HACKER Q&A
📣 lquenti

What is the killer app/library of your favorite language?


I liked the idea of [1] that many languages just get popular because they have killer apps. The prime examples are - Wordpress and PHP - Rails and Ruby

What are the killer apps of your favorite language? You can go for any language if you want to as well.

For me, Haskell has 3 great apps/libraries:

- PostgREST: An awesome way to create a REST-API from PostgreSQL tables

- Shellcheck: A static analysis tool for Shell scripts

- Pandoc: A parser/converter for various formats

How about you?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4

  👤 rwmj Accepted Answer ✓
On the subject of PostgreSQL and although I haven't had to use it in several years, I'm quite fond of the OCaml extension I wrote which integrates PostgreSQL statements directly into the language.

Values are type-checked across the boundary, SQL commands are validated at compile time, and proper prepared statements get generated (also at compile time).

It's a little bit like MS Linq in concept, but it works quite differently - by using PGSQL "DESCRIBE" to send the statement to the PostgreSQL server when compiling the code to do the validation and get the types. It really made writing database-baked websites less of a grind. https://github.com/darioteixeira/pgocaml

👤 ncmncm
Pandoc, anyway, is essential. Many rely on Git-annex.

The only essential Rust program I know of is Blake3.

I don't know of any essential Java or .Net programs; anyway, I have no runtime for either. Maybe Minecraft and KSP?

Are any in Ada? With no runtime (as for Rust), we might not be forced to notice.

I have not encountered any in Erlang.

👤 TheMonarchist
The interesting languages are those that don't need killer apps to succeed.
👤 yucky
Not a knock on WordPress at all, since it is ubiquitous. But for PHP I would say the "killer app" is actually Laravel.
👤 santa_boy
Copilot from Github is proving to be a huge killer addition to the my programming work in node.js

Despite limited enterprise level programming knowledge, Copilot is helping me write pretty good code vs. doing the copy, paste, modify from Stack Overflow.

👤 deathtrader666
For Elixir -

[1] - https://livebook.dev/

[2] - https://livebeats.fly.dev/ built with Phoenix Framework

[3] - Discord

👤 forgotmypw17
Perl: No breaking changes since October 17, 1994.
👤 thesuperbigfrog
Linux / Unix and C