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

Question

27

Options
Considered

614

User
Recs.

Mar 15, 2019

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 21 OptionsWhy?

Best programming language to learn for backend developers	Price	Current stable version	Price
90 Elixir	-	1.8.1	Open source (Free)
88 Rust	-	1.33.0	Free
84 Python	Free	3.7.2 and 2.7.15	-
79 Golang	Free	1.11.1 / October 1, 2018	-
-- Clojure	-	1.9	Free, Open Source

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20 Other Options Considered

Rust

Top Pro

Compiler prevents memory management and concurency mistakes

Top Con

Hard to find learning resources or libraries

Because it's still a relatively new language, Rust does not enjoy a following as large as other languages/environments. Rust development has also been rather volatile for a long time during the beginning of the development of the language adding to this issue. Because of the small community, it's harder to find useful libraries for projects or any other kind of resource. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.33.0

Price:Free

Site:rust-lang.org

License:MIT/Apache

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 new and untested

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

Asynchronous I/O is not (yet) a part of the core language

The issue of asynchronous I/O is still being discussed as a language feature, and not yet in the implementation phase. See the RFC on GitHub here. 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

Lifetimes can be tricky to learn

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 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 Pro

Lifetime semantics have benefits in other languages

When you are used to the lifetime semantics of Rust, you can easily use the knowledge to also better manage memory in other programming languages. 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

Built-in concurrency

Rust has built-in support for concurrency. 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 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 Pro

Zero-cost futures or Async IO

Top Pro

Most popular programming language 2017

Rust was the number one wanted programming lnguage in the 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. (See https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted) See More

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Python

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Python has simple to learn syntax which helps beginners to utilize this programming language and has support guide available. See More

Top Con

Slower than alternative languages

Compared to alternatives such as C++, C#, F#, Elixir/Erlang or Go, Python can be sluggish and is often not a good choice for applications where performance is a significant concern. See More

Elias Van Ootegem's Experience

I've tried my hand at python, and I have to say: I'm still baffled at its popularity. It's slow, the tooling isn't great, and the syntax is horrible (I know: "You'll get used to it", and "after a while, the significant whitespace becomes a plus"... spare me the cliches, it's not for me). For quick prototyping, I suppose Python allows you to get started quickly. It's well supported and a great number of people can write it. Those who can't, can at least read it. True, but the performance is pitiful. Because so many people write it, a lot of the code out in the wild really shouldn't exist. The documentation is painful to navigate, the dependency management tool is poor (I mean: PHP has a better tool in composer!). Most of the people who write Python use frameworks like Django, and don't really understand what it does under the bonnet... I've found myself explaining to Python devs why golang yields much better performance. I started off by saying that you don't need something like nginx for a start. Your binary is the server. They seemed confused by this concept. To use python on the back end means you have too much money to burn on CPU power and RAM. Same holds true for any interpreted language in fact. The pythonians (or whatever they call themselves) can say what they want about something not being very pythonic (or "unpythonic"). The fact remains: the language allows you to do things the wrong way. PHP gets a lot of hatred for allowing people to query a database in a template, and rightfully so. Why don't we hold Python to the same standards? PHP is often criticised because it has no real deprecation process. It just ships with one or more replacement modules next to the old one, then at some point it's announced the old module will start issuing E_DEPRECATED notices, and further down the line, the extension will be removed. That is indeed messy. But let's look at Python. How many places still rely on Python 2.x? Youtube (owned by google, who employed Guido Van Rossum, creator of Python) is one. some popular modules only support Python2. How long until the community makes the switch? It's been years now... The language itself feels messy. Passing through the implicit object variable self isn't a huge problem, but it makes it harder to distinguish between static and non-static methods. The "private method by convention" rule is a joke. Python, to me, feels more like a hackers tool. An alternative to the mess that is bash, and more readable than something like Perl. Given the choice, though, I'd rather write a production grade application in anything other than python. Python is a confused language. It doesn't quite know what niche to focus on: is it a language for the web? Django seems to think that it is. Is it for data analysis, machine learning, and science? Others claim that it is. Is it a scripting language that takes away the pain of writing portable Bash, or spending days wading through someone else's Perl scripts? Perhaps. Why not add GUI's to the mix while we're at it... oh, someone did (Pygame, PyGTK, ...). I wouldn't at all be surprised if one of these days we'll see a kickstarter to build a python machine like the good old lisp machines from the days of yesteryear. Some specific oddities about the language that really irked me: Only recently type-hints were added (just checked - about bloody time) No switch-case - a wide-spread construct. This issue is commonly mitigated using dictionaries. If you need a fallthrough case, God help you... Try-catch is again a well-established paradigm, but for some reason, python chose to replace the catch keyword with except. Grammatically, this doesn't even make sense. I read "Try X except Y" to mean: try doing X, except in case Y, implying an exception is checked before the try. I know I'm nit-picking here, but things like this really bug me. No bloody explicit interfaces. Without these interfaces, you have to rely on the hack that is the pass keyword. The pass keyword. I can declare a function, class, or start a block (if, else, except, ... whatever) and tell the interpreter to just not expect anything to be there... just skip it. Save for a few very rare cases, I don't see the point. Even in those rare cases, I'd argue most of those might actually indicate you're doing something wrong to begin with. Like using a language that doesn't have interfaces, for example. Pythonians will say python is strongly typed, and it is. Internally, however, everything is a PyObject. This enables Python to be dynamically typed, but for most use-cases for backend development, you know what types you're dealing with. A statically typed language, like it or not, is safer. Python values are typed, variables are not. I can reuse the same variable for different types. It should be obvious how this makes code more error prone as time goes on. The threading issues are bizarre. Depending on the implementation, you might have things like GIL to contend with. Either way, giving threads to inexperienced developers (like many python devs are) is like taking a group of toddlers on a trip, first to a brewery, then a distillery, to end up at a firing range. It's going to get messy. I mentioned it before, but the syntax... yuck. Significant whitespace is all well and good, but leaving blank lines to make code more airy is important. brackets make it more clear when a block ends (editors even highlight the closing bracket for that reason). No such luck for python devs. See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.7.2 and 2.7.15

