Ask HN: What is the most productive stack or lang for single devs ?

The framework that you already know how to use

Ruby on Rails has recently started actively marketing itself as the solo developer framework. I've worked with it for a long time now (among a bunch of other languages and frameworks) and I have to say the recent updates to the frontend 'story' are really compelling for a solo dev.

One of the compelling reasons to write JS on the server was to have the same language and ecosystem in the client and server, and things like Turbo for Rails really go a long way towards delivering on that for Ruby (although of course you still need to understand javascript and browsers.)

That said, if you're already familiar with something else, then pick the most mature batteries-included framework in that language. Languages are just a tool for the job, it's incredibly unlikely as a solo dev that you can pick a "wrong" one.

I think .NET has gotten, or rather failed to shake off, a reputation as slow and Windows-only.

It's very powerful, the tooling is free and best-in-class, self hosting on a cheap Linux VPS is trivial and the framework itself includes almost any functionality you could wish for with installing random packages.

Common lisp

There's no right answer, unfortunately, but the one I'll give is React, Node.js, and Express for consistency.

As always with these things it really depends on what you're trying to do and what your skill level / background is.

Personally I find PHP + Laravel is great for throwing together a simple website. The amount functionality Laravel provides out of the box is incredible and so long as you're not doing anything too crazy you'll find most of the heavy lifting has been taken of for you.

If you need to use a modern frontend JS framework on your frontend then I'd probably go with React (or Vue) with a Node/Express API. I'm not a huge fan of using Node on the backend for professional projects be honest, but if you're a single developer I think there are benefits to using a single language on both your frontend and backend. I've tried using Vue with Laravel before, but I didn't like constant context switching between languages.

I've not got much experience with Ruby on Rails but I've heard good things about it and I suspect that would great option if you have familiarity with Ruby. I'm not sure if Rust would be the most productive choice?

If you're just getting into web development I'd go with Laravel personally. I wouldn't complicate things just yet with adding modern frontend frameworks like React into the mix.

Absent any other info, for a "single developer in 2024": Python and Django. Reason: You're statistically the most likely to know Python at least a little bit.

In general the selection algorithm for results-driven development is: First, go with whatever web framework you're most comfortable with. If you don't have any, go with whatever the most popular framework is, in the programming language you're most familiar with.

The reason this works well is because your question is ill-formed. In general, I haven't seen any hard evidence that Django vs. Rails vs. Laravel vs. Node vs. (etc.)-based projects have big variations in lead time to new features, lead time to bug fixes, etc. Your knowledge of the underlying PL, framework, and their quirks dwarfs any technical advantage they might have over one another.

(For the sake of completeness: If you don't know any programming languages, go with whatever the most popular language is. How do you know what's popular? Intuition! Most people's brains will answer "Python" or maybe "JavaScript" to that question, and those are both great choices. If you're the kind of weirdo who says "Ruby" or "PHP" or "Scheme", you might as well roll with it, because that answer comes from a part of you which is constantly noticing the trends in its local environment, and it probably has a lot more logic than you would expect.)

Rails is by far the best time saving all-in-one tool.

Nextjs for example don’t come even close - you can easily waste a month just properly setting up your monorepo with all necessary bells and whistles.

With this come also the scaling pains and downsides, which might only be relevant to a tiny percentage of solopreneurs.

Flask + Svelte is very accessible. When my Middle School students wanted to "build an app" I would roll up a boilerplate with Flask, Svelte, and SQLite on Replit (would not recommend anymore - Replit has jumped the shark) and they were able to become very productive very quickly.

EDIT: this was after 1-2 months of intro Python and JavaScript, so they weren't going in blind but also didn't have to learn, say, React. If you know some Python, you can use Flask. If you know some JS, you can use Svelte.

JavaScript all the way - you'll probably need it one way or another.

So why not go with the one language that works on the backend, frontend, data processing, scrapping? Getting to a pro level in multiple languages is more difficult than mastering just one.

I've pumped out many web apps using Svelte(Kit). I find it very good for rapid prototyping and exploratory programming. For example, I wrote a beat-aware video player in an afternoon or two (while I was learning Svelte).

Even if you are a single dev, you will probably find yourself interacting with other members of the community. (Maybe more so for a single dev?) I find the Svelte community quite responsive and helpful.

SvelteKit can handle both client and server parts. It streamlines a lot of the stuff most web apps need like routing. However, it doesn't include some other common stuff like auth and persistence to a database.

https://kit.svelte.dev/

When I work on solo projects, my goto is what I've dubbed the HAG stack:

  - HTMX: For client/server interactions. Returning HTML fragments is easy and lightweight.
  - AlpineJs: For interactivity that doesn't require a http request, think toggling sidebars etc...
  - Go: Primary development language, simplistic and easy to get started with. Fast compilation and with embedded files I can ship a single binary for deployment that contains all required assets.

Tertiary and other tools/services I use:

  - Turso (Sqlite): Primary datastore, great to use for a "db per user/tenant" approach."
  - Redis: Sometimes I use redis over turso, depending on need. Also used for caching. I've been moving much more into Turso though, especially with the embedded replica's.
  - Docker: Everything is built into docker images. For my Go app I disable CGO and use Google's "distroless" container images as the base image.
  - Fly.io: Hosting everything.

