from Hacker News

Does it really matter which language?

by yunyeng on 5/4/14, 11:25 AM with 7 comments

After all, does it really matter which language we are using to create our Web, Mobile, Desktop apps? Isn't our duty is to serve people some kind of service or product in somehow. Why are we arguing whether to use PHP, Ruby, Python, Objective-C, Android etc...? Does the end user know any all of these ? I want to create Online Education platform that will serve the students in all ages and I am sure the 17 year old girl in Africa will not know about the programming language that the platform is written in. So why are we struggling so much, aren't the most functions are similar and they all provide some kind of security. Just build it and market it. I think prevalence is the problem at this point.

  • by jardaroh on 5/4/14, 1:15 PM

    Languages have different pros and cons and also quite a bit of cons/pros depending on viewpoint.

    PHP is quite good if you like messy code and typing all manner of brackets all over the place, it is still good if you don't. What I mean is, PHP works and you don't have to think too much about deployment issues, however, a lot of people burn themselves thinking that there are no deployment issues and on the lack of never looking at those issues.

    Python is awesome in my opinion, it is clean and elegant. Of course as you say the end users, the students in africa as you say, won't know how elegant a language is behind their application. But they may notice if you make use of a few things that Python makes a lot easier compared to PHP, such as realtime cross client updates, this ofcourse requires javascript or Brython in the web browser but, hey, Python is great on the backend. With Brython you can use Python across your entire stack (backend, browser, phone apps)

    Javascript is awesome too, if you, like php enjoy syntactic hell. This can be worked around using coffee script but that has it's own issues (debugging). JS can also run on the backend resulting in one language across your entire stack.

    Those are just three languages and just a snippet of whats good about them. You can do realtime cross client updates with PHP too if you really feel like it, but it is not reccomended. You can run Javascript and Python Backends on anything you can run PHP on. Each of these languages are just as good really, it all boils down to one thing.

    What can you use to produce solid, effective quality code in as litle time as possible?

    Answer that and you have your answer about what is the best language.

  • by JoeAltmaier on 5/4/14, 1:04 PM

    Folks who like cars discuss their differences endlessly. Folks who like wine make things up to talk about.

    Programmers are no different. Rust or Go? C++ or C#? Erlang or whatever? You can turn preferences into argument endlessly.

    In fact, the closer two things are together, the longer you can argue. Because, you see, it becomes harder to make an argument that compellingly distinguishes them, so the discussion can go on forever.

  • by ankurdhama on 5/4/14, 1:30 PM

    No they don't. What matters is your approach to design the system.

  • by mooism2 on 5/4/14, 12:52 PM

    So there's no problem with writing everything in shell script?