What are the best server side programming languages?

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30 Options Considered

Best server side programming languages	Price	Current stable version	Platforms
86 Golang	-	1.18	Windows, Linux, Mac etc.
84 Elixir	-	1.11.2	-
84 Rust	-	1.66	Linux, MacOS X, Windows, BSD
83 Python	-	3.9.1	Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS
82 Clojure	-	1.10.1	Windows, Linux, Mac

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score 180 · Answer 1

Golang

Top Pro

Goroutines

A goroutine is a lightweight thread managed by the Go runtime. Source & Tutorial here. See More

Top Con

Designed to make the programmer expendable

Go was designed for large team projects where many contributors may be incompetent. That Go can still get things done under these conditions is a testament to its utility in this niche. Go's infamously weak abstraction power is thus a feature, not a bug, meant to prevent your teammates from doing too much damage. This also means any team member can be easily replaced by another code monkey at minimum cost. Good for the company, bad for you. The more talented programmers, on the other hand, will be very frustrated by having one hand tied behind their back. See More

Capuccino 's Experience

Go Language was an answer to the current loophole of language design. Created by the author of C and Unix with Google, this is currently the youngest yet the most important language. Beware of the lack of Generics though. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.18

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

GZipped size:115 MB (installer)

Developer:Google with Ken Thompson, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike

Top Pro

Compiles quickly

Go compiles to machine code for multiple platforms quickly. This comes from supporting modules (packages) properly and from regular grammar. See More

Top Con

Doesn't have true enums

Golang does weirdness with const versus having real enums, like other languages. This reflects the stubbornness and shortsightedness of the core developers, similar to the issue with generics, where it was denied that it was needed until it became too obvious that it should have been added years ago. See More

SincereWaygl's Experience

Goroutines and intuitive coding. Easy porting from C libs. Small static binary. See More

Top Pro

Powerful standard library

The Go Language is very powerful in its standard library, pretty much like its derivative language - C See More

Top Con

Does not have sum types

Makes it harder to have functions of different parameters types in a non OOP language. Thus messy generics and interfaces, and more confusion, where sum types could have solved a number of issues. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

Much faster than Python as it compiles very quickly to native C code. Multiple platforms like Windows, Linux and Mac are supported. There is a good ORM available to write database independent code. See More

Top Pro

Easily scalable

The runtime system can easily support tens of thousands (user-space) threads, which can communicate and synchronize using channels. This makes it easy to design an application consuming multiple cores, making asynchronous I/O, and being scalable. See More

Top Con

Golang controlled by Google

Solves Google problems, which might not be your or the majority of user's problems. Was created for the benefit and purposes of Google, so is less flexible in language direction and options. See More

OpinionatedLiber's Experience

I've used Go for my websites for over a year now, and using the Revel framework + Golang, I will never need to look any further for another solution. It's perect. I've also used many other languages for server-side web dev too. See More

Top Pro

Statically typed

Most of errors related to types are detected during compile time. The compiler helps to find "stupid" mistakes on the very early stage, which is very helpful for developers of any level of experience. See More

Top Con

Lot of error handling braces

Error handling in go in many places feels like a boilerplate code. Yet, it has a powerful error handling mechanism, you have to write code to handle those errors. See More

hari prasad's Experience

I have been working in Golang for 3+years and I was migrated from java. It was an excellent language for server-side programming. It works great in both single core and multicore systems because of its concurrency. Every single API request has been handled by dedicated goroutines which boosts performance. I have seen a lot of nodeJS server has been replaced by golang. Exception handling is awesome and Error handling looks boilerplate. I recommend golang only to a build web server and the server-side application. Golang still needs to evolve in various sectors like command line apps, desktops as well as mobile app platforms and also in IOT to meet various industrial demands. See More

Top Pro

All code gets standardized formatting

This is handled by go fmt, a built-in formatting tool in Go's toolkit. See More

Top Con

Forces K&R style and won't allow Allman style

Golang developers were extremely short-sighted and biased by forcing the K&R style, which should never have happened. Basically kicking Allman style users out of their language. See More

y's Experience

will try See More

Top Pro

Simplified C-like syntax that is as easy to read and write as Python

The language is designed in a manner that seems logical. Syntax is simplified to reduce burden on the programmer and compiler developers. See More

Top Con

Easy to shadow variable

Due to single character only difference, declare and assign statement can easily shadow variable from outer scope unconsciously. Example: err := nil if xxx { err := somefunctionthatreturnsanerr } return err // always return nil See More

Zachary Romero's Experience

Go is a good language that definitely has its sweet spot and there are types of server-side development where Go excells, particularly performance sensitive microservices. See More

Top Pro

Intuitive concurrency

With goroutines it's easy to create a lightweight thread. Go was designed with concurrency in mind, which makes it an ideal language for creating servers which need to deal with many connections coming in at once. It makes it a great introduction to parallelism and writing highly scalable web apps. See More

Top Con

It appears Google uses position to snuff out or suppress other languages

Newer languages that could threaten Golang (or other Google controlled languages) appear to have suppressed search results on Google and YouTube. Dangerous situation where large company can manipulate user choice and market share. The freedom to freely choose and user rights need to be protected. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Golang is published on GitHub under Google's own Open Source License. See More

Top Con

Lacks support for immutable data

Only way to prevent something from being mutated is to make copies of it, and to be very careful to not mutate it. See More

Top Pro

Interfaces

Golang supports Interfaces, which is usually used for content checking. See More

Top Con

Too much boilerplates

Go is often touted as a short and simple language, but there is still a lot of boilerplate code you have to write in order to get things done, compared to other modern languages. See More

Top Pro

Built-in testing framework

The idiomatic approach to writing a Go software project is to perform test-driven development with unit testing. Every source code file should have an associated *_test.go file which tests functions in the code. See More

Top Con

Performance slowdown because of indirect calls and garbage collection

Practically no meaningful Go application can be written without indirect function calls and garbage collection, these are central to Go's core infrastructure. But these are major impediments to achieving good performance. See More

Top Pro

Pragmatic minimalism

What's best about Go is what isn't in there. What they took out because the language is better without it. Go represents a ressourcement, a rethink of language design. It's minimalist , spare (compared to C++, and Java) and yet it is imperative and similar in many ways to C and C# family languages, so it's not as ultra-minimalist as LISP. See More

Top Con

Very strange syntax

Top Pro

Great language for building networking services

Go was started as a systems language but now it has fully committed in the niche of networking services. This has been a brilliant move by Go because it allows them to capitalize on the immense talent of the Go engineering team (who are in the most part network engineers). In a world dominated by Java EE and slow scripting language, Go was a breath of fresh air and it continues to be one of the most powerful languages if you want to build networking services. See More

Top Con

Too simplistic

It is so simplistic that it limits what an advanced developer can do. See More

Top Pro

The go compiler compiles binaries instantly — as fast as a scripting language interpreter

Compiled binaries are fast — about as fast in C in most cases. Compiles on every OS without effort — truly cross-platform compiler. As a result of the fast compilation speed, you can use the gorun program to use go source code as if it was a scripting language. The workflow is comparable to that of a scripting language. See More

Top Con

Does not have the best concurrency model

Go's concurrency model is ugly and not as sophisticated as some of its competitors (i.e. Elixir). See More

Top Pro

Channels

Channels are a typed conduit through which you can send and receive values with the channel operator, <-. Source & Tutorial here. See More

Top Con

Learning curve

Going to Go after dynamic immutable languages – is a very icky experience. No good sources on intuition on how to deal with passing structures or references, copying, interfaces etc. See More

Top Pro

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Simply prepend a function with go to execute it concurrently. Utilizes channels for communication between goroutines which aids to prevent races and makes synchronizing threads effortless. The maximum number of threads to use may be defined at compile time, even if that is limiting goroutines to run on one thread. See More

Top Con

Go uses public memory to store processes

Unlike some of its competitors, who protect processes by using private memory, Go uses public memory similar to the way Java does. See More

Top Pro

Backed by Google

Go was created by Ken Thompson, the creator of C and Unix and Google Engineers, to introduce a more unique take on programming. See More

Top Con

Go's green threads are fatter than some of its competitors

Compared to Elixir, Go uses about 10X the memory just to start one of its green threads. See More

Top Pro

Simple high level programming language

The grammar is compact and clear. Features are powerful and consistent. The learning curve is very friendly. One can focus on the main concepts and ignore unimportant details. It is a nice compromise between Python and C worlds. See More

Top Con

Heavy reliance on code generation

Due to lack of language features, code generation has been the go to solution for many problems in the Go community, ruining an otherwise simple build process. See More

Top Pro

Unicode support

Go Language comes with Unicode support by default. See More

Top Con

Implementation of interfaces are difficult to figure out

Finding out what interfaces are implemented by a struct requires a magic crystal ball. They are easy to write, but difficult to read and trawl through. See More

Top Pro

Automatically generates API documentation for installed packages

Godoc is provided to automatically generate API documentation for Go projects. Godoc also hosts it’s own self-contained web server that will list documentation for all installed packages in your Go path. See More

Top Pro

Supports functional programming techniques such as function literals.