I think it is very, very hard to beat Python+Django. As long as you're willing to conform to the "Django mindset" and the boilerplate it requires you can get simple websites up and running in no time. You also get so much "for free" that most other frameworks does not provide you with. The only major drawback is that Django is not great if you really want to do things your way.

Keep in mind that the average replier here is an older developer whos skillset has come from the 2008-2018 generation (Rails, Django) and have rarely ventured elsewhere. Or when they have they blame the learning curve on the tool not themselves.

To me it seems like your very early on your journey and haven't ever learned a web framework or become proficient in at least one language.

So if I was to give you a blanket recommendation: Javascript or Typescript.

From there you can start on the frontend side and work your way to a backend (Nextjs is a good candidate here)

or do the reverse and go back to front and start with Express

The reason im recommending this is

- Youll have to learn javascript anyway

- It has tons and tons of support (libraries, tutorials, docs)

- You can also venture into mobile app development if thats interesting.

- Once you get the hang of it I believe its faster to spin up projects than rails or django

This is coming from someone who has worked professionally in *a lot* of stacks

- Ruby / Rails / Angular

- Python / Django / jQuery

- C# / .net / knockout.js

- Javascript / Express / React Native

- Elixir / Phoenix / React

- Hasura / Nextjs

- Go / Nextjs

- Java / Spring

- Haskell / Elm

Aside: if you want to know my favourite stack, BE It's Elixir / Phoenix by a large margin. FE im just more productive in React/Nextjs but Remix seems cool.

PHP, Yii2 Framework, Nginx.

Productive out of the box, comes with bootstrap 5, jQuery( yeah i know).

It's has amazing documentation easy to learn. It uses PHP for templating, so you can prototype very quickly.

Collection of wisdom:

- A single dev will be more productive with a mature framework 10+ years, most of it has been documented, bugs fixed, tooling matured. Old is tried and true

- JavaScript libraries rot very quickly. Try running any node project from 2 years ago? Now try running any PHP, Django project from 15 years ago see the difference.

-C# and .Net is amazing

-Sqlite is amazing

- I was an angular/react dev for many years, now I'm pumping server side html templates and jQuery like there's no tomorrow. It's so easy, so simple. Why push json on the backend, then another project to consume/validate that JSON on the front-end, when I can just push everything as HTML.

- It's not just easy to develop, it's also ease of deployment.

1. Web apps - Ruby on Rails hands down, every time. with SQL lite works pretty good on smaller projects. this is if you're working on a project yourself or have a very small team. If you're doing full stack and if you're doing turbo/stimulus it's a bit harder to hire people that have all of that. In my experience, easiest to hire full stack devs are with node/react stack. Coincidentally that's the group of people with largest knowledge gap in the either stack, people tend to specialize in one

Not sure about 2 and 3, not my cuppa tea

LAMP (or LEMP) stack, hosted on a single VM (probably Digital Ocean).

You probably want to use a framework of sorts. Laravel or Symfony are good. Not mandatory though.

Server side rendering to start off with. Bulma for CSS. Alpine for JS.

Throw in some cronjobs for scheduled stuff.

Maybe a bit of Redis for sessions and caching.

Well, back when I was single, Ruby was definitely the answer. Now that I'm married I would still try it, or some or the JS frameworks backed by the big companies and still alive. I don't think my wife would mind me using Ruby.

Making things is the most productive stack. Your experience is the only way to know what works for you and to know what doesn't work for you. It is the only way to know what you are actually interested in doing versus what you are interested in thinking about doing . What I mean is, you could have started building a simple website with Notepad instead of asking a question. It would probably have been hard and not very good. Asking the question was not and turned out ok.

Anyway, HTML and Javascript is the simplest thing that might work. HTML and javascript are the fundamental abstractions of web development. Not knowing them is an "illiteracy."

Getting anything up and running will still require a lot of workflow discovery. When you have experience in a workflow you can make informed decisions about your particular needs.

https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization

Good luck.

If you are doing webapps, JS all the way. Although don't overlook the benefit of static html/css for a lot of things, at which point Python becomes very worth it because of its integration into other things is a bit better than JS.

Productivity can mean speed, or it can mean reassurance that code will be easy to understand and refactor in the future (which compounds speed).

The past few months I’ve been working heavily with Python type hints and pydantic which makes it bearable.

Golang is strongly typed but it’s difficult to transform data handily with one-liners.

I’ve used Java and Spring but it’s very verbose

In my experience, TypeScript and its ecosystem has been very productive. It runs on backend and frontend, and the type system is very expressive. I always reach for it first.

Whatever you know is the best.

.NET is solid, you can even use C# on the front-end using Blazor

Cloudflare Workers, raw html/css/js (maybe TS). Can use a different "pages" provider like Netlify. It's very freeing. Especially Cloudflare, where the server side APIs are very similar to client side service worker APIs. The "low level" browser APIs can do a lot, you might be surprised. And you won't have any dependencies to update 2 years later.

Some would say Laravel and I can agree, it's such a powerful web framework to build quick. Personally I'm at the most productive state when working with Next.js + TailwindCSS & Prisma. Additionally I also use a UI library called DaisyUI that is built on top of TailwindCSS.