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

GZipped size:22.5MB

Language type:Interpreted

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

Not type-safe

For back-end system development, strong static type checking is extremely important. Without strong static type checking, errors that could have been detected at compile time won't show up until run time, which could have disastrous consequences. 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

Slow to run

Check for example the first result from Google: https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/python.html 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

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 slower than Java. 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

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

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

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

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

Language fragmentation

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

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

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

It's really simple

It's very simple for understanding how programming works. 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

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

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

Lots of framework choices

Has many frameworks like flask, django, pyramid, etc 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

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

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

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

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

Promotes beautiful code

You are basically put in a situation where you have to write beautiful code, because of the indentation rules. 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

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

No delimiters, just indentation

If you forget to indent your code, it will not work properly. Also you can't see the end of the command (";") or the end of the scope ("{" and "}"). This can prove itself very inconvenient for both beginners and experienced programmers. See More

Top Pro

Supports multiple databases

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

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

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

Top Pro

Language of choice for hobbyists

Hackers projects based on platforms like the RaspberryPi almost unanimously use Python. Editors like (neo)Vim allow you to write plugins in Python... you can easily build/extend something if you know how to write this language. See More

Top Con

Confused as to its puprose

Python is used for 1001 different tasks. As a result, the language lacks a clear direction. It seems to be loved by system administrators (because they are done with the mess that is Perl, or Bash). At the same time, a lot of people seem to really love Django. Scientists use Python because it's easy to learn. It seems to have established itself in other fields to do with big data and experimental stuff like machine learning to some extent. The result is a language that feels confused and more of a collection of hackers tools than a purpose-built, razor sharp tool waiting for an expert pair of hands 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 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 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 Pro

Automatically optimized C code

Django specifically uses Cython to turn python code to C code that is super fast. Though python on its own is slow, with cython fast. 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 Pro

Import Turtle

Do something visually interesting in minutes by using the turtle standard library package. https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/turtle.html 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 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 Pro

Has features of both high and low level language

It is somewhere between C and Java. See More

Top Pro

Multiparadigm language

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

See All

Golang

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

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

Doug Sparling's Experience

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:1.11.1 / October 1, 2018

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

GZipped size:21,1 MB

Paradigm:Multi-paradigm: procedural, object-oriented, concurrent

See All Specs

Top Con

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

Default package manager fetch all packages to $GOPATH and use them across all projects which mean that 2 projects cannot use different versions of the same package. However 3rd party solutions exists. This has been solved with the dep tool and semver. See More

Top Pro

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

You can compile an executable for linux, windows, OSX, FreeBSD, NetBSD etc. You can easily cross-compile accross platforms. See More