This naturally also supports first class and high order functions, so you may pass functions as variables to other functions. See More

Top Pro

Does OO without class-based OOP

Does a more generalized version of Object Oriented programming by use of embeddable structs, assigning methods, and using interfaces. Golang's way of OO is easier to understand, troubleshoot, and track. See More

Top Pro

Provides tools for automatically formatting code for your entire software project

This helps keep every programmer on the same page in a project and eliminates arguments over formatting styles. See More

Top Pro

Excellent dependency management

Simple and clean dependency model. See More

Top Pro

Syntax for exported code from a package is simplified to be less verbose than other languages

Any variable, type and function whose name begins with a capital letter will be exported by a project, while all other code remains private. There is no longer a need to signify that a piece of code is 'private' or 'public' manually. See More

Top Pro

Performance is on the order of C and Java

Go is blazing fast, but easier to write than Python, JS, Ruby, or many other dynamic languages. See More

Top Pro

You can get a job knowing Golang

At the top of many language indexes and job listings. See More

Top Pro

Great getting started tutorials

go tour and and effective go + go playground provide clear and concise guidance an allow new language learners appear in the middle of a working web application in a week See More

Top Pro

Demonstrates a unique, simple concept to OOP and duck typing

All types are essentially objects, be they type aliases or structs. The compiler automatically associates types to their methods at compile time. Those methods are automatically associated to all interfaces that match. This allows you to gain the benefits of multiple inheritance without glue code. As a result of the design, classes are rendered obsolete and the resulting style is easy to comprehend. Basically, interfaces are compatible by structure, which allows "duck typing". See More

Top Pro

Supports 'modules' in the form of packages

Every Go source file contains a package line that indicates which package a file belongs to. If the name of the package is 'main', it indicates that this is a program that will be compiled into a binary. Otherwise, it will recognize that it is a package. GoLang has explicit package-level export/import. Package dependency graph (DAG) defines the order of compilation and initialization. Packages help to build the architecture and to deal with the complexity of the system. Packages and clear dependancies makes it easy to understand the system (design). Proper support of modules (packages) make the compiler super-fast, since it can easily tell which packages must be recompiled. See More

Top Pro

Multiple variables may be assigned on a single line

This conveniently eliminates the need to create temporary variables. Fibonacci example: x, y = y, x+y See More

Top Pro

Great team working behind it

Go has a solid team of engineers working on it (some of the best networking engineers in the world are working on Go). Up until now, the great engineering of the language has compensated for its lack of power. See More

Top Pro

API documentation is rich in content; easy to memorize

Only features deemed critical are added to the language to prevent cruft from working it's way into the language. The language is small enough to fit inside one's head without having to repeatedly open documentation. Documentation is hosted on an official webpage in a manner that is simple to read and understand. See More

Top Pro

Easy to install and configure; simple to compile software

Go software can be immediately installed, regardless of your operating system, package manager, or processor architecture with the go get command. Software is compiled statically by default so there is no need to worry about software dependencies on the client system. Makefiles and headers are no longer necessary, as the package system automatically resolves dependencies, downloads source code and compiles via a single command: go build. See More

Top Pro

Demonstrates a unique, simple concept to object-oriented programming

All types are essentially objects, be they type aliases or structs. The compiler automatically associates types to their methods at compile time. Those methods are automatically associated to all interfaces that match. This allows you to gain the benefits of multiple inheritance without glue code. As a result of the design, classes are rendered obsolete and the resulting style is easy to comprehend. See More

Top Pro

Simple infrastructure and tooling

The standard tools: go-build/test/get/install are very fast and powerful. GoLang community developed many additional tools for vendoring and static analysis. The reasons for simple infrastructure came from the language properties: proper implementation for modules (packages), static linkage, static types, and regular compact grammar. See More

Top Pro

Supports splitting source code into multiple files

As long as every source code file in a directory has the same package name, the compiler will automatically concatenate all of the files together during the compilation process. See More

Top Pro

NO Try/Catch statements

Exception handling is completely different from Java/python style. You don't' need to worry about in which part what exception will occur. Golang will take care of it. See More

Top Pro

Programmers don't have to argue over what 10% subset of the language to implement in their software project

The language promotes programming in a specific idiomatic style, which helps keep every programmer on the same page. See More

Top Pro

Backwards-compatibility - it's always safe to upgrade to the latest version 1 release

See go1compat. It is extremely rare to face any issue when upgrading go versions. Even features such as modules didn't necessitate changes to existing code to upgrade go version. See More

Top Pro

Discourages creating too many packages/modules

Go software is often very flat in structure, without large hierarchies in the directory structure. This makes it easier to navigate using simple CLI tools, and encourages the developer to really think about whether a new module is necessary. See More

See All

score 159 · Answer 2

Elixir

Top Pro

Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP

All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Rubys syntax which many people love. See More

Top Con

Slow computational performance

AmiableOri's Experience

ugly syntax See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.11.2

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

GZipped size:3.61 MB (without required Erlang VM)

Top Pro

Out of the box concurrency

Top Con

Doesn't have wide adoption in industry

RespectfulAtropos's Experience

Functional, easy compose. See More

Top Pro

Scalability

Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers. More details can be found here. See More

Top Con

Doesn't have wide adoption in industry

TallMimir's Experience

The language which is made with love See More

Top Pro

Code hot-reloads out of the box

Top Con

Deployment is still not as easy as it should be

AmbitiousHypnos's Experience

great See More

Top Pro

Supports functional programming

It helps to developers to write code that is short, fast, and maintainable. See More

Top Con

Some design choices may seem strange

Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird: Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end or receive do {:hello, msg} -> msg {:world, msg} -> "won't match" end See More

Troy Robinson's Experience

A bit unnecessary IMO. Why not use C#, Java or Kotlin?!? See More

Top Pro

Distributed concurrency system

Not only does Elixir support concurrency on a single machine, but also across multiple machines. This lets you use all the cores in one server, or all the cores is all the servers in a datacenter, should the need arise. See More

Top Con

Slow in IO operations

Slow in IO operations like open/reading/files and redirecting stderr/stdout. See More

Silbermm's Experience

Highly productive. Batteries included. See More

Top Pro

Easy to download libraries

Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get. Supports source-only, git-friendly, project-local, etc. See More

FunnyLluddLlawEraint's Experience

Productive as Ruby See More

Top Pro

Errors are isolated, don't affect other connections / processes

Top Pro

Well designed language

The syntax, patterns, and design of this language make it clear that the creators have put an incredible level of care into them. Their thoughtful choices help make difficult concepts easy to grasp and push you toward better code. See More

Top Pro

Powerful metaprogramming

Top Pro

Great for concurrency

Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM. See More

Top Pro

Light-weight processes

Elixir uses light-weight processes that are both fast and efficient; more so than other languages, like Go, which use 10 times the memory per process. See More

Top Pro

Processes are stored in private memory

Unlike languages like Java, which store everything in shared memory deep down in the JVM, Elixir stores processes in private memory so they cannot interfere with each other. See More

Top Pro

Full access to Erlang functions

You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal. See More

Top Pro

Actor Model

Top Pro

Great getting started tutorials

The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly. See More

Top Pro

Stable API

Old answers on stack overflow, tutorials, and other resources are still useful and the code still works. the core team works hard to only add things to the language that can’t be accomplished any other way, and the built-in extensibility and metaprgramminrg of the language mean that those kinds of features are few and far between. See More

Top Pro

Has powerful tools for monitoring and supervising processes

Top Pro

Types don't get in the way

See All

score 98 · Answer 3

Rust

Top Pro

Catch errors at compile-time

Since Rust is statically typed, you can catch multiple errors during compile time. This is extremely helpful with debugging, especially compared with dynamically typed languages that may fail silently during runtime. See More

Top Con

Very ugly and verbose syntax

Compared to many languages. One tool needed to be productive is the language to be pleasing and effective, yet Rust friction is as high as its safety. See More

ImaginativeShennong's Experience

After spending signifcant time using this language, it hits as more hype and grift (for a select few) than really useful and productive. Then there is the 'Rust Evangelism' and 'Rust Foundation', which just comes across as bananas. Rust Foundation is like a drunk dictator, trying to force what we have never seen any other language try to do: 1) Prohibit firearms at their events. 2) No using "rust" in crate names. 3) No using "rust" in product or service name. 4) No using "rust" in domain or company name. 5) No using "rust" if user group or conference makes a profit. 6) Your trademarek must be bigger than theirs on your own website. 7) Must comply with local health regulations, because they say so. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.66

Platforms:Linux, MacOS X, Windows, BSD

License:MIT/Apache

Top Pro

Compiles to machine code allowing for extra efficiency

Rust uses LLVM as a backend, among other things this allows Rust code to compile down to machine languages. This allows developers to write programs that run as efficiently as possible. See More

Top Con

Low readability

Harder to read and understand language. See More

SophisticatedMayahuel's Experience

Please no, programming in Rust feels like bashing my head against a wall. The syntax is a horrible combination of ML/Haskell and C. Tha lambda syntax is strange, the need to constantly unbox and collect standard lib types, the weird guideline that 'you shouldn't use return except sometimes you should' as if they want to emphasize pure functions but only go halfway with it; the language is unwieldy. So-called safe Rust has both borrow checking soundness holes and provenance-based LLVM miscompilations. Creating &mut without incurring UB is harder than C++. Rust is not my favorite cup of tea. See More

Top Pro

Built-in concurrency

Rust has built-in support for concurrency. See More

Top Con

Low productivity

The compiler is strict, such as ownership and borrowing checkers. See More

SincereWaygl's Experience

Rust does not have a following for more reasons than the fact that it is new. Many do not like the syntax or fighting the borrow checker. See More

Top Pro

Threads without data races

Unique ownership system guarantees a mutable data to be owned and mutated by only one thread at a time, so there's no data race, and this guarantee is checked at compile time statically. Which means easy multi-threading. Of course, immutable data can be shared among multiple threads freely. See More

Top Con

Long compile times

Way longer to compile than other languages. See More

Maxwell Anderson's Experience

With the help of Rocket and other crates, it is very easy to create a robust, fast, and secure server with Rust. See More

Top Pro

Generics support

You don't have to write same array and dictionary classes hundreds and thousands times for strong type check by compiler. See More

Top Con

Significant time required to understand the language fully

There's the infamous borrow checker for example. See More

NeighborlyChloris's Experience

wonderful experience ,complex and beautiful See More

Top Pro

Supports cross compilation for different architectures

Since Rust 1.8 you can install additional versions of the standard library for different targets using rustup/multirust. For example: $ rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl Which then allows for: $ cargo build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Pretty strict and hard to adapt for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Makes developers write optimal code

Rust is a modern programming language written around systems. It was designed from the ground up this way. It's language design makes developers write optimal code almost all the time, meaning you don't have to fully know and understand the compiler's source code in order to optimize your program. Furthermore, Rust does not copy from memory unnecessarily, to give an example: all types move by default and not copy. Even references to types do not copy by default. In other words, setting a reference to another reference destroys the original one unless it's stated otherwise. See More

Top Con

Not as useful or productive as advertised.

