Comment by faangguyindia
8 hours ago
These 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.
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.
Funny, I have also converged on shell scripts for simple scripting or configuration, but I use /bin/sh for portability. Many of the machines I use do not even have bash installed.
> 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.
And fewer dependencies, and fewer vulnerabilities (if any at all, depending on your few dependencies).
Go is "only" a pain when you want to use your own copy of packages (because `replace` directives are always ignored everywhere except on the "root" package), and whenever you want to work with private Git repositories outside of the forges that have hardcoded config in the Go code (like GitHub) (because Go assumes there's an HTTPS server, and the only way to force it to use only SSH is with ugly workarounds AFAIK).
But despite this I still prefer it for personal projects because I can come back after not touching it for years, and the most I need to do is maybe update `golang.org/x/net` or something like that.
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.
Well, Java would compile and work for 3 decades straight. If anything, go did have an actual breaking language change (for loop variable capture)
Note that Java makes breaking changes all the time, which is why it publishes a compatibility guide with each major release. These are usually judged to be minor breakages, but if you have a codebase on the order of millions of lines, there's a very good chance that at least one thing will break and require a little bit of work to upgrade. And Java's not unique here, every stable language makes changes all the time that have the potential to break some user in some edge case.
Not that I need to tell you of all people, but I do find that Rust's editions system is one of the better ways to minimise this issue.
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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.
Whether there is any escape from JS/TS is a matter of what you are building and who is around you. If you are building SPAs all day, then sure, you will probably have to deal with the JS/TS ecosystem. If you are just building websites, then basically any traditional web framework would do. Only that then it depends on whether you have to work with people, who don't know web basics or people who want to use JS web frameworks even when there is no need, in majority, so that you get no choice, but to work as a team.
In theory most websites could be done statically with rendered HTML and CSS and maybe a little bit JS, but not mandatory, and having noscript fallback flows. MPAs are fine for most things and having noscript fallback flows can also be done kind of systematically, and in many cases isn't that difficult. Just that these days not many people bother or care.
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.
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.
https://www.radicalsimpli.city
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?
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.
Obvious follow-up that's begging to be asked -- if you like nix and want a lisp, have you tried guix/guile?
I'm curious about your Clojure setup. Same as GO, I think Clojure has very strong backwards compatibility.
If trying to avoid the cloud, like OP, which hosting option is suitable for Clojure, what do you use? I believe Clojure (JVM) has higher RAM requirements?
And GO has pocketbase.io which looks quite interesting. Do know whether something similar exists for Clojure, or maybe it's straightforward enough to compose your own by using various Clojure libs?
Elisp and Common Lisp for me, although I still use bash in the terminal.
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.
Good for you? I’m glad you have languages that fit your needs.
In the realtime/high assurance systems world, where garbage collection can be a huge source of non-determinism and overhead; we don’t have great options.
Zig is really the only language (idk about Odin?) trying to take the same approach that C did in giving you absolute control over a minimally abstracted CPU model. Us folks who need/want maximum control/performance should be allowed to have nice things too.
Why did you give up on Java and Rust?
Java is a resource hog when you use patterns and libraries popular in Java land. When you are working in the Java ecosystem, you just assume that this much resource is needed by the app! But when you'll code the same thing in Go using the same methods, you'll find resource usage is really very low.
We’ve a 1: 1 copy of the app; on JVM, it's using 2GB RAM using Spring Boot, and on Go, it runs on 512MB RAM and is blazingly fast.
ofc, it's possible to tune java app but why bother? when we get same low resource usage and better performance in Go from get go while still writing naive and dumb code?
Deployment is super simple in Go, upload a single cross compiled binary it's done. Very simple and easy.
Rust needs a lot more effort to write correct code than Go in my experience. We get the same performance out of Go, with much less effort. At some point, it's just cheaper to start one extra instance than perform some low-level optimisation; modern hardware is fast enough that Rust-level optimisation is rarely needed for what we do.
You are comparing a (the most?) featureful web framework to a vanilla http server.. of course one will be significantly more resource heavy.
> using SpringBoot
well there's your answer, isn't it?
I cant really agree on Rust. It does take a bit more time to write the same code in rust vs go. But in my experience the code is much more likely to be incorrect in go than it is in rust. Which over longer periods means rust is easier to maintain.
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I'm not sure the effort part makes sense now that we have LLMs? LLMs basically liberate language choice, which has made Rust incredibly attractive to me since I basically get good performance out of the box, while any possibly annoying pedantic obsession with correctness can be easily handed over to the LLM.
If I use a JVM language, running my test suite takes 10 to 30 seconds. With Rust it spends 3 seconds compiling and half a second to run 250 tests.
The irritating parts of Rust are more related with bloated libraries like serde that insist on generating code which massively slows down compilation for not much benefit.
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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).
1. http://lisette.run
Which Sqlite library are you using? With or without cgo?