try good old C instead of niche languages? It has a significant job market, you will learn about memory management, and get your foot into embedded, high performance, and system programming, far from the world of JS. These skills will translate into the other (niche or not) languages you may use next. Even in high level languages, having an idea of how that works on a lower level is a good thing.

I think "any experienced programmers should be able to pick up a language in a few days" is true for a lot of surface level things, but expertise is entirely different. A language isn't just the syntax and runtine, but the idioms, patterns, package ecosystem, and tooling that surround it, which you will likely not learn in a few days.

Is it really expected to be able to learn even the syntax and runtime in "a few days".

I've been using Javascript for 20 years and I'm still learning new things (though it helps that the language keeps changing)

Yeah it's probably more accurate to say "learn enough of the syntax and runtime to write/edit code in a few days".

> But chances are that a NodeJS back-end and one written in, say, Elixir, won't feel much different after the honeymoon is passed.

This is very, very far from my experience, having worked extensively with both of these particular examples.

At my current job I deep dive into a lot of years old, kinda sketchy Elixir code, and it's almost always less effort to learn/fix something than I've found in other languages, especially other dynamic languages. Except when macros are overused.

Thinking like this is how you get factory objects in JavaScript or Elixir processes as objects. They are very different technologies that need to be written differently at the core.

Yes, but the problem is non-technical recruiters. They want to be looking for a "Java programmer" or an "Elixir programmer". If you tell them that a good programmer is a good programmer in any language, and that they need to look at what the person has actually achieved, they won't be interested. Keyword-matching on Linkedin is a lot easier.

language matters in what language i prefer and enjoy working with. sure i could pick up a job in any language out there. but why would i want to? working with niche languages has the advantage of a smaller community where developers are generally more enthusiastic about their language and more skilled programmers too.

personally i enjoy working with plain javascript. but i also liked coffeescript and i ended up choosing that for our codebase because job applicants were of higher quality (including those that had never used coffeescript before)

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