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What new language/tool/etc. have you been meaning to learn but haven't gotten around to yet?

Ben Halpern on April 24, 2019

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Laurie

Vue! Started to play around with it yesterday :D

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Katie Adams

Only to a beginner level but I had a crack at Vue recently and - as my first attempt at using a framework - was pleasantly surprised! How're you finding it?

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Desi
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Laurie

It’s a great one for sure :)

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Laurie

I'm liking it. It's certainly fast to get up and running/start to use.

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Ben Halpern

First impressions?

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Laurie

I will still never be a fan of functions that start with $, it seems unreadable. I'm more likely to use the mounted function instead of $mount as I result.

I really like how lightweight the configuration is. And it feels pretty intuitive without a lot of extra context/bloat to understand.

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romedu

I bet you hated Jquery.

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Laurie

Haha, I accepted it! But I like the direction things are moving in terms of readability.

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Sophie The Lionhart

How do you feel about single file components? I think that's the best thing coupled with the scoped css.

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Laurie

I’m amenable to both!

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Jaaki

Yay, it's quick to get going, but it's also quite powerful as you dig in further.

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Gabriel Laroche

Golang! I started to read a few books on O'Reilly, but haven't coded in it yet

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David Wickes

Just going to leave this here...

github.com/quii/learn-go-with-tests

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Gabriel Laroche

Well well well, don't mind if I do

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Florian Rand

I'm finishing The Go Programming Language, a bit dense sometimes, but a good must have.

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Neil Syiemlieh

GraphQL. The hype makes me wanna join in, but I just don't feel like I need it yet. I guess I just haven't worked on any project large enough to warrant it

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Ken Bellows

A fun experiment to try it out is to find a public REST API, ideally something that can be modeled with some sort of type system (my recommendation: the PokéAPI), run some queries to get familiar with it, then build a GraphQL layer in front of it. Gets you familiarized with GraphQL types and resolvers and such. There's a slight learning curve at the beginning, but it's not bad, and it's a very nice interface to query once it's set up!

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Neil Syiemlieh

Awesome suggestion. I'll definitely try this out

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Laurie

If you want a really clean way to play around with GraphQL make a Gatsby project and throw in some kind of static content.
When you spin up the project for development it generates an additional localhost endpoint that consists of a stand alone GraphQL playground (think postman for REST).

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Neil Syiemlieh

A Gatsby + GraphQL combo is exactly what I had in mind when thinking of learning graphQL :D

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Jacob Evans

You could try creating a standalone GraphQL API instead of a RESTful one. One of the jobs I did the only thing Express was doing was running Apollo server, everything else was pure GraphQL API.

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Tushar Khubani

I would personally suggest you to start with a crud project involving authentication and authorisation. Covers pretty much the basic necessities for a base.

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Tom Bonanno

Rust. Been seeing lots of hype about it lately and started reading up and going through the getting started stuff.

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Dylan Anthony

Rust is a very complicated language to learn and also so worth it. After going through their tutorial (which is the best language tutorial I’ve ever encountered), it is my favorite programming language.

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Neil Syiemlieh

I've also considered starting Rust soon, been going through their tutorials. What I love most about it is how well documented and thought out it seems to be

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Haruan Justino

Elixir with Poenix framework, didn't have time to first impressions yet, but its seems that the active record(ecto) is a bit hard to get used with.

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Nick Vernij

I liked ecto a lot when I first started using it, because its API is very explicit i was able to pick it up quickly, especially compared to activerecord.

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Haruan Justino

Great to know, I'm comming from python/Django, hope I have the same feeling that you had.

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Michael Crenshaw

Not so new, but Ruby. I understand it's a really clean-feeling language. But I'm worried JS/TS will leave it behind.

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Shawn Mealey

Been meaning to pick it up here too. I feel like a lot of folks still like it's syntax over Javascript/Typescript so I think it will still have a place for a while to come. I still haven't gotten over the syntax yet, and our codebase has a bunch of things going on where I feel like I am just intimidated.

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rhymes

Don't see Ruby disappearing anytime soon so learn away!

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Boris Krstić • Edited

Python.
Writing different automation scripts with it. It's pretty cool and interesting how easy I can make something to work the way I want it. I was trying to do the same thing with Node but boy I'm just not succeeding!
Anyway I am on the edge of choosing between JavaScript or Python. I can use JS "everywhere" and I can use Python for almost "everything".
My current work has nothing to do with these technologies at the moment, but I am preparing myself for a career change 😏

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Patrick Charles-Lundaahl

Python's a lovely language :)

I'd also say: you don't necessarily need to pick! Python is really fast to learn, and you can be productive with it really quickly. JavaScript does really well as a slow-burn language - it's totally doable to use the little bits that you need and pick more up as you go (it's also got a crazy amount of variety in its ecosystem, and I'd say it's probably good for the sanity not to try to learn all of the things at once).

