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

[Carlton Hanna]

I can't live without Emacs plus org-mode. This is what helps get me through my day. I used to have so many applications open at once. This just became more desktop clutter and became a big distraction. Now, I have very few applications open and this allows me to focus on the tasks I need to get done. There is no end to what you can learn or do with emacs. I enjoy learning something new every single day.

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

TypeScript (and Node.js) sparks an unhealthy relationship. It's love-hate, but the development is fast, as well as let me develop anything I can think of. (partially due to vastness of NPM, and partially due to dynamicness of JavaScript.)

[Hayden Rouille]

Elixir is so beautiful to write <3

[Michael Z]

Despite its many quirks, JavaScript is fun. To this day I still pick up awesome little tricks like this one.

[Michael Z]

I've built a little interactive tutorial to overcome this initial skepticism you are talking about: learning-by-vueing.netlify.app/tai...

All free and can be completed very quickly.

[Elliot Derhay]

As a PHP user, I love using Laravel. I also love using Tailwind CSS whenever I get the chance.

Tailwind was weird to look at at first with all of the class names, but it quickly became easy to remember them by their prefixes.

As another comment said, the Tailwind IntelliSense plugin for VS Code also helps a lot when you're trying to find the right variation of a class (especially margin/padding sizes and text colors).

I guess I could say I'm happy not having to directly write CSS. It's so time-consuming.

[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.

[Jevgeni Tarasov]

Hands down Rust and Cargo. One of the best, most rewarding developer experiences I’ve ever had.

[Burak Aykan ÜRER]

Spring Boot ❤️

[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);