If really out here wanting to use something besides C/C++, in 98% of use cases, would do just as well or be better off using something other than Rust. Will complete the project faster, would be easier, will be happier, and nearly as safe (use newer language with optional GC). See More

Top Pro

Support for macros

When you identify a part of your code which gets repeated often, which you cannot abstract using functions or classes, you can use Rust's built-in Macros. See More

Top Con

Rust not as safe as it pretends to be

Rust problems: 1) Massive undisclosed usage of unsafe. 2) Massive amounts of memory safety CVEs - see details. 3) Large bloated Rust binaries increase attack surface for exploits. 4) Many corporate types claiming Rust is safe, don't actually program or use it (have some quiet financial interest to push it). See More

Top Pro

Official package manager and build tool

Cargo is the official package manager for Rust. It comes with the language and downloads dependencies, compiles packages, and makes and uploads distributable packages See More

Top Con

Low-level programming language

This means that it encourages the programmer to be very careful in terms of how memory is allocated, etc. Most applications can run without exceeding the capacity of the server, even with an inefficient dynamic scripting language. See More

Top Pro

Easy to write understandable code

While not as verbose as Java, it still is much more verbose than languages like Go and Python. This means that the code is very explicit and easy to understand. See More

Top Pro

Big community

The biggest community contributing to language. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming

Very easy to create functional with some additional from structure application. See More

Top Pro

Zero-cost futures or Async IO

See All

score 124 · Answer 4

Python

Top Pro

Has a lot of good web frameworks

A wide variety of web frameworks have been developed for Python, including full-stack, general-purpose and micro frameworks. See More

Top Con

Slow to run

Check for example the first result from Google. See More

EmpatheticIcovellauna's Experience

i am a student in computing science i have some experience in the server . python language is the best server-side language it is powerful and easy to learn and use See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.9.1

Platforms:Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS

GZipped size:22.5MB

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

See All Specs

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Python's syntax is very clear and readable, making it excellent for beginners. The lack of extra characters like semicolons and curly braces reduces distractions, letting beginners focus on the meaning of the code. Significant whitespace also means that all code is properly and consistently indented. The language also uses natural english words such as 'and' and 'or', meaning that beginners need to learn fewer obscure symbols. On top of this, Python's dynamic type system means that code isn't cluttered with type information, which would further distract beginners from what the code is doing. See More

Top Con

Community split between legacy (2.7.x) and new (3.x) version

Python 2.7 and Python 3 are incompatible, though with a sophisticated script to ease migration. A lot of libraries are still written for Python 2.7. The Python community has still not moved over fully to Python 3, which is mean to be the new version of the language, even though it was released in 2008. A large subset of the Python community still uses / relies upon Python 2, which is considered a legacy implementation by the Python authors. Some libraries still have varying degrees of support depending on which version of Python you use. There are syntactical differences between the versions. See More

MellowHadur's Experience

python is best as it also supports machine learning See More

Top Pro

Easy to get started

On top of the wealth of tutorials and documentation, and the fact that it ships with a sizeable standard library, Python also ships with both an IDE (Integrated Development Environment: A graphical environment for editing running and debugging your code); as well as a text-based live interpreter. Both help users to get started trying out code immediately, and give users immediate feedback that aids learning. See More

Top Con

Inelegant and messy language design

The first impression given by well-chosen Python sample code is quite attractive. However, very soon a lack of unifying philosophy/theory behind the language starts to show more and more. This includes issues with OOP such as lack of consistency in the use of object methods vs. functions (e.g., is it x.sort() or sorted(x), or both for lists?), made worse by too many functions in global name space. Method names via mangling and the init(self) look and feel like features just bolted on an existing simpler language. See More

Winnie Brockett's Experience

Python is an interpreted, high-level and general-purpose programming language. Python's design philosophy emphasizes code readability with its notable use of significant whitespace See More

Top Pro

Easy to implement

Top Con

Speed can matter

Python, like many interpreted and untyped languages, is fairly slow compared to compiled languages like C, C++ or Java. Sometimes this won't matter, but when it does you're talking about twenty times slower than C/C++ and ten times slowed than Java. See More

ExceptionalBacchus's Experience

The thing I love most about Python is that it looks like a glue: whenever you need to join different codes from different languages, you can do it easily with python. Building apps with a Python core is easy, and whenever you need to upgrade some part of your code (for math computing, data processing, and other), there are not only tons of libraries that allows you to easily implement that joint, but it is also fast to develop such program/application. See More

Top Pro

Has many libraries for scientific computing, data mining and machine learning

Python is commonly used in data science and has many libraries for scientific computing, such as numpy, pandas, matplotlib, etc. See More

Top Con

Hard to debug other people's code

As the structure of Python code is based on conventions, many developers are not following them and so it is difficult to follow/extract the design of not trivial application from the code. See More

omgMajk's Experience

Clean, fast, powerful and can do almost anything. See More

Top Pro

It's not Javascript

Top Con

Significant whitespace

While proper formatting is essential for any programmer, beginners often have trouble understanding the need and lack the discipline to do it. Add to that all those editors that randomly convert N spaces (usually 8) to tabs and you get an instant disaster. See More

Top Pro

Active and helpful community

Python has an active and helpful community, such as the comp.lang.python Google Groups, StackOverflow, reddit, etc. See More

Top Con

Not great for performance & memory footprint

Top Pro

Good documentation

The Python community has put a lot of work into creating excellent documentation filled with plain english describing functionality. Contrast this with other languages, such as Java, where documentation often contains a dry enumeration of the API. As a random example, consider GUI toolkit documentation - the tkinter documentation reads almost like a blog article, answering questions such as 'How do I...', whereas Java's Swing documentation contains dry descriptions that effectively reiterate the implementation code. On top of this, most functions contain 'Doc Strings', which mean that documentation is often immediately available, without even the need to search the internet. See More

Top Con

Unflexible userbase

You will be expected to rigidly stick to the coding practices and to do everything by-the-numbers. See More

Top Pro

Comes with extensive libraries

Python ships with a large standard library, including modules for everything from writing graphical applications, running servers, and doing unit testing. This means that beginners won't need to spend time searching for tools and libraries just to get started on their projects. See More

Top Con

It's great until it's horrible

It's great until you want to do something like threading or functional programming and then it's awful. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials

Python's popularity and beginner friendliness has led to a wealth of tutorials and example code on the internet. This means that when beginners have questions, they're very likely to be able to find an answer on their own just by searching. This is an advantage over some languages that are not as popular or covered as in-depth by its users. See More

Top Con

Does not teach you about data types

Since Python is a dynamically typed language, you don't have to learn about data types if you start using Python as your first language. Data types being one of the most important concepts in programming. This also will cause trouble in the long run when you will have to (inevitably) learn and work with a statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Installs and works on every major operating systems if not already installed by default (Linux, macOS). See More

Top Con

Limited support for functional programming

While Python imports some very useful and elegant bits and pieces from FP (such as list comprehensions, higher-order functions such as map and filter), the language's support for FP falls short of the expectations raised by included features. For example, no tail call optimisation or proper lambdas. Referential transparency can be destroyed in unexpected ways even when it seems to be guaranteed. Function composition is not built into the core language. Etc. See More

Top Pro

Can be used in many domains

Python can be used across virtually all domains: scientific, network, games, graphics, animation, web development, machine learning, and data science. See More

Top Con

Not good for mobile development

You can use frameworks like Kivy, but if your ultimate goal is to write mobile apps Python may not be the best first choice. See More

Top Pro

One right way to do things

One of the Guiding Principles of Python is that there should be only one obvious way to do things. This is helpful for beginners because it means that there is likely a best answer for questions about how things should be done. See More

Top Con

The process of shipping/distributing software is reatively complicated

Once you have you program the process of having a way to send it to others to use is fragile and fragmented. Python is still looking for the right solution for this with still differences in opinion. These differences are a huge counter to Python's mantra of "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." See More

Top Pro

Supports various programming paradigms

Python supports three 'styles' of programming: Procedural programming. Object orientated programming. Functional programming. All three styles can be seamlessly interchanged and can be learnt in harmony in Python rather than being forced into one point of view, which is helpful for easing confusion over the debate amongst programmers over which programming paradigm is best, as developers will get the chance to try all of them. See More

Top Con

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Although the principals of multi-threading in Python are good, the simplicity can be deceptive and multi-threaded applications are not always easy to create when multiple additional factors are accounted for. Multi-thread processes have to be explicitly created manually. See More

Top Pro

It's really simple

It's very simple for understanding how programming works. See More

Top Con

Unintuitive reference semantics

Top Pro

Very similar to pseudo-code

When learning Computer Science concepts such as algorithms and data structures, many texts use pseudo-code. Having a language such as Python whose syntax is very similar to pseudo-code is an obvious advantage that makes learning easier. See More

Top Con

Might not be very future-proof

Lots of features that will probably be crucial as time goes (good support for parallelism for example) are missing or are not that well-supported in Python. See More

Top Pro

Easy to find jobs

Python's popularity also means that it's commonly in use in production at many companies - it's even one of the primary languages in use at Google. Furthermore, as a concise scripting language, it's very commonly used for smaller tasks, as an alternative to shell scripts. Python was also designed to make it easy to interface with other languages such as C, and so it is often used as 'glue code' between components written in other languages. See More

Top Con

White space as syntax

Top Pro

Good introduction to data structures

Python's built-in support and syntax for common collections such as lists, dictionaries, and sets, as well as supporting features like list comprehensions, foreach loops, map, filter, and others, makes their use much easier to get into for beginners. Python's support for Object Orient Programming, but with dynamic typing, also makes the topic of Data Structures much more accessible, as it takes the focus off of more tedious aspects, such as type casting and explicitly defined interfaces. Python's convention of only hiding methods through prefacing them with underscores further takes the focus off of details such as Access Modifiers common in languages such as Java and C++, allowing beginners to focus on the core concepts, without much worry for language specific implementation details. See More

Top Con

Abstraction to the point of hinderance

Python is abstracted far enough that if it's your first language, it will be harder to pick up lower level languages later versus going the other direction. See More

Top Pro

Best chances of earning most money

According to Quartz, Python programming skills on average earn $100,000 per year. Closely followed by Java, C++, JavaScript, C, and R with $90,000 per year and above. See More

Top Con

It is best suited for scripting, but so are many other languages

I.e. running js as a script in a node is trivial. Even languages that were not meant to run as a script are easy to use as a scripting language with just a .sh file. See More

