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Jan Wedel
Jan Wedel

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What Is Your Main Language?

I am following The Practical Dev and dev.to for quite some time and had the impression, that this great community consists of a majority of frontend and scripting language developers. I was more than happy, that my article about Modern Java Development gained some attention.

Now I am curious to know, What is you main programming language and what are you using it for?

Top comments (103)

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Cat • Edited

Vanilla Javascript, however, I'm shopping around for a library or framework. I'm looking at React for obvious reasons * coughiworkatfbcough * but I've recently been Ruby on Rails-curious since I've heard it mentioned a lot on Learn to Code With Me and Code Newbie podcasts.

TL;DR: since JS was my first language, I equate new programming languages with what I know in JS. So yeaaaah. Vanilla JS.

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Jan van Brügge

You may want to take a look at Cycle.js if you are interested in functional programming. Found it, used it, then joined the team

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Ben Halpern

Ruby is my main language. I code in other stuff as well, but I'd call myself a Rubyist at heart.

dev.to is built with love and Ruby. ❤️

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Jan Wedel

What did you do before dev.to?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Immediately before dev.to I was building a messaging dashboard with Node, and before that it was a marketplace app in Rails.

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Casey Brooks

Most of the code I write at work is in Java, but more and more I am replacing my Java side projects with Kotlin.

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Jan Wedel

And what kind of SW are you building?

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Casey Brooks

I'm a consultant so the specific projects/technologies change frequently at work, but my current project is a large Android application. A lot of my side projects are also Android apps, but the big thing I'm working on is Orchid, a new static site generator. The core is still in Java, but I've been building all its many plugins in Kotlin.

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Jan Wedel

Nice. I’m also tempted to start with Kotlin. But as I had the same feeling when Scala came out, I’m waiting if the hype will last...

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Casey Brooks

Yeah, I had similar concerns for a while, but when Google announced first-class Android Kotlin support, I decided to take the plunge. I think the support of Google and Jetbrains, both large and influential companies in the Java space, give Kotlin an edge that other JVM languages do not have.

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Souk Syp.

Moonscript(Lua), especially with Lapis + Openresty for backend and rest API. For the frontend, vanilla Javascript with frameworks like React help me build prototypes faster. Because Moonscript and Javascript are so alike, I learn one for two.

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Jan Wedel

Interesting. What kind of apps (as in domain) are you building with Moonscript?

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Souk Syp.

A news web app (naneung.com/) and a web note editor that translate karaoke into lao, currently in development.

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Souk Syp. • Edited

To illustrate what I'm doing...
Typr

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Jan Wedel

Fancy! karaoke? 🎤
Reminds me of using Pinyin for Chinese...

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Souk Syp.

Yes. Karaoke is the most popular language among millenials in Laos for chatting.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

Jasmine, a testing framework for Javascript, since my job is software QA. I use Protractor and supertest with it to test Angular front ends and REST APIs.

Mocha would have worked for those, too, but Jasmine is a tad more straight forward. If more people were reading my spec files, I'd consider switching.

Personal projects then end up using Angular or vanillaJS, but I'm itching to get back into Python to do something data related.

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Jan Wedel

Are you only write tests? In my team, we also develop angular apps, but all testing from unit to E2E UI tests is done by our developers. Do you really see a need to have a separate QA?

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ItsASine (Kayla)

At my location (one office of a larger organization), they try to maintain a 2:1 dev:QA ratio within teams. Devs write unit tests for their code and then QA writes the integration and E2E tests for the app as a whole.

In theory, this allows for devs to focus on deving and QAs to not be as tied to the code so they’re able to catch things better (going off of the spec rather than what the implementation does).

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Jan Wedel

In theory

So, does it work in your opinion? I mean in terms of quality and also team responsibility? I would assume that it will end up in a situation where “they” write the bugs while “them” alway being to picky.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

I’ve been on teams where it’s been siloed between dev and QA, and there has been a bit of infighting amongst those who find bugs and those who write code. It’s never been hostile just certainly a sense of otherness.

Most teams, though, if QA and dev are integrated then there’s no issue with that. Like, don’t have QA site bunched together away from dev, don’t have QA only lunches, etc. If everyone acts as a team, there’s no otherness.

Biggest issue I have with it is that I’m bored more often than not. Once I set up the initial framework, it’s a whole lot of waiting on dev to implement features for me to E2E test. 2:1 is good when a project is spinning up fast, but I think they need to revisit how many QAs are needed when a project is more in a sustaining pace. If the devs are working on infestructure or tech debt, I’ve got nothing to do.

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Pierre Bouillon

Python here ! For tasks automation and APIs, but for pretty much everything else too.

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Valentin Baca

Java for the front and backend: serverless on AWS Lambda with an Android client. In the near past I was using Java for web servers using Spring & Tomcat.

I've been learning Python on my own time, but putting that on pause while I pickup Objective-C and Swift for iOS at work.

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Jan Wedel

In what field are you working?

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Valentin Baca

I work for a website that sells books :)

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Brian Kephart

I’m using Ruby on Rails to build a music school administration app.

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Jan Wedel • Edited

Interesting! What was first, you or the app? 😄

  • What I mean is, did you offer to write such an app or were you hired to do so?
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Brian Kephart

I was hired as a teacher/manager, and I learned to code specifically to build this app.

I started off in the same job as the other managers. I was more efficient than the other managers at technical jobs, so I got put in charge of all things tech (and fewer things sales 😄). We wanted to make our teachers' notes paperless and accessible to other teachers, so I built note systems in a no-code app platform based on spreadsheets. That was slow and clunky, so I learned to program in order to build a web app. I'm the only coder, so I needed a framework for fast development, thus Rails.

So yeah, one thing kind of just led to another. To be honest, I guess my main language is actually music. 🎶

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rhymes

Awesome!

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Flavio • Edited

learn programming in c# and .NET (a lit of java) , but i really like js , i did web pages , services , apps and bots using node and using vanilla js for front; saddly now i use cobol in my new job :(

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Thalles Henrique

Java. But I have interest to learn Swift, but I guess I'm having troubles with this because I don't know much about functional programming (I only know to code using the Object-oriented paradigm). I tried to learn this programming language using the demonstration project of the Apple's development page, but I continue with some doubts in some aspects of it, such as the guard-lets and the way which Swift use the MVC-Pattern. Currently, I'm programming in Python (with Django framework) too.

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Jan Wedel

I‘m also a Java dev and I code some iOS apps in my spare time. So I’m wondering you are having troubles with Swift? It’s as function (or not functional) as Java. Why are you having trouble with it?

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Thalles Henrique

I always get confused with ViewControllers (put the code of one in another, because of the name) and find the "guard lets" very complicated. I'm more used to programming using very much comparisons and tried to implement the demonstration project in Apple's site, and I haven't studied anything of the language before starting, which I guess wasn't a good idea. I understood the basics but some functions are a little bit obscure for me.