What is the best programming language to learn for backend developers?

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score 48 · Accepted Answer

Golang

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Top Pro

High level programming language

It makes it easy to learn and the learning curve is friendly for beginners. One can learn the main concepts and ignore unimportant details. While in low level programming languages, like C, one should spend a lot of time on low level details even when developing very basic (web) service. See More

Top Con

No user defined generics

This means that you can utilize strong typing only as long as you do not need a generic container like for example list. Only ways to deal with it is either code duplication or using interface{} which means that you lose strong typing. See More

Experience

Doug Sparling

Needed something for high traffic website where caching was of little benefit. (Hundreds of thousands of unique requests.) Go may not be the only solution, but I like the language and with Go’s high performance concurrency I got the performance I needed. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.9.2

GZipped size:16MB

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

What is the best programming language to learn for backend developers?

The Best 1 of 20 OptionsWhy?

Golang

My Recommendation for Golang

My Recommendation for Golang

High level programming language

No user defined generics

Doug Sparling

Great runtime performance

Default package manager doesn't allow versioning of libraries

Roman Scharkov

It is supported on all the mainline operating systems and supports cross-compilation

No GUI designer

RobustCottus

Green threads and channels built-in

Performance slowdown because of indirect calls and garbage collection

zou ying

The final package contains everything you need to run it

Default package manager doesn't allow multiple versions of the same package to be used at once

Elias Van Ootegem

Large community

Initial setup of working environment is non trivial

Dave Jensen

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

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Support of OOP and duck typing

Built-in unit testing

Simple infrastructure and tooling

Great language for building networking services

Provides tools for automatically formatting code for your entire software project

Supports packages properly

Strong static type system

Easy to install and configure; simple to compile software

High Performance & great concurrency support on constrained resources.The best fit for billed cloud resources

Performance is on the order of C and Java

Supports 'modules' in the form of packages.

Supports splitting source code into multiple files

Great team working behind it

Demonstrates a unique, simple concept to object-oriented programming.

Multiple variables may be assigned on a single line

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

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

API documentation is rich in content; easy to memorize

Automatically generates API documentation for installed packages

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

Multiple values can be returned from a function

Supports functional programming techniques such as function literals

19 Other Options Considered

Python

My Recommendation for Python

My Recommendation for Python

Easy to learn

Slower than alternative languages

Elias Van Ootegem

Lots of tutorials

Not type-safe

Hasnat Babur Raju

Cross-platform

Slow to run

Clear syntax

Hard to debug other people's code

Active and helpful community

Significant whitespace

Very similar to pseudo-code

Speed can matter

Lots of framework choices

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Comes with extensive libraries

Might not be very future-proof

Easy to get started

Language fragmentation

Can be used in many domains

Confused as to its puprose

Promotes beautiful code

Inelegant and messy language design

It's really simple

Does not teach you about data types

Good documentation

No delimiters, just indentation

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