Top Pro

Import Turtle

Do something visually interesting in minutes by using the turtle standard library package. Turtle graphics is a popular way for introducing programming to kids. It was part of the original Logo programming language developed by Wally Feurzig and Seymour Papert in 1966. Imagine a robotic turtle starting at (0, 0) in the x-y plane. After an import turtle, give it the command turtle.forward(15), and it moves (on-screen!) 15 pixels in the direction it is facing, drawing a line as it moves. Give it the command turtle.right(25), and it rotates in-place 25 degrees clockwise. Turtle can draw intricate shapes using programs that repeat simple moves. Example Turtle Star Drawing from turtle import * color('red', 'yellow') begin_fill() while True: forward(200) left(170) if abs(pos()) < 1: break end_fill() done() See More

Top Con

Problems with handling Unicode in Python 3

Python 3 took a different stance on dealing with Unicde than Python 2. In UNIX as in Python 2, everything was bytes. In Python 3 everything is unicode. Filenames, terminals, stdin and stdout are Unicode instead of bytes by default. But since everything is actually bytes, this brings a lot of issues. such failures when trying to install pip packages because the changelog has umlauts in it. See More

Top Pro

Advanced community projects

There are outstanding projects being actively developed in Python. Projects such as the following to name a random four: Django: a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. iPython: a rich architecture for interactive computing with shells, a notebook and which is embeddable as well as wrapping and able to wrap libraries written in other languages. Mercurial: a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface. PyPy: a fast, compliant alternative implementation of the Python language (2.7.3 and 3.2.3) with several advantages and distinct features including a Just-in-Time compiler for speed, reduced memory use, sandboxing, micro-threads for massive concurrency, ... When you move on from being a learner you can still stay with Python for those advanced tasks. See More

Top Con

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

Top Pro

Static typing via mypy

Python's syntax supports optional type annotations for use with a third-party static type checker, which can catch a certain class of bugs at compile time. This also makes it easier for beginners to gradually transition to statically typed languages instead of wrestling with the compiler from the start. See More

Top Con

Requires tests even for trivial functions and modules

Top Pro

Has features of both high and low level language

It is somewhere between C and Java. See More

Top Con

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

While it's a good language to learn and use after you have mastered a couple of other less rigid programming languages, it's definitely not good for first-time learners. Both the language itself and its community have made it quite clear that you should do everything the "Pythonic way" to get the best results, that it feels more like an opinionated framework instead of a general-purpose programming language, which means if you are a first-time learner and getting too "tuned" to the "Pythonic way" it will be much harder for you to learn other less-opinionated languages compared to the other way around. Like any programming languages and/or frameworks, probably the recommended way for first-time learners would be to learn less opinionated ones first to open up your mind, then learn some of the more opinionated ones to increase productivity for specific fields of works. After all, programming languages are just some utilities for the human mind to interface with the computers, and there are more suitable tools for different tasks, and you should master the "Pythonic way" (after you already have adequate experience in computer programming) instead of locking your mind too close to the "Pythonic way" as a first-time learner. See More

Top Pro

Interpreters for JS, Microtontrollers, .Net , Java & others

Python is not limited to just be cross platform. It goes far beyond all high level languages since it can run on top of several other frameworks & architectures : Examples of interpreters: Standard (PC Win/Lin/Mac, ARM, Raspberry, Smartphones): CPython usually, but some more specialized for smartphones: Kyvi, QPython, ... Web Browser JS : Brython, PyJS, .Net : IronPython Java: Jython Microcontrollers with WiFi like ESP8266 or ESP32: MicroPython Can be statically compiled (instead of interpreted) with Cython. (Do not mix up with cPython) With python, you're sure your code can run (almost) everywhere, from 2€ computers to the most expensives. So, for instance, with Jython you can access the Java libraries with Python language. See More

Top Con

It is best suited for scripting, but so are many other languages

Running js as a script in a node is trivial. Even languages that were not meant to run as a script are easy to use as a scripting language with just a .sh file. See More

Top Pro

Includes pygame library

Want to start game development? No problem! Using pygame open-source library you can fast begin creating games without worrying about pointers or undefined behaviors which they exists in C/C++. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn, More to Go

It is very easy to learn and it has community support and many categories available. See More

Top Pro

Mobile versions

Mobile versions are available but can be difficult to find. Examples for android are pydroid and qpython. See More

See All

score 148 · Answer 5

Clojure

Top Pro

Extremely rapid prototyping and workflow

Simplicity is one of the pillars on which Clojure is built. Clojure tries to solve many problems in software development as simply as possible. Instead of building complex interfaces, objects or factories, it uses immutability and simple data structures. See More

Top Con

Doesn't have wide adoption in industry

HonestMwari's Experience

Clojure helped me understand recursion and lazy evaluation better than JavaScript or Python, and I've solved hard problems with it where I would've been struggling with classes in others. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.10.1

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Site:www.clojure.org

GZipped size:3.7Mb, requires JAVA

See All Specs

Top Pro

Immutability pairs extremely well with stateless web services

Clojure programmers are highly encouraged to use immutable data in their code. Therefore, most data will be immutable by default. State change is handled by functions (for transformations) and atoms (an abstraction that encapsulates the idea of some entity having an identity). See More

Top Con

Confusing error messages

Clojure's error messages more often than not are very confusing. They usually involve stack traces that do not thoroughly explain where the error was caused or what caused it. See More

Ivan Fedorov's Experience

Every time I go outside of Clojure world I say to myself: "Well, lets get this medieval bread". Clojure just makes me happy. Fast prototyping, absence of mutable state errors, analogue of gradual typing with spec, same language for front and back, but backend has real threads. Pure joy to work with. See More

Top Pro

Minimal syntax

Being a LISP, programs are simple: they're just functions and data. That it doesn't get bogged down with syntax or the loftier FP concepts like monads makes it one of most approachable functional languages for beginners. See More

Top Con

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations.

Some language constructs were obviously created as workarounds for JVM limitations. This makes the language much less elegant than it could have been. Also, the JVM has a very cumbersome FFI. See More

EmpatheticDerzelas's Experience

Incredible concision and expressiveness. Helps find design problems. REPL development makes for incredibly rapid iteration. See More

Top Pro

Tries to solve problems as simply as possible

Simplicity is one of the pillars on which Clojure is built. Clojure tries to solve many problems in software development as simply as possible. Instead of building complex interfaces, objects or factories, it uses immutability and simple data structures. See More

Top Con

Hard to sell to people

Introducing it into a company can be hard; common complaints are: It's too hard to find devs (untrue), the syntax is weird (C-style was weird to every beginner programmer too), we need mutability and/or proper static types for speed/efficiency, there's been little change to the language so it must be dead (untrue). See More

IntellectualAmphictyonis's Experience

I am using it in my daily job See More

Top Pro

Rich Hickey

The creator is so awesome, he's a feature. Just look up his talks and see why. See More

Top Con

Syntax can be alien / jarring for those used to other Lisps

Perhaps some may consider this attribute an advantage, but I do not. Clojure does not attempt to maintain significant compatibility with other Lisps. So, if you already know a Lisp or are used to the way Lisp works in general, you'll probably be confused if you take a look at Clojure. See these resources for more details on this subject: https://clojure.org/reference/lisps http://stackoverflow.com/q/6008313/2636454 http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-major-difference-between-clojure.html http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/153128/166211 See More

DevotedOrcus's Experience

Built server, client-server, and server-server based applications in Clojure See More

Top Pro

Hook into the extensive repertoire of Java with little to none of the pain of Java

Top Con

Dynamic types

You can put anything in. This makes reasoning about code after a time has passed very hard. See More

HumbleNingishzida's Experience

Used it for 10 years. Has some warts, but much better than any other language that I used professionally. See More

Top Pro

Easy to share code with the frontend using ClojureScript

Clojure and ClojureScript are basically the same language, and reader conditionals make it simple to adress the differences in hosting language in tshared source files. See More

Top Con

Can't run files directly like JS, Python, or Ruby

Ten second REPL fire-up with lein run vs. Node.js's near-immediate script start via node index.js. See More

AwareMinos's Experience

Clojure is really Fast to implement and practical to manage Data See More

Top Pro

Powerful REPL, connected to the running application

Being able to examine and modify the running application is extremely useful and joyful. It also creates a scene whee nice and simple editor integrations further power your work. See More

Top Con

Need jvm

SophisticatedCreidhne's Experience

Clojure is my profession. And I am also the creator of one of the main IDEs. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Clojure compiles to JVM bytecode and runs inside the JVM. This means that applications written in Clojure are cross-platform out of the box. See More

Top Con

Most developer environments have a tough learning curve

Compared to most contemporary languages, clojure has relatively few well supported environments. Sure, there's cursive, which is decent, but I much prefer vs code to intelliJ. Also, the environments that seem to get the best support are the hardest to learn: emacs, vim, etc. See More

HilariousTriptolemus's Experience

I come for Clojure after 10 years of PHP and now I really obsess with this language. See More

Top Pro

Good for writing concurrent programs

Since Clojure is designed for concurrency, it offers things like Software Transaction Memory, functional programming without side-effects and immutable data structures right out of the box. This means that the development team can focus their energies on developing features instead of concurrency details. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic language

A superb data processing language. While rich type and specification systems are available they are optional. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful, powerful approach for data processing

Offers lots of simple data-processing functions that compose well together See More

Top Pro

Fun and enjoyable

Clojure's interactivity and expressiveness means you're never bored using it. You get instant feedback and quick results, and your code is never any longer than it has to be, with all redundancy and verbosity removed. Makes it a joy to use, and just an overall fun and enjoyable experience. See More

Top Pro

Huge ecosystem of libraries to work with

There's a very large ecosystem of high-quality Clojure libraries which developers can use. One example is Incanter. It's a great data analytics library and a very powerful tool for dealing with matrices, datasets and csv files. See More

Top Pro

Incredible reach

Clojure is incredibly versatile, and can target so many platforms, that you get an incredible ROI. You can use Clojure to write JVM or .net CLR applications. You can use it to develop JaaScript SPAs, or NodeJS applications. You can use it for scripting a-la bash. It has an interpreter in Go and in native GraalVM. There is a Clojure for Erlang. There is a Clojure which compiles down to C++11. These are just the well maintained ones. There are plenty more being developed. This shows that Clojure is a solid foundation which is easy to port to new platforms, and the set will just grow over time. See More

