
Ask YC:  What new technologies are you exploring? - iamelgringo
What are you tinkering with?  What are you exploring?  What are the technologies that really interest you?
======
tx
After having explored "new technologies" since my graduation in 99, I paused
myself and has started moving back in time, discovering things like Lisp,
Smalltalk, vim and bash. I picked up Python and rediscovered a beauty of a
simple text file without XML garbage. All of that feels very "fresh" to me
after years with COM-ActiveX/Win32/XML/XSLT/XPath/.NET and other "ex-new"
tech.

Besides, what is "new"? MVC has been something of revelation to most web
"engineers".

In fact (or maybe it comes with age) I started to dislike new stuff, like
Flash/Flex/Air. I see a great danger of "web runtime" being controlled by a
company. If they won't stop, Adobe will soon become "Microsoft of the Web"
because they'll be controlling "Web OS". This is why I want AIR to fail and I
hope that more web applications stick to HTML/CSS/JavaScript as opposed to
moving to Adobe world.

For same reasons I always stayed away from Java. Same applies to Silverlight.

I do like D though (the language). But the author made two crucial mistakes
that will inevitably hurt this beautiful systems programming language: he
picked a name that does not work with search engines at all, and he decided to
control too much - won't even let other people to distribute binaries of his
compilers.

~~~
birdman
It's a little harsh to compare Adobe to Microsoft. They were friendly to the
open source community by open sourcing Flex. And as far as controlling the
runtime goes, that does have some risks going forward as you say, but it also
has the benefit of allowing cross-platform web development largely free of
browser-compatibility issues. Which is nice.

~~~
nailer
At least with Java, you had multiple working implementations of the VM from
multiple vendors. With the Flash VM, there's only Adobe's VM, and they've made
no indications of opening the code anytime soon.

~~~
Elfan
What about Gnash or Swfdec? A free Flash player seems to be high enough enough
priority that one will have feature parity with Adobe "soon".

------
lsb
Large-scale text mining (Google/Wikipedia). There's boatloads of patterns and
data latent in an enormous popular text corpus.

For instance, if you have two terms, and you want to see how similar they are,
that's P(A|B). So do a search query for A&B and for B, and P(A|B)=P(A&B)/P(B),
and that's a first approximation, a Google Distance, for arbitrary terms.

The information silos are only a couple years old, and already they're so
valuable. I can't wait until the Internet's a century old.

~~~
pixcavator
P(A|B) != P(B|A), so not really a distance...

~~~
lsb
It's from Cilibrasi and Vitanyi. They have shimming factors, so you take the
min of A|B and B|A, then you throw in some logs to not penalize low
probabilities.

------
sohail
What really interests me is Common Lisp. I am planning on using it for a real
web application (omg).

If you are interested:

[http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-programming-
framewor...](http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-programming-
frameworks.html)

[http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/update-web-
programming-f...](http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/update-web-programming-
frameworks.html)

[http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/lisp-web-framework-
desig...](http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/lisp-web-framework-
designer.html)

So far it is fucking amazing. I love it.

------
redsymbol
Distributed version control systems. Especially Git, ATM.

Also seeking a deeper understanding of language design and compilers. Some
inspirations for why:

[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-
food...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html)

<http://martinfowler.com/dslwip/>

Next on my list after all that: Machine learning.

------
jsnx
Bourne shell, sed, awk, sort, uniq -- the UNIX utilities are worth your time
to get to know well.

Filesystems -- how to write them, and what's out there already.

------
mynameishere
Well, perl is pretty new. In geological terms. Plus, I'm finding that 1000+
line java applications can be replaced with 15 lines of perl.

~~~
Tichy
Which ones? I suppose then there are also 1000 line Perl applications that can
be replaced with 15 lines of Java. There are enough bad programmers out
there...

~~~
vikram
Doesn't it take 10 lines to say "Hello World" in Java.

~~~
tlrobinson
You were probably exaggerating, but for reference:

    
    
        public class hello {
        	public static void main(String args[]) {
        		System.out.println("Hello World");
        	}
        }
    

Also, I interviewed with a large company that shall remain nameless (probably
not who you would expect), and one of the interviewers mentioned that their
build system was a MILLION lines of Perl...

~~~
vikram
Yes, I am exaggerating. I would call this three lines. As there are 3
constructs here.

A million lines of Perl, was maintaining that part of the job description?

~~~
tlrobinson
Yes, the position was for the build team, so I assume maintaining that beast
was part of the job.

------
davidw
Android looks like a lot of fun, and I get a good feeling about it. So I
decided to port Hecl to it.