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Boris Krstić

This actually makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for the feedback!

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Dylan Anthony
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Katie Adams

Python. Picked up a Raspberry Pi and can see it being a great opportunity to start learning it.

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Sophie The Lionhart

Ansible. I never want to set up my computer again.

I basically want to install all my dependencies, hook up my github, download my repos and dot files, run updates, build all the project docker images, and have everything good to go. I know normally Ansible is for setting up server clusters though.

If anyone has any better ideas to set up a local dev machine I'm all ears though! I basically want a package manager file for apt in the vein of package.json or composer.json I guess, with a few scripts to be ran after dependencies are installed.

Also I guess I'll write a simple bash script to download and run the ansible stuff eh? :P Or alternatively can I use docker to set up my actual computer? Tough life...

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dallgoot • Edited

i suggest you go the Docker route : Ansible comes after basic system needs.
Those basic system needs are simple (since you use composer i'm assuming PHP) :

  • http server
  • PHP
  • some database

These can be quickly set up via a docker-compose file and started/stopped easily (once every config is done)
Ansible at the moment will only add a layer of complexity that, i think, you don't need at first.
All packages are configured/set up through the dockerfile(s) once and if needed you can enter a bash/sh console on each container.
I recommend you start with the more "complete" images (they have everything needed system wise) and then go for smaller images that fits your needs later for less memory/more performance.

:)

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Sophie The Lionhart

I get what you mean there, but I'm not talking about setting up deployment servers. I'm talking about setting up my local environment. Like I buy a new computer or wipe my hard drive or something and want to get up and running again. Things like installing my IDEs, setting up my .bashrc, installing things like spotify or slack, and other utilities like gedit or 'bat' or 'exa'.

For the projects I will use docker for sure. I don't think I can set up my local machine using docker though can I?

Also if not, I actually decided to go the Ansible route so far and have it almost working already. Just having some ppa issues and also an issue with snaps on crostini that it was too late to try and fix when I encountered it last night.

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dallgoot

you're right Docker means containers not your host machine so its only use, for your needs is the environment for code.

Setting up your OS is another topic and i believe there (probably) are tools to customize the distro you are using.

BUT going with Ansible for that is a good idea :)

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Julia Flash

I spent a summer learning x86 assembly in three separate courses. I did this while playing Dragons Dogma, I would pause the game - do a section | chapter of the courseware - and keep playing as a reward for my advances in the course. I was learning it for understanding the utilization and modification of shellcode better. It didn't work. Dragons Dogma was great though.

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Florian Rand • Edited

Elixir. Started reading a book two days ago after a long phone talk with a friend. I asked him for a nice language to learn for back-end development. He's currently working with elixir so he gave me very nice points.

The thing is, reading the book I felt like few years ago when I tried to do a hello word in brainfuck.

for those who don't know what _brainfuck_ is, here is a hello word:
+[-[<<[+[--->]-[<<<]]]>>>-]>-.---.>..>.<<<<-.<+.>>>>>.>.<<.<-.

So, after a few pages, put the book in the shelves and I'm continuing learning Go. And good thing I've been learning how to benchmark functions in Go!

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Glenn Carremans

Vue: I have been mostly focused on backend (PHP/Laravel) but want to spend some time in learning more frontend frameworks.

Kotlin: I am an Android dev but unfortunately I have not been able to work in Kotlin yet, for the last 2 years I have worked mostly on big legacy applications that are written in Java.

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rhymes

Judging from the direction Android dev is going I'd prioritize Kotlin, you can also contribute to the newly released DEV Android app in the meantime 😂

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Glenn Carremans

Very true! I hope to be able to help a lot in the future development of the DEV Android app.
So many interesting things to learn everywhere 😂 hard to prioritise, Kotlin, Vue, tailwindCSS, SASS, ... Lol the list can go on. But for sure will try to focus on Kotlin.

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rhymes

Ahahah the infamous "stuff to learn" list

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Dylan Anthony

And to that point, it may be worth looking at Google’s own Flutter which they are pushing in very hard. Haven’t decided how I feel about Dart yet, but it’s very familiar and easy to pick up.

