Ask HN: What programming language to use?

If you want to stick with a Microsoft Stack, you could try ASP.NET (shudder).

Python has a screaming gajillion well written and supported libraries, and the language itself is very...orderly. That suits some people very well, and others is an anathema.

A new one on the block is Scala and /Lift/. Probably not as mature as either of the above, but runs on the JVM so you can stick it on Tomcat or any other java web container, and as such you have a lot of hosting opportunities.

Perl natively supports multiple threads whereas PHP does not. Multiple threads can assist greatly in speeding overall access to SQS, etc.

I also prefer the structure that Perl provides. Coupled with the Catalyst framework and lots of module availability on CPAN, I'm happy with my choice for now.

Does anyone else have any feedback on my choice of Perl for its multi-threaded capability for use with AWS - I'd appreciate a sanity check :)

Flash actually doesn't have much of a learning curve - in particular, actionscript doesn't have many ideas you won't have seen already if you know javascript.

The trouble with flash development isn't that it's hard to learn, it's that the environment and tools are incredibly ghetto and hard to integrate into a sane tool-chain.

And of course, Perl's syntax is very similar to PHP, so the transition might be a bit easier than to a Python, although your milage will vary.

Lastly, it's worth noting that the choice of server-side and client-side technologies are mostly independent... You can use either HTML/JS or Flash as the client interface to talk to server-side logic written in any of the PHP/Perl/Python/etc. languages discussed above.

Working only within the "scripting language" space of the typical LAMP stack will limit your thinking in ways that could hurt you later on.

Currently on my way to buy SICP so I can learn Scheme LISP.

edit: it may interest you to know that I do absolutely no web development.

In general, the reason is simple: python programmers tend not to worry too much about the language, although there's a fair bit of fretfulness about the folks trying to do functional stuff in Python, or people who want Python to be LISP. But apart from those groups, pretty much everybody else just sits down and writes their code, and generally pretty soon forgets they're writing in any language in particular, they just sort of churn out code that pretty much works as expected.

And that's really the point of Python. You stop noticing it after a while. It doesn't reward extremely subtle cleverness (much) and it doesn't severely punish stupidity, it just sort of does what you expect, and pretty soon there's your working application, stable, maintainable and clean(ish.)

I can't give a language higher praise than "it doesn't get under foot, and there are very few nasty surprises."

Python. Unless there's a specific reason to do something else.

PS: web frameworks in Python kind of suck because they're mostly a bit abstract. You might well wind up bolting together something dirty for your own needs.

If you must learn a different language then learn them on the side (hobby) while you are making your bread with the rest of your time using skills you already have.

Java is kind of like .NET, only, at least in markets I'm familiar with, it's fading. Sure, it can scale to no end, but it has a pretty high TCO. Unless you're going into financial programming, I'd leave Java aside. Knowing C# gives you an entree into Java should you ever need it.

Ruby, RoR is up and coming, but not, from what I've seen, highly well paid.

PHP is often underpaid, but has potential. Being pretty mature, there are a lot of roles out there. It _can_ scale -- Yahoo! proves this -- but not exactly out-of-the-box. Lots of freelance work available here.

Erlang has a lot of value, and I suspect will continue to grow in this world of multi cores and multi processors. Concurrency is soon to be king.

Python is a good utility language, but unless you're a Python guru, you probably aren't getting paid squat to know it.

It's always good to know C/C++. Heck, it's good to know Assembler insert platform here to boot. Excellent fundamentals, if not a lot of LOB work around these days. C++ is good for mobile work. I bet Android increases the amount of mobile work here as well.

Knowing Obj-C/Cocoa is growing in value as well. Even with low market penetration, your potential audience is pretty upmarket. Room for high margins here.

Lisp, Perl, eh, not bad to know, especially Lisp for fundamentals. For that matter, Smalltalk has value as well. Smalltalk even has a web framework these days ...

If you want to be highly employable, I'd suggest some combination of C#, Ruby, PHP, Python.

I was expecting much different answers, so this is interesting. It sounds like there probably isn't any real reason to not continue with PHP, which will be quicker to get up to speed with current standards.

I'll do some more research on the options suggested though.

Thank you, John.