Roman Scharkov's Experience

Go provides a very simple mental modal to solve a relatively complex computer programming problem, that is concurrency. Goroutines make asynchronous, non-blocking and highly concurrent code much easier to write and read. Unlike in many other languages running on top of an event loop, like JavaScript for example, where you have to write non-blocking async code properly to not shoot yourself in the foot blocking the single execution thread - in Go writing blocking synchronous code is just fine, because the builtin goroutine scheduler will automagically swap any blocked goroutine for another to not waste any CPU time. What makes goroutines special, is that they are very leightweight compared to regular OS threads we know from Java or C++ and similar, you can spawn millions of them and Go's scheduler will use up all available CPU cores to run as many of them at once as possible. The Go compiler compiles the source code into final machine code which is executed directly by the CPU bypassing any interpreters and virtual machines eliminating the runtime costs of such abstractions as well as any runtime dependencies. Although the compiler isn't probably as smart as a regular modern C or C++ compiler yet, it's compile times are very low and the generated machine code is very efficient making Go blazingly fast, almost as fast as C/C++ (not quite, but still). The built-in concurrent mark-and-sweep garbage collector has it's tradeoffs (like any another GC) but is optimized for latency to minimize stop-the-world delays and does it's job pretty well. The compiler also tries to optimize memory efficiency by trying to allocate as much on the stack (which is also special in Go, but that's a whole other topic) as possible through escape analysis and similar techniques. Besides that, Go offers a strong static type system, supports reflection and encourages duck typing, interfaces instead of classes and composition instead of inheritance. The language grammar is very simple, it makes working in a team of people with different levels of skill a piece of cake. Go has basic support for generics. The builtin map, array and slice containers are fully generic. Documentation is built into the language. Source code comments are automatically transformed into documentation. godoc.org constantly scans for Go repositories and generates public documentation for them on-the-fly. Modular design is achieved through packages, every folder represents a package containing exported and unexported functions, types , constants and singleton variables. All that together with a rich standard library and a high quality toolset make Go a simple, elegant and highly efficient platform for application and systems development. 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

Great runtime performance

GoLang is compiled language, so it is expected to run faster than interpreted language. GoLang programs may run as fast as ones written in Java. It is just a matter of time when GoLang compiler will beat Java and will compete with C/C++. See More

Elias Van Ootegem's Experience

As Backend is growing more and more towards containerised micro-services, Golang definitely has got a bright future ahead of it. Having a clean, simple language with the X-platform portability of "ye olde C", and the design team that is focussing the development with networking in mind just makes sense. Your code compiles down to a single binary, that you just drop in a scratch container as your entry point, and job done! That's not to even mention the toolchain. For a language that isn't that old, its toolchain feels very solid, and full-featured. There's go-metalinter to lint-check your code, there's the built-in testing (go test), formatting (gofmt), race detection during testing and/or compilation, profiling, ... it's all ready to be used through a handful of binaries. Java has been around for over 2 decades, and still they haven't settled on a single build tool (maven, gradle, ivy, ...). No language is perfect, but to me, Go strikes a nice balance between cleanliness, not adding bloat (e.g. No classes, but you do have interfaces). Some things take some getting used to, and you might end up abusing them at first (errors as return values, the empty interface type, and race conditions aren't always easy to spot if you're not used to reading go code) See More

Top Con

Hard to abstract even the simplest notions

Go is famously regarded as very simple. However, this simplicity becomes problematic in time. Programmers who use Go find themselves over and over again writing the same thing from a very low point of view. Domains not already served by libraries that are easy to glue are very difficult to get into. See More

Top Pro

Green threads and channels built-in

The system can easily support tens of thousands (user-space) threads, which can communicate and being synchronized using channels. This makes it easy to design a system consuming multiple cores (and being scalable) or making asynchronous I/O. Scalability and asynchronous processing are very important property of systems. Simplicity of working with threads and channels is very important for beginners. See More

RobustCottus's Experience

Go speed and simple c-like syntax makes it a good fit for our production. 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

The final package contains everything you need to run it

Everything is contained in the executable. Is like you do static linking in C. That means you no longer need to provide external libraries. This also simplifies the installers (if you need them at all). See More

zou ying's Experience

Support multiple cores naturally. Highlight feature of goroutine(corroutine), channel. Wonderful golang ecosystem. 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

Top Pro

Large community

The community is large enough at this point that there are plenty of resources on the web for learning, asking questions, and interacting with many other Gophers. See More

Dave Jensen's Experience

Early on in our project we moved from Node.js to Golang. The big concern was that we were losing our expertise in Javascript for something new. After a few weeks on go those conerns went away. The simplicity of the language and the culture of writing simple code hooked us almost instantly. As already experienced programmers we went from beginners to power users overnight (but we're not experts, yet). 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

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. See More

Top Con

Expects prior familiarity with tooling, "advanced" OS use

A standard step of even installing Go is modifying your path -- a person who's encountering their first language might not even understand. It's hard to escape using Go without familiarity with using build tools, managing and organizing project directories, etc. It's not as simple as Python's "just run the .py file with the interpreter." See More

Top Pro

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Goroutines are "lightweight threads" that runs on OS threads. They provide a simple way for concurrent operations — prepending a function with go will execute it concurrently. It utilizes channels for communication between goroutines which aids to prevent races and makes synchronizing execution effortless across goroutines. The maximum number of OS threads goroutines can run on may be defined at compile time with the GOMAXPROCS variable. See More

Top Con

No forms designer

I'm probably an old fart, but being a long time Visual Studio developer, I'm used to the luxury of having a forms designer for rapid development. See More