I want to do a web thing in Erlang + javascript, but haven't quite figured out
what... although <horn tooting> I actually started using Erlang a number of
years ago.

------
euccastro
What I'm currently looking into, none of which is too new, is: Scheme (Gambit
C), Lisp macros (On Lisp), concurrent-like programming with continuations and
epoll, raw X Window protocol (i.e., not using Xlib after initialization),
OpenGL/GLX, unconventional text editors (the editor part of Jef Raskin's
THE/Archy). In a short term, I'm just scratching an own itch, but some of
these technologies I want to learn for longer term projects.

------
jsjenkins168
GWT, Android, Ericsson JSF MobileFaces, Metro web services using Glassfish,
JPA (mapping to MySQL DBs), and Flash Lite are what I'm dabbling in right now.
With the exception of Flash Lite, all of that is Java based... Meh.

~~~
bkmrkr
hey it would be great to talk about coding on android, email me bkmrkr at
yahoo.com

------
spiralhead
I'll admit what everyone else here is apparently afraid to: Flex/ActionScript
3.

I don't really see a future for MXML in it's current form but the rest of the
stack--mainly ActionScript 3 / the SVG drawing API, Video/Audio APIs are
definitely worth looking at. Some of the highest paying web development gigs
are in Flash programming, and it's a lot less painful than browser programming
(which isn't saying much).

~~~
sohail
Can you talk about it here please: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81768>

------
icky
Currently playing with (separate of each other):

\- Android SDK (though it was kind of surreal to realize that I was coding
Python for work and Java for play... @_@)

\- Cairo vector graphics (it's not that hard to get Cairo-rendered buffers
into OpenGL textures (though you do have to un-premultiply the alpha values
:P))

\- Working on a lightweight embeddable lisp compiler (currently hosted in
Python). Stealing good ideas from Arc, so get coding, Paul! ;-)

\- Working on an interesting, erm, "lifestyle-enhancing" webapp in Django [one
that already provides value to me just by having it for my own use!]

\- Pyglet (python multimedia and windowing lib)

For work:

\- Coding web apps in Pylons. (SQLAlchemy is a manly ORM that makes other ORMs
look like babies' toys ;-)

\- Further investigating haXe and OpenLaszlo (did this for fun on my own a
while back, but didn't have time to do much with either of them)

As you can see, I love to code lots and lots :D

~~~
nikolaj
hah, reading #1 made me laugh out loud, as I spent last night hacking android,
and then come to work to slog away in python! How did this happen!

------
hhm
After working almost exclusively in game development for a big while; now I'm
exploring all computer vision related technologies.

------
robmnl
Not really new at all, but the approach is: I started using just javascript to
develop web apps - no server - the apps just interface with a server to get
and post data.

That's fun, especially with jQuery, which I highly recommend.

~~~
SwellJoe
We're doing a lot of this, too. Not to say there isn't a vast swath of on-
server work being done, but a lot of new features we're developing are using
the server just to serve up the JavaScript and collect some data from
disparate sources.

~~~
davidw
What kinds of applications do you do like that, if you can talk about them?

~~~
SwellJoe
Our software is an installable web application for web hosting systems
management...so we have a lot of opportunities to do neat stuff--there are so
many useful UI elements that could be added that would make the product more
useful without requiring any additional information than what we already
collect or create. We're currently building a "desktop" with ExtJS that'll
have a dozen or so widgets for presenting various bits of information about
the running system. The data already exists and is currently, mostly,
presented in simple HTML and CSS graphs...but with a little tweaking we can
make the backend spit out simple data structures in JSON and then display them
in various dynamic ways.

The first one that is almost wholly free of server-side code is a "news"
module that pulls a feed from our forums News category on our company website.
ExtJS makes this kind of thing trivial (one of their example apps is an RSS
feed reader that uses Google Gears). Other short-term bits will be converting
all of our graphs to dynamic versions that change every minute or so. Bigger
plans include a terminal emulator to replace the Java applet SSH client we
currently include. Interactive terminals are trickier, and I'm not sure if
we'll end up implementing the actual full terminal emulator in JavaScript or
do most of the work server-side and just pass things down to the server
(probably the latter at first). But, very short-term (like being released
sometime this week) it's all just conversions of existing widgets to present
nothing but JSON--it actually makes the server-side code remarkably simpler to
not have any UI elements.

------
iamwil
zoomable interfaces, erlang and functional programming, adaptive resonance
theory, android, javascript, basic GIS, meta programming in ruby.

~~~
fuelfive
The ZUI was the worst idea in Raskin's book. You can't use muscle memory for
the system because the target x,y positions and sizes change based on how
zoomed in you are. Worse, the ZUI doesn't solve the biggest bottleneck in the
existing GUI canon - asking the user to arrange and keep track of his own
crap. His ZUI concept is like the mac or windows desktop, except now you get a
magnifying glass.

The better method is search, or more accurately, comprehension, but this is a
grail quest, and my solution isn't done yet.

