Most common langs have everything on Google and StackOverflow, most weird langs don’t. Common questions won’t have answers for you in byte-sized, copyable chunks.
There’s a silver lining to this. I’ve been doing a fair bit of web-dev-y stuff this year and I’ve found that, when I search for solutions to JS or CSS problems, the search results are often clogged with low-quality content-farm pages rehashing basic info in broken English. This is less of a problem with, say, Nim, or even Objective-C.
This threw me off…I think the author meant to write the other way around, which is how Hillel’s phrase goes? Unless there’s some irony here I’m not getting.
Additionally: you’ll see segfaults from their compilers.
There may be not-quite-obvious debug options.
For example, OCaml does have exception traces, but it doesn’t enable them by default. They can be enabled from the code with Printexc.record_backtrace true or for any program compiled with debug information using OCAMLRUNPARAM=b /path/to/executable. There’s are many more things one can do with OCAMLRUNPARAM such as GC tweaks and debug/allocation stats logging. The value of reading the documentation sequentially — one may not discover such things by searching rather than reading, for better or worse.
Wrote Ada for hobby stuff for over a year, and never seen a segfault with GNAT, which is built into GCC.
I did run into one wild compiler bug which wouldn’t let me do something which should have been legal in a very niche case. I reported it and the AdaCore people fixed it in within a day and gave me a workaround until the new GNAT version shipped.
My limitation tends to be time. I’d love to have the time to dive into every single “weird” language, but I can never even keep up with the expected deliverables from my day job.
There’s a silver lining to this. I’ve been doing a fair bit of web-dev-y stuff this year and I’ve found that, when I search for solutions to JS or CSS problems, the search results are often clogged with low-quality content-farm pages rehashing basic info in broken English. This is less of a problem with, say, Nim, or even Objective-C.
This threw me off…I think the author meant to write the other way around, which is how Hillel’s phrase goes? Unless there’s some irony here I’m not getting.
I concur, given what the authors says afterwards.
oh how embarassing, I meant the other way! 😅 Thanks for pointing it out, corrected ☺️
There may be not-quite-obvious debug options.
For example, OCaml does have exception traces, but it doesn’t enable them by default. They can be enabled from the code with
Printexc.record_backtrace trueor for any program compiled with debug information usingOCAMLRUNPARAM=b /path/to/executable. There’s are many more things one can do withOCAMLRUNPARAMsuch as GC tweaks and debug/allocation stats logging. The value of reading the documentation sequentially — one may not discover such things by searching rather than reading, for better or worse.Wrote Ada for hobby stuff for over a year, and never seen a segfault with GNAT, which is built into GCC.
I did run into one wild compiler bug which wouldn’t let me do something which should have been legal in a very niche case. I reported it and the AdaCore people fixed it in within a day and gave me a workaround until the new GNAT version shipped.
My limitation tends to be time. I’d love to have the time to dive into every single “weird” language, but I can never even keep up with the expected deliverables from my day job.
Seems a good time to heartily recommend http://exercism.org
Supports 61 language learning tracks, exercises, mentoring and is free! (Hint: pay back by mentoring what you know)