What library/language/tool wowed you with its developer experience?

What thing really raised the bar for your expectations of developer experience when you first went to use it?

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

I'll name a few. Ruby really did capture me in this way. Being able to type irb into a terminal and then type "hello".upcase and see HELLO right there was really refreshing and spoke to me. I've been writing Ruby ever since.

In my brief experimentation with Flutter, I was quite impressed by the attention to developer experience that the developers are going for with this environment. I haven't done any production-oriented work, but if I went back to Flutter the experience would be a big reason for it.

[Aaron Stone]

I agree, Ben. I have done some Flutter work and it was a pleasure to work with.

[Simon Landry]

Also "did you mean ... ?", Gotchas, syntactic sugar and Active Record in general. Coming from the .Net world where we have to write getters and setters even for the simplest model to this magical world where you can just code a db and a few relationships and everything just magically works. I sometimes get imposter syndrome while writing Ruby / RoR because everything is so easy and I feel like anyone could write a website in a few days. Of course it's not true, but it goes to show how uncomfortably good Ruby makes me feel.

[Maximilian Burszley]

Coming from the .Net world where we have to write getters and setters even for the simplest model

Unclear when you last worked with .NET. T PropName { get; set; } is not really that difficult.

[Simon Landry]

Never said it wasn't easy, just that you /have/ to. Even if it's small, my point is that it's redundant. In Ruby on Rails, you don't have to do that, it automatically generates most of the methods you need just by reading your database.

[Jan Peterka]

For most of my time, I was writing in Python.
I really loved it and was able to argue for Python for hours.
I thought would never prefer another language when I had a choice.

Well... I was wrong.
In current job, I met Ruby (or Rails, to be specific) for the first time.
It seemed nice, easy to learn after Python, had some nice features.
I didn't realize how much comfortable and elegant it is before I did some work on my hobby project in Python.
It's still good, but there were multiple moments when I thought "well, I could write this much nicely in Ruby, shame Python doesn't do this".

[Ali Ilman]

Ruby.

The idiomatic methods, the elegant syntax!
I’ve shed happy tears TWICE after looking at arguably the most elegant code I’ve ever seen in my life. And they were written in Ruby. 🙂

[Evaldas Buinauskas]

Elm because of error messages usefulness and no runtime exceptions guarantees.

[@nobody]

I'm shocked more seasoned JS developers would learn TypeScript over Elm, it's uniquely concise and consistent, enforcing a functional approach to programming.

[Evaldas Buinauskas]

Don't be shocked. Elm is great and I would much more prefer to use it instead of Typescript. However getting started with Typescript is so much easier and Javascript code can be migrated gradually towards it, it is better suited for projects that cannot be built from ground up.

[Scott Simontis]

I recently learned that you can get some exceptions if you screw up Regex, infinitely recurse, or incorrectly encode/decode JSON. There's a few more cases people have discovered as well, but I'm not that good at programming language trivia

[Evaldas Buinauskas]

I see. However even with these edge cases I would be really confident with the output. Cheers for mentioning those.

[Adam Nathaniel Davis]

WheelJS:

dev.to/bytebodger/announcing-wheel...

[Aaron Stone]

Angular (v9.1.0 as of writing) has been delightful to work with so far. It has an awesome CLI that really empowered me hit the ground running on my new personal site. I am also really keen on learning Ruby.

[Cole Walker]

I always thought that Angular would be the hardest of the front-end frameworks to learn, but it was much friendlier than React.

[Aaron Stone]

I agree!

[Darren Hill]

Dotnet core and the merger of Microsoft and github opened my eyes. It's a beautiful experience.

[Shaiju T]

Programming Language should make developer life easier.

-It should be easy to learn.
-It should be maintainable.
-It should be easy to read, some languages have short syntax and its hard to find out were it starts and ends.
-It should have meaningful syntax and methods.

C# Meets all these points , I think its better than Java and other languages.

Tool should increase productivity:

-It should help locate files fast.
-It should help find Methods and Variables , References fast.
-It should make debugging easy.
-It should increase productivity.
-It should help build app using rapid development.
-It should make maintenance easier even in large enterprise projects.

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code meets all these.

What you think ? 😄

[Maximilian Burszley]

The only downside of Visual Studio to me is all the magic going on in the background with csproj/sln/msbuild files. I also really like C#, especially w/ the dotnet cli.

[simphiwe sifiso hlabisa]

I wish i can have that kind of enthusiasm with c#. 😂

[rhymes]

Ahaha a

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

For VSCode critiques, I cannot count how many times I have to reload (both the window and TS server). It can also hangs and sometimes slow.

[Zoltan Halasz]

For me, it is Asp.Net Core, with Razor Pages raised my interest in 2019. Since, I learned it and wrote some nice web apps.

[Ryan Latta]

I'd say Ruby in terms of a simple and expressive language.

I'd say Meteor as a small, but awesome way to develop web applications.

[Mike]

Netlify. It was unbelievable how simple it was.

[Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴]

Same thing for Now.sh :thumbs-up:

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

Depending on how complex your API and CRUD are, Now.sh might be simpler and support more languages. But for SSG, it has to be Netlify this time.

[Lawrence Eagles]

React Hooks. Thrilling experience with the functional programming approach, plus it takes away the pain of writing verbose class components. useEffect just saves me the mess in componentDidUpDate and code reusability makes things cleaner.

[Casey Brooks]

Kotlin.

It integrates with Java so incredibly seamlessly, and coming out of JetBrains, its IDE support is good with lots of helpful inspections and automatic Java->Kotlin conversion.

I also love how the Kotlin team always tries to provide solutions to the general problem instead of a bunch of smaller nuanced features and keywords. An example is a complete coroutines framework instead of singular mechanisms for "async/await" and "generator functions", which can both be implemented on top of the coroutines framework.

The IDE performance could certainly be better, and multiplatform (js, iOS, native) tooling is a bit confusing right now, but it's still a relatively early project and the future is looking very promising for Kotlin.

[Alain Van Hout]

It may sound counterintuitive, but Java as a language because by form and by convention it forces you to be verbose, that is explicit, rather than terse. And the Java ecosystem, which really has no equal in maturity and reliability.

[Max Ong Zong Bao]

Python as it has never failed to amaze me on the number of things you can do with it from data science, IoT to microservices.

[Jan Peterka]

Agree on that.

I have a newfound love for Ruby because of its elegance and beauty.
But Python is so amazingly multipurpose (which is mainly because of its big user base and great packages), it's extremely convenient to at least prototype new idea in Python.
Is it webapp? Is it script to rename all my movie files? Is it IoT idea (on Pi)? Scraper? Or looking into some data in Jupyter? Well, Python is a way to go!

[ari dwi prayogo]

I love kotlin. It has 4 characteristics that make me as developer more productive. Also kotlin has language design make our code more readable without performance overhead that awesome