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

Requires specific directory structure and environment variable settings

Too much knowledge required for a first programming language. 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 Con

Does not support circular dependencies

Top Pro

Built-in unit testing

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

Weak type system

Top Pro

Simple infrastructure and tooling

Someone may even claim it has too primitive approach, but in reality, when building complex systems, having very well understood infrastructure and tools have a great advantage. For beginners it is even more important that one needs to spend minimum time for learning how to compile and build your first server in GoLang. See More

Top Pro

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support of OOP and duck typing

Interface based polymorphism and structural compatibility of interfaces make it easy to extend the system/application, to reuse the code and to refactor. Basically, it allows to build less coupled architecture. The OOP support is very simple comparing to other OOP languages like Java/C++. It is relatively easy to understand and it almost does not have surprises. OOP in GoLang is a combination of two clear concepts: structs and interfaces. Structs can be just composed, while interfaces defines behavior. It is not only very simple approach but actually very right implementation of polymorphism. In other languages it will take a lot of time to a beginner not only to learn OOP support but also (what is even more important) to learn how to use it and when not to use it. GoLang encourage to use OOP in more right way. Having the minimal and clear concept of OOP, it also makes it very powerful tool of creating abstraction, sometime it is even more powerful than in C++/Java. 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

Supports packages properly

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). No surprises -- easy to learn and to develop. 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

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

Programmers don't have to argue over what 10% subet 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

Strong static type system

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 not only for a beginner but for any experienced developer as well. 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. 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

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 Pro

Multiple values can be returned from a function

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

See All

Clojure

Top Pro

Compiles to Javascript

Top Con

Requires the JVM

InterestingAm-heh's Experience

Truly the best general-purpose language, it has great language design and all the functionality you could wish for with back-end development. For free you get front-end thrown in too, thanks to Clojurescript an d Garden CSS. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.9

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:www.clojure.org

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

See All Specs

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

Lack of static type safety

Problems that could have been easily detected at compile time show up a run-time, which is terrible for back-end development. See More

Top Pro

Can use all the libraries from the huge JVM ecosystem

You can easily import Java libraries and use them in your program. See More

Top Pro

Easy concurrency

Uses channels and STM (Software Transactional Memory). That means you no longer need to fear all the locks and deadlocks from the standard concurrency model. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity

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 Pro

Immutability is the default

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 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 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

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 Pro

No C/Java syntax

This is refreshing. 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

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

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

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

See All

Java

Top Con

Can be hard to choose right stack (frameworks) for beginner

Top Pro

Lots of libraries

Abioye Bankole's Experience

I have used Java for more than 18 years and its concept of object-oriented programming makes code management a worthwhile activity. See More

Specs

Current stable version:10

Price:Open source (free)

Site:https://www.java.com

Top Con

Bloated

For the sake of your code's correctness, you had better write (or have your IDE generate) getters and setters for data fields you expose. And for the sake of safety you should definitely add null-assertions to all non-null method parameters. You also have to catch or rethrow/redeclare all checked exceptions. This, among other things, makes the average Java code extremely bloated and difficult to read. See More

Top Pro

Lots of well paid job opportunities

Santosh chaudhary's Experience

Java is the future. See More

Top Con

A bit overkill for smaller projects and junior developers

Top Pro

Mature corporate multi-platform language

Top Con

Slow to evolve

Java, which is probably the industry's biggest language and platform, is notorious for being slow to evolve. Many useful features, concepts and ideas that the majority of the languages out there have already used for years, are yet to be implemented (or even considered) in Java. Language features which could boost productivity, safety, and overall quality and have proven to do so, are not coming to the next version of Java (probably not the next after that either). 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

Too verbose

A Hello world needs package, class, static method and the actual printf. Reading a line from input requires instatiating 5 objects in the right order. Exceptions are everywhere, particularly since all values are nullable. Java has a getter/setter culture, but without native syntax support. portable Java code lacks anonymous functions, and continues to lack good support for partial application, compensating instead with verbose design patterns, kludges like anonymous inner classes, or just inline code. It is statically typed without type inference, with a culture that promotes long class names. Poor support for sum-types and pattern matching leads to overuse of inheritance for dynamic dispatch and chains of nested conditionals Especially for beginners, this can make reading Java code feel overwhelming; most Java courses tell students to simply copy, paste, and ignore a significant percentage of the code until they've learned enough to understand what it means. For experienced programmers, this makes Java feel tedious, especially without an IDE, and actively discourages some solutions and some forms of abstraction. See More

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

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

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

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

Standard-based programming

It's good to have standards for the many tasks needed to do in the web, this makes it easier for you to swap a library without changing much in your code. 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

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

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

Top Pro

Documentation is excellent

Top Con

Locks you into the static OOP mindset

Top Pro

Best virtual machine

Proven, highly tuned and high performance multiplatform JVM. 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) Java demands anonymous inner classes, an interface and a class, or worse, no abstraction at all. See More

