Hacker News: wafadaar

New comment by wafadaar in "OCaml Web Development: Essential Tools and Libraries in 2025"

wafadaar — Fri, 16 May 2025 13:09:09 +0000

I wish OCaml was a more popular/used language. It seemed to have a "boom" ~2015 with functional frontend frameworks such as Elm and Reason but died out soon after that. Jane Street supports alot of the OCaml ecosystem publicly and privately but it would be great to see more companies join in, it truly is a beautiful language that is a joy to write :)

New comment by wafadaar in "Java build tooling could be so much better (Seattle Java User Group) [video]"

wafadaar — Tue, 13 May 2025 23:48:47 +0000

Not exactly. My aspiration would be to make a package manager that has a CLI for Java.

Additional tooling that matches the functionality of uv/ruff/ty would be nice, as it would allow you to develop Java on not just an IDE (IntelliJ) but in something like nvim (it isn't impossible, just not as good).

Decoupling this is obviously not in JetBrains interest, and it seems like there isn't much will in the Java community to break away from the IDE-centric development.

New comment by wafadaar in "Show HN: Basecoat – shadcn/UI components, no React required"

wafadaar — Tue, 13 May 2025 17:07:01 +0000

Bootstrap is a completely different framework with a different design language (one that many may precieve as out of fashion). This library/framework allows folks to use ShadCN (a component library) similar to Bootstrap which is only available through React/Vue/Svelte, etc.. with vanilla HTML.

New comment by wafadaar in "Java build tooling could be so much better (Seattle Java User Group) [video]"

wafadaar — Tue, 13 May 2025 05:20:24 +0000

It's been crazy how far Java (the language) has come in the past half-decade, while it seems like the tooling around the language has not improved at all.

Sure most developers have progressed from Maven to Gradle, but not having something like `npm` or `poetry/pip` certainly puts a damper on the developer experience for the language.

Even C# and the .NET ecosystem attempt to solve this with NuGet, I would say their experience is not as excellent as other languages but still its a valiant effort.

New comment by wafadaar in "Ask HN: Are LLMs useful or harmful when learning to program?"

wafadaar — Sun, 11 May 2025 14:38:56 +0000

Like any tool, really depends on how you approach using them.

Giving it a problem statement and just blindly asking it for an answer will always yield the worst result, but I find this is often our first instinct.

Working with it to solve the problem in a "step-by-step" manner obviously yields a much better result as you tend to understand how it got to the answer.

I look at it as similar to rote-memorization vs. learning/understanding.

Most often I now use it to help find the "right question" for me to ask when starting with a new topic or domain or synthesize docs that were difficult for me to understand into simpler or more digestible terms.