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What's the dumbest reason you've learned a programming language? (programming.dev)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 9 points 2 years ago (20 children)

HEY! Is PHP ugly? Yes. Does it use stupid naming conventions? Also yes! But it's an awesome language when you want to get shit done. There's no other languages out there where you can just write some code in VIM directly on the server through SSH and immediately see your results without any further setup. No frameworks required, no packages, no imports, no buzzwords and hubub, just pure unadulterated utility.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Incorrect. Perl does the same just as well, and it's a language that actually makes sense while also being uglier.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    In my experience Perl is a write-only language. Coming in behind someone else and fixing or writing their code is often slower than just rewriting it

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    Nonsense, there are tons of systems like that now. I've been playing with Deno & Fresh, it's great. Trivial to install, a pretty great language, Fresh doesn't force everything to be client side - you can easily write old school completely server side rendered sites if you want but you get to use TSX which is waaaaay superior to the old text based templating systems we used to use (Handlebars, Jinja, etc.).

    It also has built in hot reloading by default so even faster than PHP. Literally hit save and you see the results.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    What's this install nonsense? I just looked up Deno and it's part of an NPM stack. With PHP you just

    1. Open an Apache server

    2. Write code

    3. ???

    4. Profit!

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    I just looked up Deno and it’s part of an NPM stack.

    It's not. It supports NPM modules for backwards compatibility, but the whole point is that it doesn't inherit the NPM tooling mess. You can go from a new Linux install to a running Fresh project in 3 commands.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (7 children)

    Okay, I'm interested. What stack is it part of? What kind of servers does it use?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    There's two things:

    Deno: this is a replacement for Node and NPM and prettier and some other tools. So one aspect is that it's a more modern Node, using standard web APIs instead of Node specific stuff. And the other aspect is it is more streamlined modern tooling - no node_modules, no complicated build steps, built in Typescript support, etc. In fact you can use a single file as a script, similar to Python.. but unlike Python you can use third party dependencies, which makes it fantastic for stuff like CI scripts, etc. where you might have suffered with Bash or Python before.

    Fresh: this is just a web framework targeting Deno. Honestly I haven't used it much but I really like what I've seen so far. I always found React to be confusing and overkill for most sites, which should really be rendered server side, but also I really like the way you can compose components with JSX/TSX in a real language with full type checking. Fresh gives you both!

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    but unlike Python you can use third party dependencies,

    In what sense does python not have third party dependencies?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    It has them, but you can't use them from a single-file script. You have to set up a pyptoject.toml, create a venv and then pip install . in it. Quite a lot of faff. It also makes some things like linting in CI way harder than they should be because the linters have to do all that too.

    With Deno a single .ts file can import third party dependencies (you can use any URL) and Deno itself will take care of downloading them and making them available to the script.

    Some other languages have this feature to certain degrees. E.g. I think F# can do it, and people are working on it for Rust, but Deno is at the forefront.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    Oh I see what you mean. Interesting.

    As you allude to there are tools in python to help (I tried pex briefly once, for example). It hasn't really been a pain point for me but I can see why people would spend time on it. I imagine this strategy has its share of tradeoffs and gremlins.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    there are tools in python to help

    I haven't actually used pex but it doesn't look like it solves this - it's more of a way of distributing full programs. The .pex files aren't editable, which is something you need for this use case.

    I imagine this strategy has its share of tradeoffs and gremlins.

    As far as I know there are no downsides. It's basically win-win.

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