Top Pro

Strong typed language with an excellent compiler

You always know that if it compiled then you won't have big surprises when running 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 Pro

Huge community

Top Con

No top-level functions

Sometimes the appropriate abstraction is just a function. In Java everything happens within a class. If all you want is simply a function, then you first need a class. This class should act as a container or a namespace for your function. Therefore it should not be instantiated, so you should make it final and its constructor private. Maybe make the constructor throw an exception for good measure. Within this class you can declare your function as a static method. Now, the class we declared (usually referred to as a utility class or a helper class) can hardly be considered a class anymore. There is no way to make an object out of it and it exists merely to act as a namespace for your function(s). See More

Top Pro

Pushes you to use pattern-oriented approaches

Just by looking at the language's source code you can learn a lot and get good ideas as to how to develop your own approaches "the good way". 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 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 Pro

You know what you do, and still simple

Because everything is typed and there is no silent cast or fail, you know exactly 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 Pro

Novel ideas

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

See All

OCaml

Top Pro

Encourages functional style

It steers you towards a functional style, but doesn't bother you with purity and "monads everywhere" like other languages, such as Haskell. See More

Specs

Current stable version:4.0.7

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:http://ocaml.org

License:LGPL version 2.1

See All Specs

Top Pro

Code reuse when compiled to JavaScript

You can use Bucklescirpt/ReasonML/Js_of_ocaml to use the same code for backend and frontend. See More

Top Pro

Unikernel deployment

https://mirage.io/ can compile your app to a ready-to-deploy VM. See More

Top Pro

Sophisticated and easy-to-use package manager

OPAM is a package manager for OCaml, which is really easy to use, just like npm. It creates a .opam folder in home directory. The documentation is great as well, and you can switch between multiple versions of OCaml for each project. You can also package your project and publish it on OPAM repositories, even if the dependencies do not exists on OPAM. See More

Top Pro

Strong editor integration

The merlin editor tool provides all you need to develop OCaml in your favourite editor. See More

Top Pro

Stable syntax

The syntax is consistent, some syntaxic sugar but at a reasonable level, so reading code of others isn't too much confusing. See More

Top Pro

One of the best for writing compilers

OCaml is compiled to native binary, so it's amazingly fast. Being a member of ML-family languages, it has expressive syntax for trees, and has great LLVM support. See More

Top Pro

Actively-developed functional programming language at the forefront of research

Functional programming is based on the lambda calculus. OCaml is in its functional parts almost pure lambda calculus, in a very practical manner: useful for many daily programming tasks. The acitve development makes improvements to the type system like generalized algebraic data types (GADT) or polymorphic variants, so when learning this language you get at once a down to earth usable compiler and advanced abstraction features. See More

See All

Haskell

Top Pro

Safe

The strong type system makes Haskell a safe language to use See More

Top Con

Package manager is unstable & lacking features

Cabal (There are other choices but this is the most popular) can not uninstall a package. Also working at a few locations it is difficult to have the same environment for each one be the same. See More

hadruki's Experience

Yes, the learning curve is steep but the learning material is of high(er) quality (compared to more popular languages where you have to filter out more rubbish). See More

Specs

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

Paradigm:functional

Type System:static

Top Pro

High level

Haskell is a very high level language, having tons of abstractions out of the box, making it perfect for backend development. See More

Top Con

Language Extensions lead to unfamiliar code

Haskell's language extensions, while making the language incredibly flexible for experienced users, makes a lot of code incredibly unfamiliar for beginners. Some pragmas, like NoMonomorphismRestriction, have effects that seem completely transparent in code, leading beginners to wonder why it's there. Others, like ViewPatterns, and particularly TemplateHaskell, create completely new syntax rules that render code incomprehensible to beginners expecting vanilla function application. See More

Top Pro

Purely functional

Being purely functional, there are no side effects in Haskell. As such it is easier to reason about an application written in Haskell. See More

Top Con

Requires a shift in thinking

If you are coming from an imperative background with little to no experience with functional programming, using Haskell may require some effort in shifting the way you think and reason about software. See More

Top Pro

Very fast

Most web frameworks and servers for Haskell are way faster than even the fastest interpreted languages, such as Node.js. See More

Top Con

Symbols everywhere

Haskell allows users to define their own infix operators, even with their own precedence. The result is that some code is filled with foreign looking operators that are assumed to be special-case syntax. Even for programmers who know they're just functions, operators that change infix precedence can potentially break expectations of how an expression is evaluated, if not used with care. 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 Con

Performance

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

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

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

Top Pro

Powerful Categorical Abstractions

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

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

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. You avoid falling back on old habits and learn an entirely new way to program. See More