Top Pro

Extremely stable - no breaking changes in the language

If a Clojure programme targets e.g. 1.4, it'll still run in 1.10. The language accretes features slowly, making sure not to break existing code. People are known to run alphas of new versions in production. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

Clojure has an elegant macro system which enables language additions, Domain-specific languages (DSLs), to be created much easier than most other languages (with the exception of Racket, perhaps). See More

Top Pro

An really full-stack language / Homoiconicity

Clojure for the back end and ClojureScript for the front end and that it! The REPL experience and workflow is nothing comparable. See More

Top Pro

No C/Java syntax

This is refreshing. See More

Top Pro

Great tool used in automating, configuring and managing dependencies available

Leiningen is a very useful tool for Clojure developers. It helps wiht automation, configuration and dependency management. It's basically a must for every Clojure project. See More

Top Pro

Great for asynchronous situations

Clojure's core.async library offers a simple approach to async programming based on the CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) approach. See More

Top Pro

You can learn Clojure with a game

Nightmod is a tool used to make "live-moddable" games. It displays the game's code while you are playing and allows you to inject new code using Clojure. This can be a fun and useful experience for people trying to learn Clojure. See More

See All

score 157 · Answer 6

Node.js

Top Pro

Lots of libraries to use

Most of them are conveniently hosted in the NPM repository. See More

Top Con

The constant churn of tooling and language

Trying to keep up=javascript fatigue. You won't have time to learn anything else if this is your first language, and you will probably think all programmers are crazy. Plus web assembly may open the door for better alternatives. See More

ReliableSeonangsin's Experience

Quite good when you bundle it with Typescript, but not recommended for computationally expensive tasks. See More

Specs

Engine:V8/ChakraCore

Author:Ryan Dahl/Joyent

Version(Latest):12.x

Minimum Supported ECMAScript Version:ECMAScript 6 (Node v4.x-v10.x)

See All Specs

Top Pro

Runs on both the browser and the server

With Node.js, it is now possible to run JavaScript as a web server. This would allow you to be able to create server based applications sooner than would if you had to learn a separate programming language as well for server side code. As JavaScript is the only language supported by web browsers it puts it in the unique situation of being the only programming language that's available on both the client side and server side. See More

Top Con

Complex

JavaScript has a long litany of warts and gotchas. JavaScript will bite you if you're just a wee bit careless. You have to exercise a great deal of caution and awareness. You either have to know the entire 545-page ES6 spec to avoid them all, or use a linter to help restrict you from using the bad parts (and you still have to be familiar with the language), but beginners don't know these things. (Linters are also prone to time-wasting false positives.) This is a significant cognitive burden on even the experienced programmer (as if coding wasn’t hard enough already), but try learning to program in the first place on top of all of this and you'll understand that JavaScript is a terrible choice for the beginner. See More

GenerousMagec's Experience

Very active community and newest technology. Once configured correctly, coding is super easy. See More

Top Pro

Tends to have smaller and simpler code for same tasks

Top Con

The "this" keyword doesn't mean what you think it means

this is bound to whatever object called the function. Unless you invoke it as a method. Unless you invoke it as a constructor. Unless it's an arrow function. See More

Capuccino 's Experience

Node.js is probably the most dominant, and a stark requirement for client side coding on today's industry - but it doesn't seem to fall behind it's intended purpose either, which is server-side scripting. Ryan Dahl, we salute you! See More

Top Pro

Same language on client side

Only one specialty required to work on both sides. No more confusion while switching. See More

Top Con

Poor signal-to-noise

Javascript's monopoly over client-side code has made it a popular language to teach beginners. The result is a very low signal-to-noise ratio, whether in finding example code, looking for good libraries for your project to depend on, or hiring engineers. See More

DeterminedAristaeus's Experience

The most productive stack. See More

Top Pro

Great at handling events

JavaScript continues to be the leader when it comes to watching for events - clicks, key presses, window sizing etc. These can be useful stats that are very difficult to attain through other programming languages. See More

Top Con

Counter-intuitive type conversion

JavaScript is rather inconsistent when dealing with different types. For example, when working with the + operator and two numbers, they will be added, two strings will be concatenated: 3+5; // 8; "Hello "+"world"; // "Hello world" When using + with a string and a non-string operand, the non-string operand is converted to a string and the result is concatenated: "the answer is "+42; // "the answer is 42" "this is "+true; // "this is true" In any other case (except for Date) the operands are converted to numbers and the results are added: 1+true; // = 1+1 = 2; null+false; // = 0+0 = 0; See More

Top Pro

Can be very simple (teachable)

By setting a few ground-rules (effectively coding in a subset of JS), JS is one of the simplest languages to learn (requiring very few must-learn prerequisite concepts). See More

Top Con

Error handling is all over the place

(synchronous exceptions, promise exceptions, error events) See More

Top Pro

Great tools for development

Flow, JSHint/ESLint, Babel, npm, etc. See More

Top Con

Many errors pass silently

JavaScript looks for every possible way to treat the code you write as runnable and is very reluctant to point out likely errors. For example, you have call a function with too many arguments, the extra arguments are simply discarded. See More

Top Pro

Massive ecosystem

JavaScript has one of the largest programming ecosystems, as shown by the being the most popular language for projects on GitHub. As there are so many projects written in JavaScript there are lots of libraries available to build off of and many of them are written to be easy to use and integrate into other projects. There are also lots of resources available for learning JavaScript. Other than traditional tutorials, language learning sites such as Codecademy have JavaScript courses. The Mozilla Developer Database also serves as a great resource for learning about the standard libraries built into JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Fractured ecosystem

Angular, React, Ember, Meteor, Backbone, Knockout, Express, Mithril, Aurelia. The web frameworks pass in and out of fashion too quickly to keep up with. The endless civil wars are becoming tiresome. See More

Top Pro

JSON is "native" to JavaScript

JSON is arguably a "must-learn". With JavaScript, that's one less additional syntax to learn. See More

Top Con

Has really bad parts you're better off avoiding altogether

But beginners won't know better. And even after you learn, you might have to deal with others' code that uses the bad stuff. JavaScript was originally developed in 10 days. It just wasn't designed that carefully. See More

Top Pro

Functional

Most of the other languages you'll use for this is object oriented, which is fine, if you think that way. JavaScript is better at being a functional language than it is at being object oriented, which is great if you think that way. At the same time, it's a more useful functional language than Haskell, which is obsessively functional. See More

Top Con

Very confusing to read

Top Pro

Most implementations are fast

JS/ES is in the running for the fastest interpreted language given the optimizations and JIT integration of popular implementations. See More

Top Con

Does not teach you about data types

Since JavaScript is a dynamically typed language, you don't have to learn about data types if you start using JavaScript as your first language. Data types being one of the most important concepts in programming. This will also cause trouble in the long run when you will have to (inevitably) learn and work with a statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Easy to build an application

By using the UI capabilities in HTML and CSS you can develop substantial applications with graphical interfaces more quickly and with less effort than in other languages which would require you to learn a windowing library. Building a useful application is one of the best ways to learn a new language and because of the low learning curve for creating applications you can create more substatial programs and learn more practical programming priciple faster. See More

Top Con

Fast moving

The language and the web platform move fast these days. this makes it difficult for students as there is a lot of fragmentation and outdated information. See More

Top Pro

Very good debugger

Has a built in debugger with break points, watches that work on local values, and a console that you can use to edit anything at any time. Both in the browser (eg: Chrome), and server (eg: Nodejs). See More

Top Con

Immature frameworks

Documentation and communities not as vast as those of older competitors. See More

Top Pro

No installation required

If you run a web browser you already have JavaScript installed and can get started right away. Modern browsers such as Chrome also have very powerful programming consoles built into them. Aside from the browser console, you can also use online Javascript playgrounds such as JS Bin and JS Fiddle. Even from a tablet. See More

Top Con

Numbers that begin with 0 are assumed octal

This is very surprising for beginners. Especially since 00 through 07 seem to work just fine. And this isn't just for hardcoded numbers. The parseInt() function has the same problem, but only on some systems. See More

Top Pro

Atwood's Law "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

May also be a con. See More

Top Con

Good tools are pretty much a MUST for new programmers

You really want to be using a good editor (light IDE) and a linter, type checker (e.g.:Flow), etc. until you grok the language. And choosing / setting-up that development environment is it's own learning curve. If taught in a classroom, using a subset of JS with solid tools, there is an argument that JS could be an ideal first language... however, that is a lot of ceremony to protect the new programmer from JS gotchas. But without the tools, JS can be a very painful painful first language (trying to figure out why your code isn't doing what you intended). See More

Top Pro

Required for web development

If you are looking to create web projects, you will have to learn Javascript in order to develop the client side code. If you learn the foundations of programming in JavaScript you can reapply that education later in building web applications. See More

Top Con

Limited standard library

Much often needed functionality is not in the standard library. (Contrast with Python.) However, there are well established libraries such as Lodash, to fill the gap (however, due to the diverse/fractured ecosystem it may not be clear what library to use). See More

Top Pro

Speed (most implementations)

JS/ES is in the running for the fastest interpreted language given the optimizations and JIT integration of popular implementations. On the other hand, it fails utterly when compared with compiled (to native or VM code) languages. See More

Top Con

No "clear choice" frameworks/libraries

The closest JS gets (IMHO) is jQuery for consistent DOM api. From libraries to fill the hole left by no comprehensive standard library (eg: lodash, underscore, ramda, functionaljs, sugar, core-js, stdlib, locutus, or the N implementations of range or pad on npm), to front-end frameworks (angular, aurelia, vue, react, ember, polymer, etc), and everything in between; the JS ecosystem is hugely diverse and there is rarely a "major" library or framework for a given purpose. This is overwhelming for a new user. While diversity is good, at least having a major/primary library/framework for a given need/use is highly desirable for a "learn this first"language in order to be productive and focused (not to mention finding fast and accurate help from the community). See More

Top Pro

C-like syntax

After learning Javascript, you will feel at home in other languages as C-like syntax is very common. See More

Top Pro

Several Platforms to use the web stack and JS to create multi-platform apps

Opens the door to native application development as well as just websites. Use with React Native, Weex or Quasar (Vue), PhoneGap or Cordova, NativeScript... (etc) to build native apps. Use mostly the same code base for multi-platform and web. See More

