What languages and tools do you use that spark joy?

You may have heard of Marie Kondo, a Japanese Organization Consultant, she wrote a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. In the book she discusses her method of organising, which is known as the KonMari method, it consists of gathering together all of one's belongings, one category at a time, and then keeping only those things that "spark joy", and choosing a place for everything from then on.

I think it could be a cathartic process for your digital life also, what if you gathered all of your digital "things" together, all of the languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools that you use, and decide what to keep from each category. What would you choose?

I think it's more important now than ever to review your "toolset" with this in mind. For your own well-being, you should remove things, keep the "joyful", and slowly add more. There is such a proliferation of new tech, this is a decision you need to take again and again, so it is important to have a good ethos for your personal life and career.

Comments

[Louis-André Labadie]

Lua! In my case, I used it with LÖVE.

It's exceedingly clear, it runs everywhere, and it's close enough to the metal that no bugs are magical. Every time I use it, it's a pleasure.

[Rob OLeary]

LOVE looks cool! I was unaware of Lua until I was looking at single-board computers, i was surprised that Lua was a common language to be bundled with them!

[David Wickes]

Yeah +1 to Lua. Aggressively simple. I've been enjoying my Lua with Lisp flavour recently - check out Fennel.

[Fredrik Sjöstrand]

Löve is for sure the game engine I have enjoyed the most! Is is just fun to use even for the first time. I recently tested phaser and that was so rough in comparison.

[Saurabh Sharma]

observablehq.com and quokkajs.com

I wish regular development could have that kind of feedback loop

[Daniel Ziltener]

Sounds like you wish for a Lisp

[Rob OLeary]

Some of the observable journals are beautiful, I have not used it, but would like to pick it up some time :-)

[Anna]

Before answering that question, I'd go back to the roots of the KonMari method. "Sparking joy" is an imperfect translastion from Japanese, says redditor:

Long and short of it, ときめく(Tokimeku) is a compound verb by "Toki" and "meku", where "Toki" is derivation of "Dokidoki" (Heart pounding) according to the two main Japanese dictionary. Full meaning :

Daijirin Dictionary 3rd edition (大辞林 第三版 ) - "ときめく（ 動カ五［四］ ） : 喜びや期待などのために、胸がどきどきする。" = Due to the joy and the feeling of looking forward, the heart is pounding.

Daijisen Dictionary (大辞泉) - "ときめく［動カ五（四）］ : 喜びや期待などで胸がどきどきする。心が躍る。" = Because of the joy and the feeling of looking forward, the heart is pounding.

Looking forward is crucial in technology. Tools and frameworks are constantly evolving. Sometimes, this happens too fast, with people focusing too much on trends and buzzwords.

"Joy" is not the term I'd use for my experience with npm - quite often, it's exactly the opposite, I'm feeling very frustrated. But in going forward with my current project, npm is the tool that will let me reach my goals.

[Rob OLeary]

Yep, I agree that you have to look forward in tech, and evolve, but I think it's important to be rooted in the present and not to be swayed too much, or too far from the core of what you enjoy. Of course, sometimes you have to use a tool because of a work environment, or the high adoption rate in the industry. So, if you can choose, choose a work environment that uses your "happy" stack!

I have not had to use npm extensively, so I cant share your pain! The trend that some people hope for is to use native imports more in the future and reduce the reliance on npm, I believe that's the ecosystem Deno is going for

[Mike Talbot ⭐]

If it's a tool: for me it is probably Wallaby.js - realtime as you type test runner with super powerful in editor feedback and debugging tools (and as someone else said, Quokka.js its sibling).

For a language then that's harder - I always had a soft spot for Ruby, I'm very excited about Elixir, I think C# is powerful and expressive, but coming from where it was - modern Javascript has a fluidity that is complimented by it's new found terseness and support for asynchronous coding.

[Wilgert Velinga]

Wallaby is the best. Not only is it a joy to use, if you by accident throw a project at it that doesn't work their support team is always very quick to help you out (Example: github.com/wallabyjs/public/issues...).

For other languages there are also alternatives. C# -> nCrunch, Python -> PyCrunch, Java -> InfiniTest.

[Kevin Schweikert]

For me it‘s Go/Golang! I love to write it and learning something new feels like reading a good book. Interesting and rewarding

[Travis Fantina]

Ruby and Rails spark more joy than anything else for me. I'm also a huge fan of Elixir, it's a phenomenal language and in my opinion, has some of the best documentation out there: it's standardized, concise, and easy to document your code as you go.

Svelte also sparks joy, I haven't been able to use it too much yet but the little I've played with it has me excited to try building something real with it.

As far as tools, Atom still sparks joy, it does everything I need, easy to configure and it was my first real text editor. For notes Bear sparks joy.

[João]

You know, programming in React is sparking joy for me. I like how easy it is to create components and refactor them into smaller pieces. It's 6 years old an still going strong, evolving and getting better while not leaving old code behind.

[Rob OLeary]

I noticed a lot of people speaking fondly about TailwindCSS. It's on my radar :-)

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

Personally, I don't really see the benefit of TailwindCSS, or I haven't use it much.

• TailwindCSS is still a framework, with unneeded CSS. You still have to purge / minify it.
• Still, atomic CSS is a way to go.
• Much can be accomplished using mere SCSS, but for some reasons, default HTML stylesheet is so bad... much has to be revamped.

Yes, please Change my mind.

[Richard Tong]

I love the library I created: rubico. Think RxJS, but no Observables, just vanilla types. I put up a website with some runnable code examples here. Here's a code sample with deno that I look at every now and again

import { serve } from "https://deno.land/std/http/server.ts";
import { map, transform } from "https://deno.land/x/rubico/rubico.js";
const s = serve({ port: 8001 });
console.log("http://localhost:8001/");
transform(map(req => {
  req.respond({ body: "Hello World\n" });
}), null)(s);

[Gabriel Souza]

Kotlin and Coroutines