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Dylan Anthony

It’s very easy to mix in Kotlin to existing Java code bases! I’ve done it several times now in Android apps and I’m far from an expert Android dev.

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Yuriy Bogomolov

Agda. Dependently-typed languages are the future of programming, IMO. And Agda has the most compelling feature set - even Cubical Type Theory mode. Even TypeScript has bit of type-level fun. But it's hard to come up with a good project idea that will expose best parts of each language.

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rhymes

Rust ☀️

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Jaaki

Typescript definitely.

After spending hours and hours hunting down a bug, which turned out to be caused by someone else's npm package that changed my array to an object for a split second!!!!

I should have used that time to learn Typescript and left all that Javascript nonsense behind.

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Chathula Sampath

Flutter. Started to learn it.bit like a js callback hell.

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Dian Fay

I keep wanting to learn a Lisp or other solely-functional language (Elixir?) but I've never had time and ideas simultaneously.

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rhymes

Elixir has been in my list for years, I did learn Erlang once, then mostly forgotten it. I'll get around those at some point, or maybe not :D

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Alex

I learned Haskell with the project euler problems as the excuse. Haven't found a ton of practical use for the language, but the ideas/way of thinking I picked up made a lasting impact!

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Yash Kadaru

Gatsby.js. I want to refresh my personal website with it, but every time I start I get carried away while trying to research how I can implement certain features on my site, and I go into this endless loop of bookmarking other libraries, articles and things and drool over how many cool things I can do with my site, without focusing on my one task I set for myself... to learn Gatsby.js... hahah.

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Ady Ngom

React plus Python 🐍 I always get a start but can’t find the time to go in depth

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rhymes

That's a lot! React and Python both bring with themselves a lot of stuff to learn, doing them together might be quite a feat 😂

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Ady Ngom

Indeed I think I will stick with React for now as a JS guy this has the most direct impact. There were just a nice deal on a Mosh Hamedani course on Python that was hard to resist 😂
Alright I’m going back and staying in my Javascript lane 😀

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rhymes

No no be in all the lanes, just take it easy 😂😂

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Ady Ngom

I wish indeed 😉 Bandwidth is hard to come by these days. But in reality I’m very proficient with Angular and I want to work my way up that way with React . Python would be more of a hobby at this point something to learn with my kid during her school vacation.

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rhymes

Python would be more of a hobby at this point something to learn with my kid during her school vacation.

That would be lovely indeed!

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Autumn

Javascript! I'm thinking of learning about React, any good resources?
I'm a Python coder. I feel like I have a lot of hte backend stuff, but I just can't make cool interfaces for any of my apps.

PS: if you think React sucks, do advise me :)

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Florian Rand • Edited

Best starting point for react But before that, I highly recommend this: github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

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Omer Farooq Ahmed

React! I spent a lot of time learning Angular in 2017 and then again in 2018 when I worked on a large enterprise project using Angular as an intern. I guess it's difficult starting React because it means coming to terms with the fact that Angular is losing popularity fast and that I might have to give up on a framework I spent so much time learning and using.

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K

ReasonML

I used it a bit, but never really build something. Besides Rust it seems to be the most promising language currently on the market.

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Jack Harner 🚀

React! I've started to dabble and managed to cobble this together: Harner Designs Labs. The idea behind it is to have a place to show off examples of stuff, proof of concepts, etc. Kind of like my own personal CodePen that lets me play with PHP and other stuff.

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Jack Harner 🚀

If any React-inclined people have any time to look over the code for it and give me pointers or feedback, I would love that:

harnerdesigns / harner-designs-labs

A React Landing Page for the Harner Designs Labs.


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Edwin Mak

I really want to try Phoenix LiveView! See how much I could avoid javascript ;P

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rhymes • Edited

Please write articles about it! I read the article they wrote to introduce it to the world and it seems super interesting!

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Edwin Mak

Absolutely! Your comment has super charged me to give LiveView a view (pun intended not sorry lol). Hope to have something out that peaks your interest :)

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Basti Ortiz

I don't really have a need for it yet, but learning Python is in my bucket list. I've heard so many good things from it. Perhaps I could learn it to automate much of my daily tasks... 🤔

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Jamie

It's less of a language and more of a framework I guess, but I'm finally getting my hands dirty with Hugo. I've built a few static sites before (and am currently in love with Netlify), so I'm taking a handful of blogs (because I have that many) and am trying to convert them to static sites with Hugo.

It's going really well so far, and the sites I'm converting (and redesigning) have been easy to migrate. Plus the migrated versions are super fast - I'm also avoiding using client side JS as much as possible.