See All

JavaScript

Top Pro

Rich module ecosystem

The npm client is bundled with node.js. It allows developers to quickly install ready-made modules, which vary from utility functions to complete blogging platforms. See More

Top Con

Not suitable for complex computations

Heavy calculations and big data processing kills JavaSript's speed and server availability. It is perfect for building real-time apps with high number of connections, though, as well as for regular apps which don't require complex data processing. See More

Specs

Engine:V8/ChakraCore

Author:Ryan Dahl/Joyent

Version(LTS):8.x

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

See All Specs

Top Pro

Large community base

Even though server side JS has not been around for long, it has a very large group of users using it and thus you will be able to get help easily. See More

Top Con

Difficult to find the real cause of an error

Top Pro

A very popular newcomer

With Node.js becoming a popular used runtime environment for developing a diverse variety of server tools and applications JavaScript as it's underlying language becomes more popular too. See More

Top Con

Churning ecosystem

New JavaScript packages are common, and the most popular setp can change very quickly. What a beginner learns now is likely to be out of date very quickly. See More

Top Pro

Great tools for development

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

C-like syntax

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

Top Con

Easy to fall into bad manners and bad mind structure

It wouldn't consolidate a good mind structure for moving to other languages. Too open. 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 Con

Very confusing to read

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

Array-like objects

Many cases when you should get an Array, you just get an Array-like object instead and none of the Array methods work on it. 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 Con

Lack of static type safety

JavaScript simply lacks the static type checking that is necessary to build reliable and high performance systems. Problems that could have been easily detected at compile time show up a run-time, which is terrible for back-end development. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful syntax

JS itself is a multi-paradigm language that gives you an ability to use functional, object-oriented programming, etc. The syntax isn't strict with punctuation; it may look like a C language or python-ish. Latest versions of language are filled with syntax sugar, borrowed from best programming practices from different languages. See More

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

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

Does not teach you about data types

Since JavaScript is a weakly 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 strongly or statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Extremely popular

JavaScript usually tops the lists for most popular languages in use today and rightly so. It's used almost everywhere and it's in high demand, making it very easy to find a job for anyone who knows JavaScript. This helps make it desirable for a first language, as it will often be used in the future. 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

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 Con

Each browser has its own quirks when executing the same code in some cases, requiring to use "babel" to make the code compatible.

Beginner programmers often make the mistake of coding something, seeing it works in the browser they tested it in, and then scratching their heads when it doesn't work in another browser. Ideally you'd want a language that works consistently across all platforms in order to be able to focus more on the programming and less on the underlying environment. It just takes time away from learning and forces you to spend time figuring out why this worked in browser X but not browser Y unless you transcompile your code using "babel" to target all the platforms you want to be compatible with. 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

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

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

Many tutorials, code, and resources, are structured for older ES5 code

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 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

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

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

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 Con

The `null` and `undefined` objects aren't really objects

Therefore, attempts to call methods on them will fail. This is especially frustrating since these are often returned instead of throwing exceptions. So a failure may appear far away from the actual cause, which makes bugs very hard to find. 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 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

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 substantial programs and learn more practical programming principles faster. See More

Top Con

Asynchronous coding is not easy for beginners

JavaScript can work synchronously but its current use is mainly around asynchronous instructions, and it's surely not a good way to start learning programming. 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

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

Top Pro

Concise

JS code is usually quite small compared to other languages, especially with ES6 syntax. See More

Top Con

Weird type coercions

'5' - 1 == 4, but '5' + 1 == 51. There are other examples that make even less sense. See More

Top Con

Easy to accidentally use globals

If you forget a var or new, you can clobber the global scope. For tiny scripts (JavaScript's original use case) globals are great, but for larger applications globals are generally regarded as a Bad Thing. This is because changes to one small part of a program can randomly break things anywhere else. These kinds of bugs are notoriously hard to find. 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

See All

Pharo

Top Pro

Remote debugging

Top Con

Small community

But they are very friendly and supportive. Best help comes through the mailing lists so not always easily googlable. There is also a Slack community where help is nearly instantaneous. See More

Hesham ELMAHDY's Experience

The most productive programming language ever made See More

Specs

Price:Free / Open Source

Site:http://pharo.org

Platforms:MacOSX; Linux; Windows

License:MIT

See All Specs

Top Pro

Very friendly and helpful community

Top Con

No 64 bit VM

Although 64 bit support is on its way, there is no official VM to work in a 64 bit system, requiring you to use 32 bit libraries. Available in Pharo 5. See More

Top Pro

Highly productive

Top Pro

Live updates

The nature of Pharo being a "live" environment allows you to perform live updates to your system without requiring to restart it. You can upgrade/modify classes while serving requests at the same time. See More

Top Pro

Easily learnt

There is good, free documentation including several books written by experts with extensive examples. There is an online MOOC. There are many tutorial videos. Supportive conferences and community. Even a professional support option if desired. See More

