alt Hacker NewsThese days I just use a few languages:
1. Go, when I first saw code I wrote almost a decade ago still compiles and runs in Go, I decided to use Go for everything. There were some initial troubles when I started using it a decade ago, but now it's painless.
2. Haskell, I use it for DSL and state machines.
3. Bash for all deployment scripts and everything.
4. TypeScript, well for the frontend.
Lately, I’ve been using Go and SQLite for nearly everything.
I don't think I’ve any motivation to look at any other language.
I gave up on Java, Python, Ruby, Rust, C++, and C# long ago.
Fun fact:
Same thing for cloud, I just don't use managed cloud services anymore. I only use VMs or dedicated servers. I've found when you want to run a service for decades+, you’ve got to run your own service if you want it not to cost a lot in the long run.
I manage a few MongoDB, PostgreSQL clusters. Most of the apps like email lists marketer (for marketing, sending thousands of email each day) are simple Go app + SQLite using less than 512MB RAM.
Same for SaaS billing, the solution is entirely written in Go and uses Postgres. (I didn’t feel safe here using SQLite for this for a multi-tenant setup.)
Our chat/ticketing system is SQLite + Go. Deployment is easy, just upload Go cross-compiled binary + systemd service file, alloy picks up log and drops it graphana which has all alerts there.
I don't need to worry about "speed" for anything I do in Go, unlike Ruby/Python.
When something has to be correct I define it model it in Haskell as its rich type system helps you write correct code. Though setup is not painless as Go, decent performance.
I write good documentation, deployment instructions right into mono repo. For a small team this is more than enough imho.
No Docker, no Kubernetes, just using simple scripts + graphana + prometheus + Loki and for alloy/nodeexporter. Life couldn't be any simpler than this.
Replies
I am in a similar place.
Especially regarding Bash.
Used to be in a few companies where most developers just couldn’t/wouldn’t write in more than one language and it was always a pain to maintain different runtimes, languages, packages and internal dependencies of things that could have been a 20-line bash script, and had to be maintained and updated from time to time.
I understand people have their own limitations and reasons, but having to constantly deal with “wrong tool for the job” for the thousandth time gets frustrating.
Especially in cases where four different languages were used across the company because different people had different preferences. Worst case was Python/Ruby/C#/Javascript.
I get that Bash is not perfect, but I enjoy the simplicity and directness, and dislike the multitude of problems caused by not using it have shown to me it’s a better tradeoff.
I'm in the same boat, I started using go only a year ago, but don't want to really use anything else now for apps or data processing. I wrote an app that loaded a lot of data for reporting into duckdb. I've been doing so much java and JavaScript that I feel like it was just much simpler to deal with overall.
Shell for the scripts. I haven't tried to work through much DSL as I really am not a fan of DSLs. Maybe I'll give haskell a shot again to see if it sticks.
The funny thing is how ubiquitous TypeScript/JavaScript is. There is no escape. I also only use four languages: C#, F# (for DSL), Powershell (for deployment) and... TypeScript.
Despite we have different tastes in language and are in completely different ecosystems, TypeScript is still the lingua franca lol.
Would love to use go for SaaS but things like OmniAuth (RoR) make me stay with Ruby. I actually never used ruby before, but I think its a swell language to do SaaS in.
Yeah after writing some Haskell semi production apps (ported an old service at a previous company to Haskell and tried to productionize it enough for our staging environments) that's the conclusion I came to for using Haskell.
Curious if you've tried to use agents to read / write Haskell and how the experience has been?
Im with you on Go and SQLite, dropped Postgres for many of my projects, I might add: HTMX instead of a TS frontend, very few apps need a TS/React/... frontend. Doubling development effort with minimal gain (except games etc.)
Dabbled with Rust some years ago, I think it is an excellent choice for sudo-rs and such but for GUI and web apps I (perhaps too stupid) end up with arcmutex soup.
IME Ruby is really good for working alone on tiny projects without an IDE (trying to get more than syntax highlighting causes problems). Sometimes I write single-file scripts or even just use interactive Ruby.
I went the same way but with only using Lisp dialects like Elisp and Clojure and Nix. Although I would ditch Nix too if another Lisp could supplant it too.
I also LOVE Go, but recently rewrote a small tool to Lisette [1]. Its was the most fun i had in a long time while programming.
I can Highly recommend it, specially because you have Haskell experience (you get all the usual suspects, like ADTs, exhaustive pattern matching etc) in Lisette code. It has a fast compiler too, and produces human readable Go code. It also comes with great tooling out of the box (formatter/lsp etc).
Which Sqlite library are you using? With or without cgo?
Well, Java would compile and work for 3 decades straight. If anything, go did have an actual breaking language change (for loop variable capture)