~~~
apgwoz
I'm interested in your unfinished solution; you have any thing about it
online?

------
zyroth
Machine Learning, especially Reinforcement Learning

~~~
greg
me too... have you read Sutton and Barto's book?
<http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html>

------
nostrademons
Lots of JavaScript, mostly with JQuery. Some Flash. Compilers, interpreters, &
language design (which have always been a hobby of mine).

I'll also second what everyone else said about learning Lisp, Smalltalk, early
windowing systems, UNIX fundamentals, and other forgotten areas of the history
of computing. There're lots of good ideas in there.

------
henning
Haskell, compilers, interpreters.

------
jey
I missed coding, so I've been tinkering with the LLVM compiler infrastructure
lately.

------
kajecounterhack
Speakers that cost under $1 <http://www.householdhacker.com/>

(Its a troll, in case you don't know.)

------
ptn
Parsers (they are new to me).

------
hollerith
machine learning

------
pg
News aggregators.

~~~
Kaizyn
What are you trying to do with them?

------
Goladus
I'm writing a compiler in C. It's exactly the kind of practice I needed to
make up for years of slacking.

~~~
jey
For what language?

~~~
Goladus
C->MIPS.

It's for a class, but it's consuming most of my free time. The classroom
instruction is good but we're largely on our own as far as implementation goes
(though it has to be written in C or C++).

We only have to finish a subset of C, and I'm not planning to take it any
further.

~~~
jey
Neat! You should write your compiler in the same subset of C, so it can be
self-hosting. ;-)

------
nside
Flex/AS3 AS3 is interesting because it's client-side and quite fast compared
to Javascript.

------
huherto
I think GWT is very cool. I wouldn't attempt to write a big application in
Javascript but I would do it in Java. Not only I am more familiar with Java,
but I also appreciate having strong typing as a safenet.

------
ALee
TV set top boxes, exploring haven't figured out how they'll work though.

------
danw
Mobile, mobile, mobile...

------
cellis
The people working on the hottest stuff will not tell you what "new"
technologies they are working on. Very little of it is ever "new", just new
ways of putting it together.

------
pius
Erlang and D.

------
auferstehung
I find the following technologies interesting:

1\. SERS 2\. MEMS 3\. Taggants 4\. Ground source heat pumps 5\. OLPC 6\.
NMR/MRI 7\. ERP

Except for 5 maybe 7, not common topics of interest here.

------
injesus
Silverlight w/C# clientside. I'm excited by the idea of replacing javascript.
I'm still happy to use java backend, I love tomcat.

~~~
Zak
Please explain why you're excited about being able to use C# instead of
Javascript. Personally, if I had to use C# for anything, I'd be very excited
by the prospect of replacing it with Javascript.

~~~
hello_moto
Desktop UI, Enterprise Systems, Large-scale software. Would you rather write
your web-app using Javascript that (hopefully) able to connect to a DB?

~~~
Tichy
Javascript doesn't imply that it has to be client side.

------
joeguilmette
has anyone started hacking away at OpenSocial?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Not me, but one of the bloggers I follow has been hacking away at it

[http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/FractalsOfChange/~3/179825426...](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/FractalsOfChange/~3/179825426/opensocial-
deve.html)

~~~
joeguilmette
great article! forgive me for submitting it :)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
E-gads! Karma slut! :)

~~~
joeguilmette
i've been called worse

------
falsestprophet
tagclouds

------
vikram
Erlang, Ocaml and Jocaml.

~~~
nailer
Now that I realize there's something called Jocaml, I want to learn it too.

~~~
nostrademons
Jocaml is fascinating. It's a concurrent distributed-programming language &
runtime based on the join calculus (which if I had to describe it would be
"pattern matching over processes", a pretty nifty idea in itself). I looked at
it fairly briefly in college and it seemed really interesting, but wasn't
mature enough to really do much with. Given how it's popping up now, that may
have changed...

------
hello_moto
The whole .NET 3.0/C#/ASP.NET3.5 and SQL Server 2005.

------
programnature
getting up to speed on web technologies. jquery, css, javascript. facebook
apps.

learning about business process modeling languages.

------
samb
lua

------
brlewis
Photo sharing

------
n3m6
Most people on this post are talking about languages. There could be other
things more important, like AJAX (which isn't totally new), Amazon AWS, Google
Android, but mostly it would depend on what you are trying to accomplish I
guess ?