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Alex

Property-based testing frameworks! I've toyed with them a teensy bit in rust, but I really want to start applying them to a real codebase - I've glanced at FsCheck for my .NET work, but haven't had any time to investigate it more.

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Nick Wu • Edited

Flutter. Coming from Angular dart I was very interested in flutter, and after a few simple codelabs it seems to be a promising technology to master. But I haven't had a chance to really sit down and study the framework, and more importantly, do an end to end project.

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

I read this on hacker news the other day and it makes me want learn Logo.

Elite schools do that in undergrad; e.g. as an initial scored lab exercise, write this recursive fractal shape using Logo, parallel Delaunay triangulation with prefix sums , dynamic programming solving oligopoly problem or single-value Paxos pseudocode on a piece of paper in 10 minutes (I am being serious). If you can cope with it, it immediately shows up in the interview and you are considered a member of the club, a person worthy of having conversations with.

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Gil Blinov

AWS Amplify.

I'm still having issues with visualising what happens behind the scenes.

Even though I can build my infra using Teraform, the feedback regarding Amplify is very promising.

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mattmatt

Terraform. I got as far as spinning up two ec2 webservers and a load balancer, but I'd really like to use it to set up a whole cicd for a static s3 site.

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diek

I cannot finally decide to use Golang for my home projects, i love the language, i love the way to do things... but, wat, i don't know, i am always back to javascript, php or python.

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rhymes

Well, maybe the universe is telling you that you don't really need it :D

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Matt Del Signore

Typescript, but now I need to learn it for a new position and the docs are really good.

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Amara Graham

I need a good excuse to play around with Vue.

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Ben Halpern

I feel you on that comment on Rust so it was well-deserving of the ❤️

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KLGF (she/her)

I really wanna learn Haskell!
Hopefully soon after my bootcamp :)

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Jacob Evans

I am planning on learning TypeScript - but have not found anything I really like yet as a tutorial or explanation.

GraphQL in depth - I know it but I want to become a deeper expert along with React

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Another Dev Tale

Clojure! Started learning, but learning curve is very steep... need more free time...

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Giuseppe Vetri

Flutter

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Aniket Bhattacharyea

Flutter. Have played around with it a little bit but hoping to learn more.

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Youth

Maybe webGl or svg

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Glenn Stovall

AWS Lambda

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dmdinh22

GoLang

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lucasprag

Emacs =)

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Evaldas Buinauskas

Domain Driven Design. I've got Eric Evans's book next to myself at my workplace, but I never find time or will to start reading it. :|

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Giovanni Cortés

A little of OpenGL and Metal :)

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Klaus Donnert

Python. I just signed up for a Python class yesterday.

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Szikszai Gusztáv

If you want to learn something new try out Mint :D

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Yuriy Bogomolov

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Agda is cool, as well as theorem proovers in general.

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K-Sato • Edited

TypeScript and Gatsby

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reza

Kotlin, started to learn a week ago, but got too busy!

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Stephen Chiang

Haven't finished GraphQL, but it's next on my list, then the Web Component API, and then Flutter probably.

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Nick Vernij

I want to play around with crystal-lang.org/ sometime soon

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A

I've always wanted to learn how to make Chrome extensions.

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artisanserve

Flutter and GraphQL

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Anwar

Definitively all what is related to text analysis. Giving the user tags suggestions for its web page meta keywords depending the content of the post would be very cool 😎

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amin jegham

Python, can't seem to find the will to start playing with it yet :(

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Kyle Johnson

Visual Studio 2019 - Not enough space available on my laptop.

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Sm0ke

Next.js .. is on my list. Still "digest" GatsbyJS.

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Aivan Monceller • Edited
  • Functional Programming
  • Compilers
  • Assemby for Reverse Engineering
  • Dart & Flutter
  • Mobile Game Development
  • Design / Illustration
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Robin Palotai

J. I heard it is supercompact write-only (or read-as-puzzle) code.

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Pabi Moloi, but Forbes

Flutter 👩🏾‍💻

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Joel Krause

React 😩 I just haven’t found the time to play with it yet!

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Maria-Ines Carrera

React hooks. Seems pretty cool but I'm hesitant to introduce a new pattern to my team right now.

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Stanislav(Stas) Katkov

I'd really love to have more experience with Clojure/ClojureScript right now.

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Fran González

Elixir and Elm, gonna ride that functional train soon, though!

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HS

Scala and Elixir. Although started a bit Scala last week, stopped at second lecture because of reasons :D

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Devin

git 😵

I mean, I know it... and I don't.