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Ask HN: Favorite language for coding webpages?

3 points by ImaBauss ↗ HN
I've dabbled in many languages such as Ruby, php, and Java. However I want to choose a language to really stick to master! What are your guyses preferred languages for coding websites/webapps? If you could put benefits as well as drawbacks to your favorite language as well that would be amazing!

-Thanks for your time

4 comments

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samlev
I've spent a lot of time working in PHP. I largely enjoyed my time, because it provides a (mostly) easy-to-deploy, fast-to-develop platform for web development. What it also provides is a maintenance nightmare. It promotes sloppy coding, and the library of standard functions are horribly inconsistent. Many people never run into this, but whe you really want to design something properly, using strong OO ideas, then PHP just isn't up to the task (type hinting is for objects only? what?).

Ruby I've never used personally, but it seems kinda popular. It doesn't have the market penetration for deployment of PHP or python, though.

Python is my new favourite for web development due to a couple of very nice frameworks. Django for when I want to build something fast, and don't care too much about controlling the particulars like user management, etc. Pyramid for when I want to develop something which will involve a lot of customising parts. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and what you use is both personal preference, and should be decided based on the project.

Java - Oh, Java. GWT provides a nice way to build webapps with Java, but I'm not a fan of using it to build 'page' based web applications. That's personal preference, though, and I've got no good reasons not to use it - it just rubs me the wrong way for web.

callahad
All of the modern languages are pretty capable, and learning any one of them will make it easier to learn any other.

I'd suggest looking around and figuring out what people in your area are using, then picking whichever one has the most active user group. Being connected to real people in that language's community is a great way to stay motivated and accelerate your learning.

pshc
Javascript.

Benefits:

- Sharing code between client and server is a huge win

- Less impedance mismatch glue code in general

- V8 is really fast

- Node.js makes me write everything streaming style which may reduce page latency

Drawbacks:

- Javascript (I like coffeescript but I still write more bugs in CS than in plain JS...)

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