Top Pro

Modern ESNext is far better than the JS of days past

Modern JS has made great strides, and can be targerted to older (or non-standard) browsers using Babel. There are new language constructs that can make programming in JS comfortable.; e.g.: async / await ( <3 ). See More

Top Pro

JSON is native to JS

JSON is arguably a "must-learn". With JS, that's one less additional syntax to learn. See More

Top Pro

Prototype based Object Oriented System

Being object oriented, it supports the predominate and powerful programming approach. Being prototype based, it provides an intuitive approach to OOP. Whereas other popular languages use classes, which focus on thinking in the abstract, Javascript's prototypes allow you to focus on thinking in the concrete. For example, in a prototypical language, you think of a rectangle, and define it. You now have a rectangle. Let's say you want a red rectangle, you copy the rectangle and give it the property red. Want a blue one? Copy rectangle again give it a blue. Big blue rectangle? Copy blue rectangle and make it big. In a class-based language, first you describe a rectangle, describe a red rectangle as a type of rectangle, describe blue and big blue rectangles, and now that you have described them, you must create instances of them, and only then do you have the rectangles. Essentially: Classes are factories for objects, prototypes are objects themselves, and the latter method was created to be more intuitive, which is particularly advantageous to beginners. See More

Top Pro

Instant gratification

While it's easy to argue that Python will give you instant gratification, JavaScript is far better in this regard. Make a small change to a page and it's immediately visible in the browser. You can throw in a JavaScript library like jQuery with minimal fuss. See More

Top Pro

Complete dev stack can be run online

With codepen.io and other prototyping tools, you can learn Javascript from a mobile device. You don't even need a computer. It can be learned from an internet cafe or public library. See More

Top Pro

First-class functions with lexical closures

While certainly not the only language with these features, this pro alone is so powerful that it compensates for most of JavaScript's problems. You'll learn to use closures and higher-order functions well in JavaScript, because you have to. And then you can generalize this knowledge to any other language that has these, and the good ones do. See More

Top Pro

High demand for JavaScript developers

If you're looking for a career as a developer, JavaScript is the place to focus your attention. There is a huge demand for good developers especially in frameworks such as React and Angular. See More

Top Pro

Integrates very well with UE4

Coding an immersive 3D game can retain the attention of new programmers. ncsoft/Unreal.js. See More

Top Pro

Atwood's Law "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript"

May also be a con. See More

See All

score 47 · Answer 7

C#

Top Pro

LINQ

Query data structure like SQL really feel like a bliss, and it adds so much possibility and flexibility to the code. You can use it to filter or transfer a list easily, without having to write a long helper function. See More

Top Con

Excessively class based OOP oriented

Limits users into overly using awkward paradigm and creating another kind of spaghetti code. See More

Noble Edward's Experience

WebServer (HTTP/REST) applications are a breeze to create, debug and deploy! See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IOS

License:MIT, Open Source

IDE Support:Visual Studio on Windows, JetBrains Rider, Visual Studio Code on other platforms

Standard:ECMA

Top Pro

Familiar syntax

C# is similar to other C-based languages, like C++, JavaScript and C. Curly braces, semicolons, even variable declaration keywords are shared with JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Too class-based OOP centric

Pushes too much of the class-based OOP paradigm. See More

Hamdi Chehdi's Experience

i am net software developer with 5 years experience c# is so powerful language you can any develop any kind of apps that work in any plateform and create very clean apps See More

Top Pro

High performance and very scalable

C# is used to build massive systems that perform well, are easy to maintain and are compatible with most cloud providers. It benchmarks well against competing server-side development systems. See More

Top Con

.Net is a mess

Too many issues with updates, size, Microsoft, and not being truly cross-platform. See More

Top Pro

Rich library support and developer community

C# has a very broad ecosystem supporting it, including clones of most familiar paradigms from Java, such as package management, an xml-based build system similar to Ant, clone of unit testing, aspect-oriented programming and MVC frameworks. Millions of C# developers are currently working around the world, are helpful and are members of most QA communities. See More

Top Con

Complex syntax

Too many syntactic constructs to learn before it becomes usable. See More

Top Pro

Great developer tooling

Visual Studio (Code) & others. See More

Top Con

Dependecy on IDE

Most people learn and depend on VisualStudio to write C#. The result is people learn how to use an IDE and not the concepts or fundamentals of good programming. This isn't necessarily a knock on the language itself, but it is frustratingly difficult to do things in C# when not using VS. See More

Top Pro

Incredibly well-engineered language

Where other languages invoke the feeling of being a product of organic growth over time, C# just feels like an incredibly well-designed language where everything has its purpose and almost nothing is non-essential. See More

Top Con

Often-used products in most C# development environments get expensive

The majority of the C# development community uses Microsoft products which are not all free and open-source. As you get into the enterprise level of some of these products and subscriptions, the expense is multiple factors of 10 greater. While you can use a fully open-source and free C# environment, the community around that is much smaller. While this can be said for other languages as well, the majority of C# falls into the for-pay Microsoft realm. See More

Top Pro

Sophisticated tooling under vigorous development

Visual Studio and corresponding tools are constantly being updated. Code analysis and development tools available from various vendors, including Microsoft, are readily available. In some segments, several tools compete with each other to fulfill the same task. The result is relatively cheap tooling and lots of open source. See More

Top Con

Too easy to write multithreading apps that are buggy

Many web frameworks or GUI libraries will push novice users to writing multithreaded code, which leads to frustrating race condition bugs. Other languages with multithreading push users towards safe constructs, like passing messages and immutable or synchronized containers. But in C# the data structures aren't synchronized by default, and it's too easy to just set a field and observe the result from another thread (until you compile with Release, and now you have a heisenbug). See More

Top Pro

Awesome IDE for cross-platform development

Visual studio has embraced cross platform development over the past 3 years. With Visual Studio Code, you now have a light, and quick IDE variant available for free as well. See More

Top Con

Some advanced language features feel tacked-on

Asynchronicity, parallelism, functional/lambda syntax, and some AOP features feel as though they break into a completely different language. See More

Top Pro

Supported on many platforms

C# can be used for Windows apps, Linux apps, OS X apps, Windows 8 "modern" apps, websites, games, iPhone apps, Android apps, Windows Phone apps, and more. If you want to create a cross-platform application, you can share most of the code and write one GUI for each platform. See More

Top Con

Developer community is considered to be underskilled

This reputation similarly plagues the PHP community, and like that community, it is partly deserved. C# and its corresponding development stack is easy to use illicitly, which means barrier to entry is very low for developers. Combined with easily-accessible documentation and helpful community, it is possible to create a full C# application that the developer doesn't understand, by following tutorials. While there are industry luminaries that are primarily C# developers (Jon Skeet, for instance), there are far more low-skilled workers in C# than in many other languages. Low-skilled developers are not generally drawn toward Lua or Haskell, they are drawn towards lucrative contracts that dictate the language to be used. One of those languages is C#. See More

Top Pro

Very high demand in the industry

C#'s been around for just the right amount of time, is regularly updated with useful additions, is versatile, easy to write & read, & has excellent tooling support. This means it is a top choice for many organisations & will remain so for the foreseeable future. See More

Top Pro

.NET truly universal

With .NET core it is a truly universal programming language which support desktop apps (Windows), Mobile apps (Xamarin), Web Apps (ASP.Core MVC). Also is perfectly fit to serverless programming for micro services. Soon it will be also support Web assembly (Blazor). See More

Top Pro

Supports some functional features

C# is primarily object-oriented, but it also supports some features typically found in functional languages such as lambdas, delegates and anonymous classes. Methods can be treated like any other object, and the Linq query system operates on monads with lazy evaluation (though it hides this with a lot of syntactic sugar). You don't need to use these features to code in C#, though, so you can start with OOP and then learn about them. See More

Top Pro

.NET is a great toolbox

C# runs on top of the .NET framework, which provides many libraries containing classes used for common tasks such as connecting to the Internet, displaying a window or editing files. Unlike many other languages, you don't have to pick between a handful of libraries for every small task you want to do. See More

Top Pro

Awesome IDE for Windows

On Windows, Visual Studio is the recommended C# IDE. It provides a very flexible GUI that you can rearrange the way you want and many useful features such as refactorings (rename a variable, extract some code into a method, ...) and code formatting (you can pick exactly how you want the code to be formatted). Visual Studio also highlights your errors when you compile, making your debug sessions more efficient since you don't have to run the code to see the mistakes. There's also a powerful debugger that allows you to execute the code step-by-step and even change what part of the code will be executed next. In addition to giving you all the line-by-line information you'll need in a hassle-free manner, Visual Studio has stuff you can click on in the errors window that will take you to the documentation for that error, saving you several minutes of web searching. In addition to all of this, Visual Studio has an intuitive, intelligent, and helpful graphical user interface designer that generates code for you (the best of WYSIWYG, in my opinion), which is helpful for new programmers. Being able to create a fantastic-looking UI with one's mouse and then optionally tweak with code helps make programming fun for beginner developers. Visual Studio also has the best code completion --Intellisense is every bit as intelligent as the name says it is. It, as well as VS's parameter hinting, is context-, type-, user-, and position-sensitive, and displays relevant completions in a perfectly convenient yet understandable order. This feature allows a new programmer to answer the questions "What does this do?" and "How do I use it?" right then and there rather than having to switch to a browser to read through extensive documentation. This allows the programmer to satisfy their curiosity before it is snuffed out by several minutes of struggling through exhaustive documentation. And for the more adventurous and text-ready developer, Microsoft does the best job of ensuring that everything, from interfaces and wildcard types down to Console.WriteLine("") and the + operator, is well-documented and easy to understand, with relevant and well-explained usage examples that manage to be bite-size yet complete, simple yet truly helpful. The reference site is easy to navigate, well-organized, clean and uncluttered, up-to-date, and fresh and enjoyable to look at, and every page is well-written with consideration for readers who are not C# experts yet want to read about changing the console background color. The best part? It's free! Visual C# Express contains all of the features described above, at zero cost. If you are a student, you can probably get Visual Studio Professional from your university, which also includes tools for unit testing and supports plugins. See More

