Hacker News Reader

Comment by WickyNilliams | Hacker News Reader

I'll have a quick gander at Mint but at the moment i'm favouring Ubuntu, purely because i've had some experience with it.

Excuse the elementary questions that follow, but i really am this ignorant to the whole Linux ecosystem!

What stacks are available? Are there relative merits which may influence my decision, or does it amount to simply picking the one i like the look of and stick with it?

What are the most popular text editors? I'm used to running Visual Studio as my IDE, is Eclipse the only editor that will offer similar depth of functionality? for example, integrated debugging, code completion, refactoring tools

I've actually got a GitHub repo already! What happens if i get bonus points before i get any normal points?! Some kind of exception thrown presumably ha. But then that was on Windows, and whilst i did set it up through the command line (GitBash) i later relied on a GUI tool in my IDE for further interaction.

View on HN

Well, there's a ton of technologies you could play around with, from lisp to haskell, ruby to python to any jvm language.

If you go with Java or Scala, Eclipse, IntelliJ or NetBeans are good choices. Personally I prefer IntelliJ where you can check out the community edition.

For scripting languages such as php, ruby or python, vim and emacs are the goto editors (i use emacs myself). On the other hand IntelliJ and Eclipse have plugins or alternate builds for these languages as well.

If you come from .NET and your main goal is to broaden your horizon, I'd definitely try to go with a plain text editor like jEdit or SciTE and pick a scripting language.

Since you said you're into webdev, the rails or django frameworks will probably get you the most bang for your buck.

I'm not keen on Java as it's just another language with a C-style syntax, i want to have my mind blown and eyes opened. Plus after using .NET for so long, I don't think i can ever go back to the awkward namespaces and classes of the Java framework. I wrote my dissertation using the then new OO features of PHP5, so PHP is out of the running as I wouldn't be treading the new ground that i sorely seek.

I concur with you that IntelliJ is great, JetBrains consistently produce superb tools. I use the WebStorm for all my front-end coding (mainly for JS code completion, linting and refactoring), and ReSharper for serious productivity and refactoring when i'm doing back-end stuff in Visual Studio. ReSharper is possibly the greatest IDE enhancement of all time.

Funny you mention jEdit, it was my text editor of choice when i was at university - we were encouraged not to use tools that hold your hand like Eclipse or NetBeans. My only fear is that if i try to build something big in jEdit (i'm thinking thousands of lines of code) it'll become a maintenance nightmare working with nothing but text files - i think i'll eventually need something that has a concept of projects etc. or am i missing something here?

I'm starting to gravitate towards Python and Ruby as primary choices of language as they're both popular and seem to have well-established web frameworks.

Agreed, Intellij is the way to go

Reply on news.ycombinator.com