Top Pro

Object-Oriented

In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful coding patterns in your IDE

No need to search google for compact beautiful examples of how to do things, your live environment source is available and you can easily live search, see how it works and copy how the masters would do it (examples most languages still copy too). See More

Top Pro

Glamorous toolkit & GTInspector

Most languages are still copying the Smalltalk tools of yesterday - GTInspector (written in Glamorous) takes live exploration of code/running objects to a new level. It's really slick, and better yet, you can easily write your own inspectors in 10 lines of code. See More

Top Pro

Seaside

The framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk is developed in Pharo. Seaside lets you build highly interactive web applications quickly, reusably and maintainably. See More

Top Pro

Graphics, graphing and visualisation framework - Roassal

Roassal and Mondrian provide fantastic and easily used frameworks for graphics, graphing and advanced visualisations (comparable to D3.js) but with much less code. Visualisations can be rendered into web friendly graphics (SVG, .png etc.) without additional work. See More

Top Pro

Advanced code analysis tools

MOOSE environment provides extensive, easily leveraged and class leading tools for code analysis and improvement. See More

Top Pro

Can run headless for production

Top Pro

Really simple networking and REST with Zinc

Top Pro

Code can be run on rock solid GemStone environment

See All

TypeScript

Top Pro

Strict superset of Javascript

Every existing Javascript program is already a valid TypeScript program giving it the best support for existing libraries, which is particularly useful if you need to integrate with an existing Javascript code base. See More

Top Con

Type checking not enforced by default

You have to use compiler flags to make sure it catches flaws like usage of implicit any, etc. See More

Ryan O’Hara's Experience

Reasons to use JavaScript: no compile step What TypeScript adds to JavaScript: a compile step See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.2

Price:Free, Open source

Site:http://www.typescriptlang.org/

IDE Support:Very good

Top Pro

Polyfill for ES6 fat-arrow syntax

Typescript implements the fat arrow syntax, which always maintains the current context for this and is a shorter/more convenient syntax than traditional function definition. See More

Top Con

Too similar to Javascript

Presents some advantages compared to Javascript, but because it is designed to be a superset of Javascript, it means all the bad parts of Javascript are still present. See More

Top Pro

Optional static typing

Typescript has optional static typing with support for interfaces and generics, and intelligent type inference. It makes refactoring large codebases a breeze, and provides many more safeguards for creating stable code. See More

Top Con

No support for dead code elimination

Typescript compiler does not remove dead code from generated file(s), you have to use external tools to remove unused code after compilation. Which is harder to achieve, because Typescript compiler eliminated all type information. See More

Top Pro

Great support for editors (Sublime, Code, Vim, IntelliJ...)

Top Con

No support for conditional compilation

There is no clean way to have debug and release builds compiled from the same source, where the release version removes all debugging tools and outputs from the generated file(s). See More

Top Pro

Works well with Angular 2

Angular 2 is built using TypeScript and applications built using it can make use of that (or not). See More

Top Con

Small community

Top Pro

Great support for React, integrated typed JSX parsing

Strongly typed react components, so UI "templating" automatically gains type safety. See More

Top Con

No Java-like package structure

If you prefer a Java-like approach of partitioning your code into different packages, the module system of typescript will confuse you. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to very native looking code

Compiles to simple looking Javascript making it easy to understand what is happening and learn the language (if you already know Javascript). See More

Top Con

Syntax is too verbose

Top Pro

Strong typed language

Lots of benefits of it, you can read this. See More

Top Con

Requires "this" for field access

Even in cases were there is no ambiguity, you still have to use "this.fieldName" instead of just "fieldName". See More

Top Con

Far less typed libraries than Dart (and TSD are never up to date).

Just compare https://pub.dartlang.org/packages and http://definitelytyped.org/tsd/ Typescript => 930 Dart => 2060 See More

Top Con

Benefits don't exceed costs

It is rather unnecessarily complicated for experienced JavaScript developers. See More

Top Con

Type inference coverage is incomplete

The default type when declaring and using a variable is any. For example, the following should break but does not: function add(a:number) { return a + 1 } function addAB(a, b) {return add(a) + b} addAB("this should break but doesn't :(", 100) In order to avoid this, you have to declare type signatures for every variable or parameter or set the flag --noImplicityAny when running the compiler. See More

See All

C#

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 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 easier to just set a field and observe the result from another thread. See More

Specs

Current stable version:7

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Very high demand in the industry

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

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 Con

Complex syntax

Too many syntactic constructs to learn before it becomes usable. 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 Con

Lacks standard-library support for immutable data structures

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 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

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

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

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

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

High Performance and great concurrency support

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

See All

PHP

Top Pro

Widely used for websites

PHP is the quasi-standard for backends for web applications and used by most of all websites. Many popular CMS are built with PHP, e.g. Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. See More