Top Pro

Can mix high and low level programming

You can code at the high level without worrying about pointers and memory management, but if you so choose you can switch to lower level programming with direct memory management and pointer manipulation (though you need to compile to specifically allow this). See More

Top Pro

With ASP CORE a good language to learn

With CORE you are no longer just limited to Windows, so a language worth learning. See More

Top Pro

Incredibly Well-Engineered Language

Where other languages invoke the feeling of being a product of organic growth over time, C# just feels like an incredibly well-designed language where everything has its purpose and almost nothing is non-essential. See More

Top Pro

Great introduction to object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is the most widely-used paradigm. C# offers support for common OOP features such as classes, methods and fields, plus some features not found in competing languages like properties, events and static classes. C# code is much more readable thanks to the syntactic sugar it offers. You can truly concentrate on your code, not on the way it's implemented. See More

Top Pro

Great language for Unity game engine

Unity provides a selection of programming languages depending on preference or knowledge - C#, JS, Boo and UnityScript. C# is arguably the most powerful with better syntax and stronger language structure. It allows using script files without attaching them to any game object (classes, methods inside unattached scripts that can be used at any time). There are more tutorials and information for C# than UnityScript and Visual Studio can be used to code for unity in C#. Additionally, learning C# allows using it outside of Unity as well unlike UnityScript. See More

Top Pro

Best language for Windows programs

C# is clearly the best choice for Windows programs. The .NET framework contains everything you need to build great-looking apps, without having to learn the confusing Win32 API or download a ton of external libraries. C# can also be used to build Windows 8's "modern" apps. See More

See All

score 87 · Answer 8

Java

Top Pro

Mature ecosystem

Tools for every aspect of programmer's life are already implemented and implemented well - IDEs, build tools, deployment, testing, integration etc. See More

Top Con

Lacks modern features

Java evolves very slowly - lambda expressions weren't available until Java 8 (which is not available on Android), and despite getters/setters being a long-time convention, the language still doesn't have native accessor syntax (a la C#'s properties). It's unlikely newer, popular features like list comprehensions or disjoint union types will be available anytime soon. While not strictly required for novice programmers, these make problems more complicated and tedious than they need to be - for example, when a simple local function would do, (portable : before 1.8) Java demands anonymous inner classes, an interface and a class, or worse, no abstraction at all. See More

Hamdi Chehdi's Experience

i am a software developer with 5 years experience i don't recommend for many reasons : bad performance lack for good free IDE google decided to replace it in android by kotlin See More

Specs

Current stable version:10

Site:https://www.java.com

Price:Open source (free)

Top Pro

Most commonly used language in industry

Java is one of the most popular languages in industry, consistently ranking either first, or occasionally second (behind C or Javascript) in terms of usage. Polls (see sources below) show it to be consistently in high demand, particularly as measured by job board postings. This makes Java a great time investment, as you will be easily able to get a job utilizing your skills, particularly as those Java applications in production now will continue to need maintenance in the future. It also results in great support for tools and plenty of computer science books, example projects and online tutorials. See More

Top Con

Enforces some misguided principles

Java utilizes principles that organize code into "classes" as the central concept, instead of more familiar organizational methods. See More

Sajjad Ranjbar's Experience

Java Developer, Backend Developer using Spring framework See More

Top Pro

Reliable

One of the worlds most used programming language is for sure the one most used for critical missions, especially in a financial area, e.g; banks. See More

Top Con

Half-baked generics

Type erasure means it doesn't even exist at runtime. The whole generics system is confusing for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Modern yet always backwards-compatible

With Java 8 the language is far more modern, yet maintains amazing compatibility to Java 1.0 See More

Top Con

Slow and heavy

Too far from the machine hardware. See More

Top Pro

Ridiculously robust

This language may have its issues (mainly with verbosity), but it takes portability seriously and companies like Netflix and Spotify rely on them for their backend systems. See More

Top Con

Locks you into the static OOP mindset

Top Pro

Massive amount of libraries and APIs

Java has been around for such a long time that there have been tens of thousands of APIs and libraries written for almost anything you want to do. See More

Top Con

Verbosity

Java is far too verbose. See More

Top Pro

Consistent programming standards

Most Java code follows very standardized coding styles. This means that when you're starting out, there are fewer questions about how you should implement something as the programming styles and patterns are well established and consistent. This consistent style means that it's often easier to follow others' example code, and that it's more likely to meet at least a certain minimum standard of quality. This discipline with consistent stylistic standards also becomes useful later, when collaborating on projects with larger teams. See More

Top Con

Long learning curve

Top Pro

Fantastic IDEs

Because Java is statically typed, integrated development environments (IDEs) for Java can provide a lot more feedback on errors you will encounter. Java IDEs can give you specific errors in the location where they occur without having to run the code every time. This makes is faster to debug and learn from your mistakes. IDEs also have extensive auto complete capabilities that can help you learn the programming libraries you are using faster and tell you what functions are available. See More

Top Con

JVM is too biased towards traditional OOD paradigm

JVM needs to handle things like tail call optimization, dynamic type inference and other features we get out-of-the-box with languages like Haskell and Erlang. Otherwise it imposes a low ceiling on the potential of Scala or being able to adopt a true functional programming paradigm in Java. See More

Top Pro

Amazingly performant

Thanks to modern JIT's and strict architecture the JVM has no real performance penalties. Primitive types are often derided by language purists but when it comes to sheer low level performance they allow Java to deliver and even exceed native performance. See More

Top Con

Too much hype and useless complication

Java is one of the best designed languages in the last 30+ years. However, starting with version 6, the number of really useful features in each release has steadily decreased. There is now too much marketing in Java's evolution and too few concerns about developers' needs (the functionalities of the applications they develop haven't changed and enterprise application architecture is much simpler than 20 years ago). It's deeply sad to say that today, learning Python is a much wiser choice. See More

Top Pro

Platform Independent

Because of the Java Virtual Machine, the Java programming language is supported wherever a JVM is installed. See More

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

Top Pro

You know what you do, and still simple

Because everything is typed and there is no silent cast or fail, you exactly know what you are manipulating, and there's no magic. Have you ever watched a beginner struggling with a "couldn't call method x on y" in python or Javascript? These languages don't teach you what proper types are. Java is one of the simplest languages to learn these basic concepts you find in every programming language. See More

Top Con

Worst-of-both-worlds static type system

It's just barely good enough to make decent IDEs, but it's not at the level of Idris or even Haskell. For large enterprise projects, the IDE support is important, but the static typing in Java just gets in the way for the smaller projects beginners would start with. Python is duck typed and this makes small programs easy to develop quickly, but the price is that you have to write unit tests to avoid breaking larger programs. In contrast, you can be reasonably certain that a program that actually compiles in Idris does what you want, because assertions are built into the powerful type system. Java can't make that claim and still requires unit tests. Java has the worst of both worlds because of its poor static type system. See More

Top Pro

checked exception

This unique feature is controversial but it guarantees the developer that he has not forgotten to handle an exception. Also avoids accidentally breaking the Liskov's principle by redefining a method in a subclass by adding an exception. See More

Top Con

Checked exceptions

Checked exceptions add significantly to the cognitive load of the beginner. The more rules unrelated to the actual task that you pile onto the beginner, the slower he gets. Exponentially. And for what? Sure, they look good on paper, but checked exceptions are useless in the real world. They don't scale. When you're calling APIs five levels deep and your method's throws clause balloons to 80 exceptions you might see, it gets kind of ridiculous. So you just say throws Exception, which defeats the whole feature, but is more pointless boilerplate in an already tediously verbose language. Or worse, while developing you can't be bothered and just catch{} and silently swallow them all. Then you forget about it. Now you don't even have exceptions. The cure is worse than the disease! So the wiser Java programmers will wrap all checked exceptions into a runtime exception, effectively making exceptions unchecked. That's at the cost of more boilerplate, but it's the lesser of evils. Unfortunately, Java doesn't even have macros to do this part for you. Maybe your IDE can write code templates for you, but that doesn't make it any easier to read. See More

Top Pro

Introduces you to object oriented languages

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is a paradigm that teaches you to split your problem into simpler modules with few connections between them; it's the most common paradigm used in industry. Java is the best choice as an introduction to object oriented languages because, as a statically-typed OOP-only language, it very clearly highlights core OOP principles such as encapsulation, access control, data abstraction, and inheritance. While a scripting language provides more flexibility and terseness, learning a scripting language first would not instill these fundamental concepts as well, as they tend to obscure details such as how types work, and are less encouraging of an object oriented style. See More

Top Con

Static typing but no type inference

The type system gets in your way more than it helps. Heavy IDE support is absolutely required for reasonable productivity. This means beginners have to learn not just the language, but eventually a complex, heavyweight IDE too. See More

Top Pro

Best introduction to "C style" languages

The Java syntax is very similar to other C style languages. Learning the fundamentals of Java will port over well to other languages so you can apply what you've leaned to other languages afterwards. See More

Top Con

Slow to adopt new features

The process of getting a new feature adopted is incredibly long and more difficult than it needs to be. See More

Top Con

Confusing mis-features

Some features in Java can be quite confusing for beginners. Encapsulation is needlessly obfuscated with a confusing access control model. As an example, the "protected" keyword not only grants access to child classes, but to the entire package. Since small programs are written as one package, it becomes functionally equivalent to "public". In OOP, everything is supposed to be an object, but, in Java, primitive types such as integers, booleans and characters are not, and must be handled as special cases. Java continues to lack many high-level features, and, particularly prior to Java 7, compensated by adding confusing Java-only features, such as anonymous subclasses. Some example code is unreadable without knowing a special-case feature, libraries differ in style based on when they were released or what platform they target(e.g., Android vs. Desktop), and some solutions just aren't available on some platforms. See More

Top Con

IDE configuration to use JAR library or configure new project

waste of time to configure new solution compared to another alternative See More

Top Con

Garbage collection may teach bad habits

Java is a garbage collected language and it does not force programmers to think about memory allocation and management for their programs. This is fine most of the time. However, it may cause some difficulties in adjusting to a non-GC language (such as C for example), where memory management needs to be done manually. But if good coding practices and habits are followed, this shouldn't be much of a problem. See More

