PHP and Javascript are my current tools as a web developer. I made some first steps with Python and. Ruby, but did not use it for a real project ye...
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Starting fresh? Go is almost certainly your best bet. It's not quite as marketable right now as some of the others, but it's also quite simply the best option out there. In particular:
GOOSandGOARCHin your build system and almost everything is taken care of automatically.go buildwill spit out an entirely self-contained static binary for whatever platform you're building for. Just copy that in, make sure all your static assets are in the right place, and start it.You're right that there aren't as many job offers for Go developers, but a significant part of that is the fact that there's almost no legacy code written in Go (unlike every other language you listed except Kotlin).
What about JavaScript? Express.js I mean.
That's some great details about Go. Will definitely take a closer look into it.
Typescript is as a language great one, you should consider it.,
My choice of language is Ruby and Typescript. Java is great but it's development is quite slow, Scala is awesome too. I have heard good things about Golang, but in my perspective go has ignored all new innovations in languages designs that has taken place in last few decades just to make it simple.
I think if you want to develop web apps you should aim for Python or Ruby. Go is great but I think the developer experience of tools like FastAPI/Flask/Django (for Python) and Rails for Ruby is better than Go's frameworks.
What are you trying to achieve?
Thanks for your first impressions. I updated my post with more information about my intentions.
Thanks Kevin!
I still think my initial recommendation is somewhat valid. You designated Ruby as a dying language and though it's not strictly true, it is true that its adoption is not at the "top of the charts".
Rails is still a solid choice that many companies still make from scratch in the last few years. You wouldn't be wrong picking that: Shopify is probably the poster child of large scale Rails deployment and they have written extensively about how to scale a Rails app.
Python has many examples of large scale web apps deployments (Pinterest, Quora, Instagram's website, The Washington Post). That happens because in web apps, in most but not all cases, the language "speed" is not the bottleneck as most operations are I/O bound and you can deal with those however you choose: single or multi-threaded, async, parallel processing and so on.
Even in the case of numeric computing (so being CPU bound), you can skirt the limitations of languages like Python using tools like NumPy/SciPy/PyTorch as Python can easily call low level code written in other languages.
I personally think investing in Python, starting from scratch, is a tiny bit more flexible of a choice than picking Ruby (whose alternatives for numeric computing and ML have vastly smaller communities). It still doesn't mean that picking Ruby and Rails is a bad choice, the size of the Rails community and projects like Ruby 3x3 are a testament that "Ruby is dead" is a false claim. We use Ruby everyday at DEV and I can assure you it's actively developed :-D
Setting Python and Ruby aside, as I mentioned in the previous comment, I do like Go very much but its "raw numbers" are a bit of an arbitrary reason for picking it. They can't be the only metric: the developer experience, maturity of tools, flexibility of language and many other things have to factor in. Go's "web applications" community is not that big, most people use it to build APIs or microservices in my opinion but I wouldn't write a traditional web app in it. It'd be way faster to build it with richer dynamic languages like Python/Ruby. Go's huge advantage is the single binary deployment, which is nothing new in the history of computing but it's a welcome "come back" as we've all gotten used to scripts that have deploy thousands of files before you see your updates in production :-D
Maybe you can pick a tutorial for FastAPI or Flask (Python) and Beego or Buffalo (Go) and go through it and see what your feeling is.
Just know there's no inherent wrong choice here :-)
ps. I didn't mention Java or Kotlin because I know absolutely nothing about them, or at least nothing that's not probably obsolete knowledge :D
Thank you very much for this detailed writeup. Will definitely keep those points in mind, and going through actual tutorials might be the best idea to get a first feeling for the options.
If you're looking at Java I would definitely look at .Net Core and C#. I use it at my work place and we build SaaS platforms and Web applications using either MVC or Angular for front end. You can get various powerful ORMs such as Entity Framework which allows for code first database development. And it can be deployed anywhere. As for Auth you can take a look at Identity Server 4, which has been written in C#.
Java is somewhat bulky, but it's not slow. Java was designed to be always on rather than on demand. Although with GraalVM Java is also playing the on-demand field.
Java is quite dominant in the Enterprise world.
But unless you are aiming to build a big to huge thing, I would probably not start with learning this as a new thing. I think it's better to pick Ruby or Python.
I'm not saying that Java is not suited for smaller web applications. But if it's something new you want to learn it might be better to pick Ruby. And once your new thing is done, build it again in Java. 😛
Kotlin is awesome! I have been using it for a couple of years now in production and is just a joy to use.
