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Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you flesh out the reasoning behind the rule?
Taking some risk has benefits in innovation if you can afford it, but the project shouldn't have two major unkowns that can wildly affect its result.
In addition to that, parent's advice is also crucial for the team's motivation.
If the project is boring and you choose a boring tech stack to go, the team morale will only be harder to keep up as the time flies by.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#53Personally I've agonised about whether X language has the best support, community, performance and whether it's the cool thing right now.
But if you're starting a project and you're strong in a language/framework already, just use that. Otherwise you'll spend months learning a whole new ecosystem instead of building the damn thing!
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#54I'd actually like to see more mixed shops. I proposed this once, but the idea got shot down. This was at a time when we were having a very hard time recruiting good developers for the technologies we were using.
IMO there's not enough difference between well-written Ruby / Python / PHP / JavaScript etc. to make a big fuss about it.
It's pretty well documented / understood how one would decouple the backend by simply interfacing your front end with a RESTful API backend.
That and the fact that it's become relatively clear to me that the present and the future of the web is in rich client architecture.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#55Now we're talking optimizing for a hugely multidimensional system here. Expressiveness: If you've aiming for a large team, try to work with a language that enables large scale services and large teams - also in the long run, strongly typed languages will work out better for this case, Java / Scala being the obvious candidates. But if you go down a microservices route, other choices might work too. Niche stars: Some l…
Curious why you think Ruby is on the way down?
(Just picked up 4 months of RoR experience after years of php and Java with some dabbling in Python.)
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#56Maybe you don't need a language at all for the backend (PostgREST)
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#57Of the ones you listed, for backend I'd narrow to Python, Ruby, Java, or PHP. Reason, they are mature and have a ton of libraries, frameworks, and projects to build upon. They are not going anywhere.
For front end, it doesn't matter. It's a continually moving target. Your front-end will be an endless work-in-progress, as the pace of browser change, UI conventions/fads, and tech stacks shows no signs of slowing or converging on a common solution.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#58I can propose another one: ActionScript 3
see: https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin
So yeah I'm the author of this project and while when I started it, it was mainly for fun "let's run AS3 on the command-line", couple of years ago I started to force myself to use it more and more server-side in the spirit of "eat your own dog food", and quite happy with it for my own side projects.
Now, as any other dev I also work with many others programming language server-side, and on a project where I'm the one to make the choice about which language to use I would say it does not matter much.
Seriously, most backend languages are more or less equivalent, except few details or "religious faith", it's not like the features of one particular language can make or break a project.
To chose one I pick the tech based on: who gonna maintain the project in the long run ?, what other dev (team) or owner (company, vendor, etc.) expect ?, what type of project or architecture is needed ? etc.
To be honest, being able to chose the language feels like a luxury, if you put "religion" aside, some people must trust you will make the right choice, even if you can chose whatever you want small comments like "we would like it to work on a LAMP stack", "we are a Microsoft shop", etc. can influence the choice.
But I do believe there is no wrong choice there.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking some risk has benefits in innovation if you can afford it, but the project shouldn't have two major unkowns that can wildly affect its result.
In addition to that, parent's advice is also crucial for the team's motivation. If the project is boring and you choose a boring tech stack to go, the team morale will only be harder to keep up as the time flies by.
This is probably the most important reason. Programmers love challenges. Keeping it interesting/challenging will also keep your good developers from looking for other jobs.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?
#60Now we're talking optimizing for a hugely multidimensional system here. Expressiveness: If you've aiming for a large team, try to work with a language that enables large scale services and large teams - also in the long run, strongly typed languages will work out better for this case, Java / Scala being the obvious candidates. But if you go down a microservices route, other choices might work too. Niche stars: Some l…
Curious why you think Ruby is on the way down? (Just picked up 4 months of RoR experience after years of php and Java with some dabbling in Python.)
Because it's no longer the cool kid on the block.