Ask HN: If you had 3 month to program for fun, what would you learn? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you had 3 month to program for fun, what would you learn?

As a Django dev (currently, anyhow - formerly was largely Windows software dev), I think I would investigate Go, if we're talking purely from a 'fun' perspective.

From a professional perspective, I've been dabbling in Objective-C/Cocoa and the Android SDK (trying to dredge up old Java knowledge) - but for something 'new' I think I'd take a closer look at Ruby on Rails.

Thanks for the advice. I come from a RoR background and I want to go into something a bit more "new age" or low level. Also digging a bit into iOS development now, just for fun.

Google definitely seems to be making a real push with Go - I believe it's just recently hit 1.0 status.

I'd like to see strong contenders for web frameworks in the language, but I think the game is still quite early. There are a few options, but they all seem to be quite immature at this time.

What is the big advantage of go? What would you use it for?

go is very fast(it's aimed at somewhere between C and C++).

it's a systems programming language, you supposedly can do anything. there's some companies already using it like soundcloud. it's awesome for api's because of it's speed.

also, it's a well thought language with many different decisions from common languages, it does not have exceptions and so on. it's an awesome language if you want to expand your mind.

otherwise, i would pick clojure.

What's the great thing about clojure then? I've been hearing a lot about that as well.

Absolutely nothing, because I would use that time to use the skills I already have to build some of my small ideas just for fun.

I would master* Node.js as much as possible, and along with Twitter Bootstrap start developing "real-time RAD (Rapid Application Development) for Web".

I'm learning Node.js, and I'm excited, but my time is extremely limited...so for the time being my RAD is limited to PHP.

*If to "master" was even possible

Yuk... PHP. Sounds icky. Hehe. I've also been thinking of going into Node.js, but the advantages of Node compared to RoR is just not that big. The only big difference is the real-time aspect, which is relatively easy to implement with Pusher in RoR.

What do you say?

Idk, I got a little taste of RoR last year in a seminar I went to, but the instructor had one version of RoR on his machine and the lab had a different version on the machines, but some of the differences were so big that the demo applications we were trying to create didn't work.

I ended up catching on fairly quickly and I was able to help out other students, but when I tried installing it on my laptop at home on a Windows computer, I had to eventually bite the bullet and reformat my hard drive to get it working.

Installing node.js was so easy, and since I do a lot of front-end work in javascript already, I already knew the syntax, I just had to learn how the node.js functions work.

I've never heard of pusher, but I tried out socket.io and it was really easy to implement.

I also saw that node.js is getting some huge support from big companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. To me, it seems like 10 years down the line there's still going to be support for it in some way, shape or form, so I also based my decision on that as well. I can't honestly say the same about RoR, but I also haven't researched it as much.

As far as I can tell, there's not much of an advantage to Node over Rails, but Node has realtime built-in so I'll use it instead of Rails&EventMachine.

That said, they're both really fun to work with.

I would like to learn to write games for the desktop and then try to write one, one of the traditional desktop games using C++ and something like SFML. The game development field has always intrigued me.

I think Javascript, tbh.

It covers quite a wide range of things you can do with it these days - regular web stuff, applications that run in the browser, and even server-side with Node.js.

If you want to go a bit lower level you can always try to write a debugger.

A debugger. Sounds interesting. What exactly would that be doing? How would you use it in a product?

Current DirectX/OpenGL API and I would try to build a renderer in C++.

I have a few things on my list. I am inclined towards -

* Going through Webkit's source

* Node

* iOS development

What if you where to go deeper into some low level programming?

Top of my list are Node.js and Clojure.

Why those two? Why clojure? I kind of know the advantage of Node.js (real-time).

I picked Clojure because I want to get into functional languages more, and I find the LISP-like syntax actually quite easy to get a hang of and more intuitive than Haskell. Node.js just to improve my Javascript skills and see what all the hype is about. Hopefully you read this, kind of late with the reply.

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