It also does not have some of the craziness of Scala that is best left for academia IMO. Just think of it as what Java would look like if it were written today (null safety built into the language, no checked exceptions, local type inference, immutable data classes, etc.)
Kotlin's interoperability with Java is also excellent, and therefore you can easily call out to third-party libraries that are written in Java.
The perceived speed of all those frameworks in the various languages is imo just a dream, a balloon that will eventually pop.
Sure they may seem to get you up and running quick, but you also inherit all the baggage, lock you into a certain way of thinking, and eventually lead you to run into the limitations. The plugins will rot over time, major framework updates will cause major upgrade pains, often leaving you stuck on the old versions for far too long, and everything that made you fast at the beginning now slows you down.
I do however think they're fine for prototyping some stuff quickly, to find out what you want and need, in the exploratory phase.
Don't get locked into framework prison. Like Uncle Bob advocates in Clean Architecture, such delivery mechanism frameworks just become some detail at the edge of your app.
Don't learn frameworks, but learn patterns, and know when to apply them.
I would suggest to roll your own framework or set of tools, based on low-level libraries, instead of high-level frameworks. It will pay off, in my experience.
Build something with Scala's ZIO, or Typescript's @matechs/effect, or Kotlin's Arrow-fx, for example. Would be my suggestion. But if you don't want to go the functional direction, the same rules apply; gather the libraries and tools that you need, try to steer clear of frameworks.
All of those languages have their pros and cons:
If you are looking for speed go with Rails or python with Django. If you are looking to learn you could take a look at Kotlin and use types along the way.
Thanks for your insights! It is really hard to decide.
All good choices I'd say. I'm a Laravel developer and managed to pick up Go in about 2 weeks. In 2 weeks I migrated a slow PHP script to Golang and put it in production, where it now performs amazing. It's really fast and the memory usage is so low that I often don't see it in the memory management tools. Seeing as you come from PHP as well, it might be a great option for you as well. It can do what PHP does, but faster. It also has a lot of other usagew, because you can compile it to a binary and drop your self containing program anywhere (with the right architecture) and run it. It's something that has helped me and might also help you.
Same story :), Using go, some benefits such as no data type related bugs, performant binary, readability for other developers...
Based on your criteria, Elixir and Phoenix Framework seem like the best fit. Elixir is a language perfectly designed for modern web development–clean syntax, easy to pick up the basics, and runs on a powerful platform that's been around since the '80s. This platform today runs apps like Whatsapp, Discord, Bleacher Report, and many others. Phoenix Framework is a fresh spin on the familiar MVC pattern and has a database access layer called Ecto.
I know I'm not exactly recommending a mainstream tech but if you try it, you'll see why it's so highly regarded.
PHP forever.
Somewhat agree, but it doesn’t really answer the question?
If you could reduce technical debts for a great performance which libraries or frameworks would you choose or choose to roll your own if you are competent enough?
Other languages are easier to set up is when you don't need different web servers and can run on it own,
I would say Javascript has the largest skilled community.
Javascript would be the biggest ecosystem.
Some cloud providers has poor customer experience and you know why.
PHP 8 is an incremental improvement over PHP 7.
Holy guacamole. I came here looking for answers and I left with more questions... I still have no clue which language I should focus on right now. Every single comment points in a different direction. It seems like we're all lost in this framework hell. I know people talk about learning design patterns and stuff, but eventually, you have to IMPLEMENT them in some language. And let's be honest, it takes some time to get FLUENT in a language. Even though it's easier to migrate between languages with experience, you still have to choose one to have rock solid confidence.
Generally speaking there are many programming languages that can fit your use case, depending on what that is.
If you're trying to figure out which language to use because you're trying to build something, it depends on the medium you're building on. e.g. in-house, web, cloud, or a specific platform.
If you're trying to figure out which language to use because you're trying to learn a language, pick the first one that sounds interesting.
Being fluent with a language will only come with practice. You have to start somewhere, and if you're unsure, agonizing over which language you might most enjoy mastering will not get you anywhere.
At the end of the day, any one programming language is a tool in your toolbox. Every tool has it's job, and when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
So, the first question to answer is: what do you need to do? Not what you want to do. What is the absolute bare minimum that you need to accomplish?
Something you like and can get jobs in. That's going to depend on your own tastes and the job market where you are.
Python is pretty good as a server-side web development language (along with Django - I like its ORM) and is great for developing the other parts of your system that aren't exactly web applications as well. If you need high performance, there are things like Numpy and Cython (but you likely won't need them for a website backend).
