Ask HN: What programming language do you think is the best for Web Applications?

It depends on a lot of factors. Building a highly concurrent application such as chat? You may find node or elixir to be good fits. Building a reports service with lots of data crunching? Maybe checkout Python for it’s data libraries like Pandas / numpy. The choice of language stems from the domain you’re solving and what your team knows. Finding a happy middle ground is best, but sometimes you need to prefer either what the team already knows for the sake of time to market and other times you need to prioritize the problem space if the team’s knowledge has a limitation that will prevent it from being a maintainable solution.

A better question is: what languages and frameworks do you prefer for developing web applications, and why.

I enjoy ASP.Net Core and C#. Both development time and runtime are fast, most things feel architected and implemented well. And works in Linux.

assembly language

JavaScript is a highly productive for Web Applications, although I also heavily use other alternatives for several reasons, But regardless, that is why it is my candidate for the best programming language especially working with the Web and Web applications in general. Anything beyond that is either niches or outside general purpose web. JavaScript can do:

- advance web applications (electron, NodeJS)

- ETL on the go (i.e. fetch, JSON, DOM, SVG)

- data visualization (i.e. d3, three.js, etc.)

- dependency management (i.e. NPM, CDN, ESM like in Deno)

- learning resources in general (extremely abundant and comprehensive on various sources)

It is hard not to learn JavaScript, it is almost everywhere. Also having to learn the 2nd or the 3rd programming language should also fill-in those gaps, even those huge gaps.