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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?

#101

Post by Cshelton »

outworlder wrote: post #99
zingermc wrote: post #56

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

Rust is exactly the language I want for the web. Unfortunately, the ecosystem is still a little too immature. In time...someday...

I've already decided my next service/api will be in Rust.

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

#103

Post by mschoebel »

dejv wrote: post #77
mschoebel wrote: post #12

Pascal

Can you elaborate on this?

See: https://deusu.org

The backend is written in Pascal.

With the exception of the blog. That is written in Node.js. I did that as a way to learn Node.js. But as soon as I find some time I'll rewrite that in Pascal too.

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

#104

Post by irrational »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #53
zelon88 wrote: 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.

That last sentence is pretty true of any combination of languages and it feels defensive.

Its pretty much the definition of Turing complete.

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

#106

Post by irrational »

ozgrozer wrote: post #69

I use PHP for a long time. But now I see Python and JavaScript are the most used languages. I just wonder which one of them will be a true choise after PHP?

Both, neither, does it really matter? In my experience any server-side programming language will be good enough for 99% of the websites out there. Once you get up to the size of a google, twitter, facebook, etc. then you can start worrying about which server-side language you should use. Otherwise just use whichever one you prefer.

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

#107

Post by rajangdavis »

I have been working with PHP steadily over the last year, and, coming from a Rails background (learned it at General Assembly), I used to hate the "ugly" syntax, weird method calls, and strictness of PHP (missing a semicolon can be damnable offense in the eyes of the compiler). Ruby to me seemed a lot more flexible, but over time, after hacking at PHP, I have come to appreciate it as a language that gets the job done.

My preference is still with Ruby on Rails; however, I have been thinking of using a more lightweight framework like Sinatra. I am still impressed with how flexible and expressive Ruby can be. Alongside bash, it has really become one of my favorite languages to work with particularly for scraping/writing automations.

Would love to get into Node, but the idea of javascript on the back-end hurts my head. All I have used Node for is for basic utilities like uglify-js and minifier. Been hacking on Angular and Mithril on the front end, I love javascript as a front end language, but still haven't wrapped my head around Node. Javascript isn't too far off syntax-wise from PHP, but my struggle with Node is how to organize the codebase as well as understanding a clean separation of concerns when it comes to front-end and back-end code.

Might be off topic, but I am really excited to see how the GraalVM is going to impact languages like Javascript and Ruby.

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

#108

Post by montyedwards »

zingermc wrote: post #56

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…

Rust has:

- Static typing

- Type inference (and pattern matching)

- No dependency on JVM, .NET, or BEAM

But the number of web frameworks, etc. for Rust sucks compared to that of older languages like Go. Go 1.0 was released in early 2012 and Rust 1.0 in May 2015.

Rust is more verbose than Go, but Go's FFI to functions written in C isn't as efficient and since "cgo isn't go", I'm not sure cgo covered by Go 1.0 compatibility guarantee.

On the other hand, Go has tons of "batteries included" plus web frameworks so that is pretty awesome to have on stable platforms (I don't consider Windows a stable platform for Go and got burned several times, but Go works great on FreeBSD & Ubuntu.)

I suspect Go & Swift won't have robust reliability on Windows (compared to other platforms) but they'll be rock solid on the ones they favor. Rust may have better prospects regarding this, but Rust still too new this year for web server language -- wait until MIR is integrated and a couple more releases after that.

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

#110

Post by JustSomeNobody »

errantspark wrote: post #98
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

More than anything I would say stay slightly behind the hype wave.

Take two steps back and one can see the waves of hype roll through programming blogs, HN and reddit. 10 years ago people were arguing over ORMs. Then it was dependancy injection frameworks, then SQL vs NoSQL. Now there's JavaScript and it's various frameworks and libraries. THere's always so much hype about what to use that it's easy to lost in it and worry that if you aren't riding the trend wave, you'll drown. But most times it's easier just to float a while and watch from a short distance. Get done what you need to get done with what you currently know. Let the hype die down. Learning new things is a ton of fun. But they can be devilish to deploy in production. Don't feel like you have to use them.

Edit: I'm not saying DI frameworks, or ORMs or NoSQL (or even SQL) are bad in any way. Just that within each topic there was much arguing about what is "the best" or "proper" or whatever. Wait for that to cool off and die down before betting your next project on it.

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