See All

score 44 · Answer 9

Haskell

Top Con

Learning requires a higher initial investment than other languages

For programmers used to Procedural languages, Haskell is a switch from what they're used to. Couple this with jargon borrowed from abstract algebra and code described at a very high level of abstraction - there's no denying it's a bit intimidating. See More

Top Pro

Trustworthy code

Referential transparency and algebraic types mean that code, whether yours or someone elses', is verified to meet a minimum level of stability and compatibility that can't reasonably be guaranteed in procedural/OOP languages. This means less time searching for libraries and attempting to judge them by their test suite, coding style, and number of contributors, and similarly less of the same when trying to bring new programmers onto your project. See More

CuriousColopUUichkin's Experience

Development of ConZone web application. See More

Specs

Site:https://www.haskell.org/

Paradigm:functional

Type System:static

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

Haskell lends itself well to powerful abstractions - the result is that even basic, commonly used libraries, while easy to use, are implemened using a vocabularly that requires a lot of backround in abstract mathematics to understand. Even a concept as simple as "combine A and B" is often, both in code and in tutorials, described in terms of confusing and discouraging terms like "monad", "magma", "monoid", "groupoid", and "ring". This also occasionally bears its ugly head in the form of complicated error messages from type inference. See More

Top Pro

Safe Concurrency/Composable Transactions

Software Transactional Memory makes getting concurrency right tractable See More

Top Con

Intended as an example language to guide research. Not intended for real-world productivity

It's perfectly fine to learn it to expand your knowledge. But since the question asks real "server-side programming language", dynamic functional languages designed for production such as Elixir are much better. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight threads

Top Con

Too academic, hard to find "real world" code examples

Top Pro

Safer than just about anything else

With libraries like Opaleye, you can even get type-safe joins for your SQL, and frameworks like Servant can even make it a compile-time error to produce URLs that 404. See More

Top Con

Documentation for most packages is short and lacking

A few Haskell packages are well documented but this is the exception, not the rule. Most of the time a list of function signatures is what passes for documentation. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to machine code

Top Con

Low diversity of code in the ecosystem

Compared with more mainstream languages, See More

Top Pro

Can be used for front-end development, too

GHCJS allows normal Haskell code to be compiled to Javascript, and Reflex-Dom allows you to write fully-functional front-end code in Haskell in a Functional Reactive Programming style. See More

Top Con

Correctness over Stability

The community has, particularly as of late, opted to correct issues with the language and its core libraries, rather than maintain backwards compatibility. This could create issues for using Haskell in production, where it may not be practical to prioritize issues caused by these changes when they happen. See More

Top Pro

Correctness over Backwards Compatibility

The community has often opted to address issues such as Applicative not being a superclass of Monad, rather than maintaining backwards compatibility. This minimizes the need for developers to memorize or wrap APIs that are inconsistent for historical reasons, which are common issues for once-popular ecosystems and those that prioritize interoperability, and reduces biolerplate and edge cases in the long-term. See More

Top Con

Still some rough edges in the ecosystem

While the community is actively working on implementing changes, there are still a handful of nagging issues with the ecosystem. Error/Exception types are still not fully standardized, and Records are still a work-in-progress. Many libraries also still have yet to catch up with newer conventions the community has settled on. This will likely continue to be the case for a while, as the language itself is still moving quickly, with talk of possibly picking up features like linear or dependent types in the near future. See More

Top Pro

An active community known for its friendliness

Top Con

Lazily evaluated

Haskell's lazy evaluation implies a level of indirection - you're not passing a value, you're passing a thunk. This is often difficult to grasp not just for beginners, but for experienced programmers coming from strictly evaluated languages. This also means that, since for many, strict evaluation is their first instinct, initial expectations of a function's performance and complexity are often broken. See More

Top Pro

Works well with Nix

There's a lot of overlap between the Haskell and Nix communities, which means working with Haskell puts developers in a good position to take advantage of the benefits of NixOS and NixOps to save trouble on package management and deployment. See More

Top Pro

Open source

All Haskell implementations are completely free and open source. See More

Top Pro

Mathematical consistency

As Haskell lends itself exceedingly well to abstraction, and borrows heavily from the culture of pure mathematics, it means that a lot more code conforms to very high-level abstractions. You can expect code from vastly different libraries to follow the same rules, and to be incredibly self-consistent. It's not uncommon to find that a parser library works the same way as a string library, which works the same way as a window manager library. This often means that getting familiar and productive with new libraries is often much easier than in other languages. See More

Top Pro

Lazy Evaluation

Non-strict evaluation leads to modularity and allows recursion over infinite data structures without any syntactic overhead. Also it allows to use certain constructs only available in impure, mutable state, languages, without sacrificing referential transparency or purity. See More

Top Pro

Easy to read

Haskell is a very terse language, particularly due to its type inference. This means there's nothing to distract from the intent of the code, making it very readable. This is in sharp contrast to languages like Java, where skimming code requires learning which details can be ignored. Haskell's terseness also lends itself to very clear inline examples in textbooks, and makes it a pleasure to read through code even on a cellphone screen. See More

Top Pro

Also used as a research language

Haskell is often one of the first languages to get access to bleeding-edge tools, whether new language features or domain-specific tools like libraries for FRP, NLP, or CRDTs. See More

Top Pro

Powerful categorical abstractions

Makes categorical higher order abstractions easy to use and natural to the language. See More

Top Pro

Trivial parallelization

Top Pro

Functions curry automatically

Every function that expects more than one arguments is basically a function that returns a partially applied function. This is well-suited to function composition, elegance, and concision. See More

Top Pro

Hand-writeable concise syntax

Conciseness of Haskell lets us to write the expression on the whiteboard or paper and discuss with others easily. This is a strong benefit to learn FP over other languages. See More

Top Pro

Very few language constructs

The base language relies primarily on function application, with a very small amount of special-case syntax. Once you know the rules for function application, you know most of the language. See More

Top Pro

Forces you to learn pure functional programming

It is pure and does not mix other programming paradigms into the language. This forces you to learn functional programming in its most pure form. This avoids you falling back on old habits and learn an entirely new way to program. See More

Top Pro

Referentially transparent

Haskell's Purely Functional approach means that code is referentially transparent. This means that to read a function, one only needs to know its arguments. Code works the same way that expressions work in Algebra class. There's no need to read the whole source code to determine if there's some subtle reference to some mutable state, and no worries about someone writing a "getter" that also mutates the object it's called on. Functions are all directly testable in the REPL, and there's no need to remember to call methods in a certain order to properly initialize an object. No breakage of encapsulation, and no leaky abstractions. See More

Top Pro

Highly transferable concepts

Haskell's referential transparency, consistency, mathematics-oriented culture, and heavy amount of abstraction encourage problem solving at a very high level. The fact that this is all built upon little other than function application means that not only is the thought process, but even concrete solutions are very transferable to any other language. In fact, in Haskell, it's quite common for a solution to simply be written as an interpreter that can then generate code in some other language. Many other languages employ language-specific features, or work around a lack of features with heavy-handed design patterns that discourage abstraction, meaning that a lot of what is learned, and a lot of code that is needed to solve a particular problem just isn't very applicable to any other language's ecosystem. See More

Top Pro

Powerful Categorical Abstractions

Makes categorical higher order abstractions easy to use and natural to the language. See More

Top Pro

Easy syntax for people with a STEM degree

Since the basic syntax is very similar to mathematics, Haskell syntax should be easy for people who have taken higher math courses since they would be used to the symbols used in maths. See More

Top Pro

Popular in teaching

Haskell is really popular in universities and academia as a tool to teach programming. A lot of books for people who don't know programming are written around Haskell. This means that there are a lot of resources for beginners in programming with which to learn Haskell and functional programming concepts. See More

Top Pro

Quick feedback

It's often said that, in Haskell, if it compiles, it works. This short feedback loop can speed up learning process, by making it clear exactly when and where mistakes are made. See More

See All

What are the best server side programming languages?

30 Options Considered

Golang

My Recommendation for Golang

My Recommendation for Golang

Goroutines

Designed to make the programmer expendable

Compiles quickly

Doesn't have true enums

Powerful standard library

Does not have sum types

Easily scalable

Golang controlled by Google

Statically typed

Lot of error handling braces

All code gets standardized formatting

Forces K&R style and won't allow Allman style

Simplified C-like syntax that is as easy to read and write as Python

Easy to shadow variable

Intuitive concurrency

It appears Google uses position to snuff out or suppress other languages

Open source

Lacks support for immutable data

Interfaces

Too much boilerplates

Built-in testing framework

Performance slowdown because of indirect calls and garbage collection

Pragmatic minimalism

Very strange syntax

Great language for building networking services

Too simplistic

The go compiler compiles binaries instantly — as fast as a scripting language interpreter

Does not have the best concurrency model

Channels

Learning curve

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Go uses public memory to store processes

Backed by Google

Go's green threads are fatter than some of its competitors

Simple high level programming language

Heavy reliance on code generation

Unicode support

Implementation of interfaces are difficult to figure out

Automatically generates API documentation for installed packages

Supports functional programming techniques such as function literals.

Does OO without class-based OOP

Provides tools for automatically formatting code for your entire software project

Excellent dependency management

Syntax for exported code from a package is simplified to be less verbose than other languages

Performance is on the order of C and Java

You can get a job knowing Golang

Great getting started tutorials

Demonstrates a unique, simple concept to OOP and duck typing

Supports 'modules' in the form of packages

Multiple variables may be assigned on a single line

Great team working behind it

API documentation is rich in content; easy to memorize

Easy to install and configure; simple to compile software

Demonstrates a unique, simple concept to object-oriented programming

Simple infrastructure and tooling

Supports splitting source code into multiple files

NO Try/Catch statements

Programmers don't have to argue over what 10% subset of the language to implement in their software project

Backwards-compatibility - it's always safe to upgrade to the latest version 1 release

Discourages creating too many packages/modules

Elixir

My Recommendation for Elixir

My Recommendation for Elixir

Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP

Slow computational performance

Out of the box concurrency

Doesn't have wide adoption in industry

Scalability

Doesn't have wide adoption in industry

Code hot-reloads out of the box

Deployment is still not as easy as it should be

Supports functional programming

Some design choices may seem strange

Distributed concurrency system

Slow in IO operations