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Poll: What Programming Language Do You Use for Server Side Web Development?

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Re: Poll: What Programming Language Do You Use for Server Side Web Development?

#92
post #70

I haven't found a web server language to my liking yet. Maybe I'm too picky, but I'd like to satisfy all of these requirements: - Static typing -- I want to eliminate as many runtime bugs as I can - Type inference -- Like in SML and Haskell - No JVM -- Personal preference, but I'd rather not pull in this monster if I don't have to. - Good pre-made web framework -- I've briefly looked at OCaml but the web frameworks s…

I have very similar requirements, and I think within the next few years, Swift will fill this niche very well.

Agreed, Vapor[1] is coming along nicely.

1 - https://github.com/qutheory/vapor

Re: Poll: What Programming Language Do You Use for Server Side Web Development?

#93

I haven't found a web server language to my liking yet. Maybe I'm too picky, but I'd like to satisfy all of these requirements: - Static typing -- I want to eliminate as many runtime bugs as I can - Type inference -- Like in SML and Haskell - No JVM -- Personal preference, but I'd rather not pull in this monster if I don't have to. - Good pre-made web framework -- I've briefly looked at OCaml but the web frameworks s…

Doesn't Go fit these requirements?

Go has a relatively weak, unsafe type system despite being statically typed. Also, lack of generics, optionals or tagged unions is kind of a bummer.

Re: Poll: What Programming Language Do You Use for Server Side Web Development?

#96
post #49

PHP. It may be old, tricky to debug, and cumbersome to write long projects with but the ability to bounce in and out of logic on a simple, proven, well adopted stack that has plenty of knowledge-base and ready machines everywhere has it's advantages. Plus, I've heard a lot of developers knock PHP but I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP.

"Plus, I've heard a lot of developers knock PHP but I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP."

Of course. Since all of those languages are Turing-Complete, this is trivially true.

Re: Poll: What Programming Language Do You Use for Server Side Web Development?

#97
post #49

PHP. It may be old, tricky to debug, and cumbersome to write long projects with but the ability to bounce in and out of logic on a simple, proven, well adopted stack that has plenty of knowledge-base and ready machines everywhere has it's advantages. Plus, I've heard a lot of developers knock PHP but I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP.

"I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP"

Scientific computing is extremely strong in Python - numpy, scipy, scikit-learn etc - and a lot of it makes use of language features that aren't present in PHP (at least as-of a few years ago, my PHP experience is rusty at this point).

Re: Poll: What Programming Language Do You Use for Server Side Web Development?

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After all this time it's still interesting to see how much hate there is out there for JavaScript even though it has proven itself a more that capable language across multiple platforms.

It's not so much the hate for JavaScript. It's the hate for the developers who know nothing about computing history making all the same mistakes as with any other platform while being so darned insistent that the world will run only on JavaScript any day now because JavaScript is the uber language.

You meet a young hip developer at the train station, the train is 8 minutes late so you have a moment to talk. They tell you they love JavaScript above all else, after a brief rant about how great lexical scoping and arrow functions are in ES6 you can finally get a word in edgewise.

What pieces of advice do you offer so that this poor child may avoid the mistakes of his forebears?

Re: Poll: What Programming Language Do You Use for Server Side Web Development?

#99

I haven't found a web server language to my liking yet. Maybe I'm too picky, but I'd like to satisfy all of these requirements: - Static typing -- I want to eliminate as many runtime bugs as I can - Type inference -- Like in SML and Haskell - No JVM -- Personal preference, but I'd rather not pull in this monster if I don't have to. - Good pre-made web framework -- I've briefly looked at OCaml but the web frameworks s…

What about Rust?

It has static typing, limited type inference (function parameters need their types declared - by design - will infer otherwise), no JVM, and has several web frameworks. Not sure if any of them would be considered "good" by your definition, but check it out: https://github.com/flosse/rust-web-framework-comparison

Re: Poll: What Programming Language Do You Use for Server Side Web Development?

#100
post #49

PHP. It may be old, tricky to debug, and cumbersome to write long projects with but the ability to bounce in and out of logic on a simple, proven, well adopted stack that has plenty of knowledge-base and ready machines everywhere has it's advantages. Plus, I've heard a lot of developers knock PHP but I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP.

"Plus, I've heard a lot of developers knock PHP but I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP." Of course. Since all of those languages are Turing-Complete, this is trivially true.

Solving a problem and computing a function are almost entirely unrelated concepts. For instance, solving a problem usually takes the form of "write a system which can do X, within budget, on schedule, in a maintainable way, with integration with these services, with at least this much reliability." Out of that list, the only thing a function can compute there is to do X, once. And maybe not even that; functions can't even do I/O.

Unless you have developers who are super excited about writing web services via BPF filters, Turing-completeness is not a meaningful way to compare programming languages; that is, that's not the reason why we have multiple programming languages in the world and why different people or projects prefer different ones.

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