Static types for Python exist with things like MyPy (as well as with Cython), but in my opinion static typing is really a millstone around developers' necks most of the time.
On the other hand, the popularity of Python seems to be somewhat skewed by data science. The job market for Python web dev doesn't seem as good as it should be for the level of popularity Python supposedly has.
I can't see in your options but check out Rust too. You can write OS or basic web API by Rust and run cross platform. It's more difficult than PHP and JS but you can code almost anything you want using Rust.
My second advice is Go, It's is easier than Rust but not as strong as Rust.
IMHO I think you should learn them all. If you know many languages you can use your knowledge to choose one that will solve your problem better.
But you have to start with one, right?
I've never trully worked with Ruby, so I can't say much about it but afaik it's losing space to other languages like javascript/node.
Kotlin is a great language with a lot of improvements compared to Java and there are a lot of great web frameworks besides spring, like ktor and micronaut that can support high throughput. You can also easily work with concurrency using coroutines and channels, and can also build a binary using graalvm to start applications at high speed compared to jars. The problem is that companies started using kotlin recently and most of them still have Java applications.
The natural way is to learn Java first and then Kotlin. Which is sad, because after using Kotlin is very painful to program in Java again.
Go is wonderful language, the built-in library by default has a great support to server side development and you can do many stuff without the need to use external libraries/frameworks. You can achieve high thoughput with low usage of hardware. If you are a experienced developer, you can easily learn Go as it's a very simple language.
Python is a user friendly language, it has many good aspects but on backend I would use it to build simple applications that are going to make IO bound operations since it's easy to prototype something. Some great frameworks like sanic and vibora are making great usage of asyncio library, but they are not mature options yet.
I know it's very hard to choose one to begin with, but TBH just pick one that you feel comfortable with. The process of learning a new language should be a pleasant work.
Actually I would really like to learn them all. The problem is that I don't have much time for learning, so focusing on one is the only good solution.
But your thoughts and details about the languages are a great help, thank you very much!
I think it really depends on where you'd like to be in a few year's time. If you're looking to be working for a company where you live then I'd look at what languages they're currently using. From your bio it appears you're currently working just now, are they using any of the languages you've mentioned?
For me, I'm in a similar situation to you, I'm a PHP/JavaScript developer and I'm looking for a new language to learn for building some complex backend systems. Out of Go and Python, I picked Python. The reason for my choice was that we have a few database and lambda scripts already written in Python. If I lose my job, Python jobs are in abundance where I live and there's far more material (Tutorials, Libraries, etc) for Python right now compared to Go, so picking it up and learning through examples isn't going to be difficult.
That's not too say there's anything wrong with Go. I hope that Go will have matured a lot in a few years as I really like the language. But for my career goals, Python seemed to be the best fit.
Choosing the right backend programming language depends on your project requirements, scalability needs, and team expertise. For example, Python is great for rapid development and data-heavy applications, especially with its strong libraries for AI and machine learning. Java excels in large-scale enterprise applications due to its robustness and portability. If you’re building web apps, Node.js (JavaScript) offers non-blocking I/O, which makes it efficient for handling real-time, event-driven applications. Ruby on Rails is perfect for startups due to its simplicity and speed for prototyping, while PHP remains a solid choice for web development, particularly with platforms like WordPress.
Ultimately, consider factors like community support, existing codebase, and the long-term maintenance of your app before making a decision. What's best for one project may not work as well for another!
Actually, for backend, it doesn’t matter what's the language you’re using. It’s all about communication protocol between your app with the web server. You can even write it using bash script if you want. But my suggestion, if you need speed, choose native compiled language. Otherwise, pick a scripting language.
I feel like this isn't quite enough information. To pick a tool, you need to know the problem being solved. What exactly are you building?
Hi, I updated my post with more details. Could you have a look? :)
Go does certainly play a role for a good balance between cost and performance for web services especially gRPC and lower memory usage.
While Generics is still being experiment, I think there is a great demand, iirc, has a better performance than Interface.
blog.golang.org/why-generics
You must be joking, it is way behind even TypeScript
Say Hello to Nodejs
Sorry, deprecated
In that case you need to provide substantial evidence to support your claim. Until then you make no sense and a little research will help your mental growth.
Why not choose Kotlin(null safety, scope level, functional ,coroutine & collection)? for me, the more important thing is that we can implement into something more meaningful.