Hey friends! Nice to meet you :)
I primarily work as a frontend developer, but have already gained some experience in backend development with JavaScript - mostly in side-projects.
Recently, I'm feeling kinda interested in learning another server-side language for web development. Plus, I want to increase my backend skills in general.
Apart from JavaScript, what is your server-side language of choice? Or what language would you recommend me?
Top comments (46)
When I hear JavaScript my brain instantly jumps to TypeScript :D
Personally, I write my "centralized" backends mainly in C# (ASP.NET) and the "decentralized" ones in Solidity and Vyper (on an Ethereum-based Blockchain as a Smart Contract for Web3 Applications ;))
Wow, Solidity and Vyper :)
Presume you already know PHP? There will be nore and more money in legacy languages.
Ruby is the language of GitHub, it is beautiful(imo) and intuitive.
Then there is python, or java if you want to follow the traditional path of growth, or go/rust if you want something more modern. Remember the more languages you know the quicker you pick them up because of pattern recognition eventually it is all down to syntax.
Dart and flutter are a strong choice if you are looking to be an app dev.
See all these languages have their uses. Python ai and data science, go ai, flutter apps. I am about to learn rust, my understanding is it is an unforgiving multitool.
Only as long those languages reside within the same neighbourhood (paradigm).
e.g. Python would do little to prepare you for Haskell (
donotation notwithstanding).Enough people seem to find the transition from an imperative language to SQL difficult enough.
Can't say I know PHP, just worked on a PHP project's frontend - i.e. with HTML, CSS and JS.. Just occasially read some PHP, never wrote it myself yet.
Have fun learning Rust, gonna check it out, too :)
Learn PHP. He who can maintain legacy projects - and 40% of the internet has a promissing future. You should pick it up fairly rapidly. I would say that is very important. Also check this free resource. It's examples are java and C, however in teaching you how interpreters are built it will make you a real full stack dev. It is the best computer science tutorial I have found, and because of that the language isn't important.
I don't know what level you are but rust is a low level language meaning you need some experience in recognizing what it is actually doing. You will know very quickly if you are ready and if you are then crack on my friend but it is similar to going from JS to C but without 40 years of tutorials behind you - a different beast.
craftinginterpreters.com/introduct...
Thank you so much for your solid advice! I'll check out the book about building interpreters!
Definitely go for C or C++. Both languages can be used to make native Node addons that can give you a lot more power when working with node. You could even use it to make steam games with electron because the steameorks API is in C. Also, sounds relatively high profile jobs require a language such as python or C++, but I personally think that C++would be best.
Is C++ like C regarding the need to handle memory usage?
Yes. C++ is quite literally the same as C, but tweaked for OOP rather than function-based programming.
From a pragmatic perspective Golang would be the contemporary choice. It seems to have the mass appeal of Python with a C-style syntax capable of producing binary executables.
"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical."
Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering
While language-level concurrency primitives are nice they somehow seem to have missed including the complementary error handling primitives (Erlang).
However if you are looking to improve as a programmer it's probably necessary to look in a completely different direction. Pick a LISP or Scheme (Racket) and go with it.
Systematic Program Design
Given that
"I was recruited to Netscape with the promise of “doing Scheme” in the browser" [ref]
the experience will feed back into your JavaScript style.
I like your pragmatic perspective and already have a small tendency towards Go :)
I would think the same for Golang and Rust.
For server side performance and general community support.
Even though both languages are relatively young they are definitely proven technologies that are extremely performant as well.
Developer and business perspective both are wins.
I'd say go for your work projects' main backend language as you have a chance to learn in a context.
Otherwise I'd say Golang (more used for big scaled, projects that need speed or optimizing) or Python (more related to projects with ML or data processing).
I talked to other very senior devs, one likes Clojure, another likes Rust.. but they both know various other languages already.
Many backends at work are written in Roby on Rails, so that is close. One project written in Elixir, some PHP Symfony ^^ I believe there are even some teams that use Go
I think that a good choice would be C#(ASP .Net Core ) as back end option. You will see how well structured is in comparison with Node.js for back end solution.
I also use Node js as back end for my side projects but C# is more clear and elegant for someone new.
Node js needs more experience in order to write nice architectured code.
That is an interesting thought. Thank you so much ❤️ :D
Personally I kept to node for backend apps and coding. Some python but not too much.
That being said, I'd steer away from learning another language (I see lots of go / ruby / c# posts in the comments) and I'd get yourself accustomed to databases, containerisation, queues, workers etc.
Learn more about back end concepts and patterns for scaling, redundancy, performance and focus less on a specific language. You'll find that if you do want to code for the back end you'll be able to use your JavaScript skills already as an example:
Ruby like apps - use sails.js
Microservice - check moleculer.js
Etc.
There will always be a framework or comparative so dive into concepts more. Databases, orchestration and deployment will be far more reaching for you
You've got a point there! Really, that's what I am going to focus on aswell - learn some concepts of backend 👍
Along these lines, I would go for one of these (assuming larger ecosystem is essential):
I like Haskell and Clojure, but their ecosystems are small and don't have the trajectory of growth of rust. Some people count java libraries when considering clojure ecosystem, but I don't.
Java has a large ecosystem, but I don't know how much of it has been kept current and whether people are still creating new Java libraries. I usually found the libraries in ruby and python more interesting than java libraries for equivalent tasks.
Scala tries to support too many paradigms. It's ecosystem is stagnant in size, and it's java++ community seems to have moved to kotlin or java, and it's Haskell on the jvm community has remained, but I am not sure why someone who had the management freedom would select scala over haskell. Within scala, zio is interesting since it presents an easier entry point into learning pure functional programming.
I think elm is a great stepping stone to Haskell, but you wanted server side languages.
Ruby and python don't seem different enough from js.
Thank you for these awesome recommendations! ❤️
I would definitely recommend Go.
It's a great language that gently introduces aspects of lower level languages and it's used a lot for AWS lambdas. It's also getting a lot of popularity and jobs using it are (in the UK at least) very well compensated.
Beyond that, I'd say C# python, Java.
Edit: if you don't know Typescript, learn that first.
My go-to stack is Java, but that's because I'm already proficient with it. I personally don't like PHP or Ruby but they might be a good choice for you if you already have access to existing projects using them.
If you're looking at learning something new, then try a statically typed language: Java, C#, Kotlin, you name it. Learn what static typing brings on the table, and its "limits" (it's sometimes frustrating but it can really save your ass too)