Entrepreneurs and hackers: Programming Language / API survey 2014 for modern web service front end.

I had a discussion with entrepreneurs about their choice language as of summer 2014. The top contenders are:

Ruby on Rails
Node.Js
Java
Python
C#
Clojure
Scala
PHP

cc Chasen Denman Litchfield Charmley

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  Albert Ko PHP for a fast MVP. Then Java/Python.

  3 hrs · Like
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  Tom Vykruta Albert are you familiar with more modern languages like RoR and Node.Js? (the industry has generally moved away from PHP and Java). If you are familiar and still prefer PHP/java would be curious to hear your thoughts.

  3 hrs · Like
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  Justin Litchfield I'm a Ruby guy. In addition to Rails, Ruby has Sinatra for lighter-weight web services, and some stripped down versions of Rails for API-specific use that are pretty good. I think that for me it strikes a great balance of simplicity and testability. ...See More

  3 hrs · Like
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  Justin Litchfield A startup in the space next to my last company got to market with a "prototype" built by the founder in PHP. Then, because that wasn't "good" or whatever, they spent the next 2 years or so reimplementing it in Scala with a team of 3 engineers. They SWORE that Scala was amazing and wonderful and just the best idea ever, but they moved SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOWLY.

  3 hrs · Like
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  Mikey Wetzel For my business, I write tons of apps in C#. (For instance, I log into gmail, scan for attachments, open HTML docs using excel interop API, and stuff values into a MySQL DB.) The speed of C# development, the extensions to do just about anything, WinFor...See More

  3 hrs · Like
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  Joshua Grass javascript and Node.js are where it's at. Node.js is really growing fast, tons of new extensions all the time.

  2 hrs · Like
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  Christoffer Björklund I did my last start up in PHP (Drupal) and it was fast as ever. But it was not complicated and I only had a very short time frame to launch it. I got it sold 2 years later. 
  
  My current start up I went back to my roots of C# and .Net. It's pretty fast to build in but hard to find really qualified engineers.

  2 hrs · Like
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  Tom Vykruta C# is arguably the best, most supported tool set. Two big problems:
  1) Must buy into Microsoft way of doing things (lots of commercial licenses, requirements to run Microsoft OS).
  2) Arguably the more critical one - talent pool is reduced to engineers ...See More

  1 hr · Like
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  Tom Vykruta Joshua Grass what are advantages of Node.js over Ruby? I have experience only with Ruby, and of course I know native JS.

  1 hr · Like
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  Joshua Grass The main advantage is that your client and server can share the same code so you can make general libraries that you know stay in sync on both platforms. It can be really useful if you want to make clients that might need to do some serve side work when they can't communicate with the server for a period of time.

  1 hr · Like
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  Tom Vykruta This sounds good in theory but in practice you're not going to be moving code or sharing code between client and server, certainly not in a complex commercial product. At least not from my personal experience. I'm not sure I see this is an actual win. ...See More

  1 hr · Like
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  Hanh Nguyen I like Python because it is very readable and fast to write, which is something important to iterate fast. I don't think you need to worry about scaling/performance/share code unless you make it for something that already have lots of traffic

  48 mins · Like
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  Justin Litchfield Likewise, Tom Vykruta - I've never understood the supposed "win" that you get by having common code execute client and server side.

  46 mins · Like
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  Tom Vykruta Rationally thinking, the only components that need to be shared are a schema for _shared_ data structures, and a DSL is a perfect solution. At Google we use https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/ which cross compiles to every language and comes with a rich, well developed lib.
  I'm not discounting node.js, just curious if it has other advantages. I am also skeptical I want to write backend code in JS.
  

  
  

  protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format - Google Project Hosting

  code.google.com
  

  Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet exten...See More

  14 mins · Like · Remove Preview
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  Justin Litchfield I started playing with the protobuf's last week actually. Very cool.

  13 mins · Like
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  Tom Vykruta Happy to answer any questions, every single service at google is built on top of protobuffs and stubby (both have been open sourced now). They are incredibly rich but very little added fat even if you just use the most basic features like encoding and decoding strings. And if you need more flexibility down the line it's there for you.

  11 mins · Like
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  Brittany Gilwit Node.js is finding it's way into almost everywhere. Just look at LinkedIn, Airbnb, Walmart, Netflix..heck, even Wall Street is using Node.js! So why is this happening? Node values configuration over convention. You don't start out with a large, heavy framework like Rails that you're constantly fighting against; instead you have a clean start and it's up to you to add modules as needed. Further, Node's I/O is unblocking, which allows for some pretty sweet real-time applications. Remember when LinkedIn moved their 30 Rails server to 3 Node servers? Node has also done a great job of encouraging front-end developers to journey into the server-side. This ultimately makes the developers and their teams stronger as they are able to better understand the stack they work with.

  2 mins · Unlike · 1
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  Tom Vykruta Very nicely said BrittanyI've felt the pain of convention-over-configuration myself, as good as it sounded in theory. I'm copying this to a blog post, if you object let me know and I'll remove your words.

  Just now · Like