Top Con

Poorly designed language

Despite its widespread use, PHP is generally looked upon poorly from a design point of view. The consistency of function names and function argument order, lazily and borderline non-functional implementation of object oriented programming, can only receive requests via POST methods, slow version adoption (the PHP you learn right now may not work on every webserver you'll work on), and a focus on "hacking things together" rather than "doing it right". These are all very common complaints when it comes to working with PHP. While not a bad language to learn, PHP is not at all a good language to learn first, as it will probably teach bad habits. See More

Joao Gilberto Magalhaes (JG)'s Experience

A lot of tools for CI/CD environment See More

Specs

Current stable version:7.3

Price:Open Source (free)

Top Pro

A lot of good frameworks for it

Like Laravel, Zend, Symfony... See More

Top Con

Very slow compared to alternatives

Compared to alternatives like Exilir and Go-lang, which provide comparable functionality, even the latest versions of PHP are vastly slower than their competitors. The difference is so significant that it has the potential to bottleneck even modestly sized applications and lead to highly significant increases in hardware costs, even with well-written code. PHP's syntax is also highly permissive of non-optimized code which can further exacerbate this issue. See More

Luiz Barni's Experience

Runs JavaScript trought PHPV8 See More

Top Pro

Huge community of practice

Whatever challenge you face, you can Google it and find existing code that solves it. Well supported packages, objects, and methods exist for data manipulation, graphic generation, file handling and connecting with diverse APIs. See More

Top Con

Lack of static type safety

The lack of strong static type checking means that simple problems that could have been easily detected at compile time are detected at run time. Clearly that's a disastrous problem for back-end software development. See More

Hasnat Babur Raju's Experience

Very easy to deploy, can be right tool for the right person in backend. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Since 7.x was released, PHP has become a pretty fast language. See More

Top Con

Often awkward setup

PHP setup can be awkward and differ significantly on different platforms in ways that are not always entirely justifiable. Often old versions of PHP (5.6) will conflict with newer versions (7.x) when working with legacy installations, and configuration of php-fpm when working with nginx can be overly complex for first-time setup, particularly for small to mid scale projects. Because the language has grown as a patchwork, different PHP documentation often provides conflicting and out of date info, which can cause system-wide problems if implimented by someone of junior or even intermediate skill. While this is also true of other languages, it is especially so of PHP, and significant development time is often lost on issues that sensible defaults would fix. While the Laravel framework, particularly in concert with Homestead, does mitigate these issues, it is by no means a universal panacea, as it will not be possible to impliment in many real-world situations. See More

Top Pro

PHP is constantly being improved

A huge community contribute to the language. PHP7 is faster than some versions of Java, Python, Perl, et cetera. See More

Top Con

Most resources are poorly-written

Few resources exemplify the "correct" or secure use of features. See More

Top Pro

Tight and easy integration with HTML

Unlike some languages, PHP is designed to work as part of an HTML file, and moving in and out of straight HTML and PHP is simple and seamless. If you're familiar with HTML, adding simple PHP gives you access to creating dynamic pages and sessions very easy. You have easy and logical access to headers, session variables, cookies, GET and PUT information and files. See More

Top Con

A big patchwork

Each new version adds a patch to this improvised language. It always gets better, but you can still see the patches everywhere. See More

Top Pro

Thousands of tutorials and courses to get you started quickly

There are thousands of tutorials available and most online course providers offer PHP courses too. Learning the language will not fail because of missing reading. See More

Top Con

Interpreter being too permissive

If you forget the dollar sign, the variable name will be converted to a string. See More

Top Pro

One of the most common languages

According to the 2015 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (26,086 people surveyed), PHP was the 5th most popular/used language at 29.7%. See More

Top Con

Immense catalog of insecure frameworks

The most serious security problems in websites on the web today are almost universally found in popular PHP frameworks, CMS platforms, libraries and code samples, almost all stemming from poor language design, bad tutorials and awful resources. See More

Top Pro

Very big standard library

Top Con

Ugly syntax

The naming of string and numerical functions is awkward, frequently inconsistent and impossible to memorize - you will always need a handy cheat sheet. See More

Top Pro

Most prominent language for web applications

Part of the de facto standard web application stack. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

Top Pro

Used by most common CMS platforms

Many clients are looking for an easy-to-update web site that's flexible and free. Drupal and Wordpress fill those needs very well. See More

Top Pro

Runs JavaScript through PHPV8

Yes, PHP can run a React app directly from itself. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials online

Top Pro

Lots of PHP frameworks available which help with development

PHP people love frameworks, and with frameworks such as Laravel, you can build a web app or API really fast (Facades, ORMs, scaffolding etc.) See More

Top Pro

Great third-party package manager

PHP standard library is somewhat subpar, but if you need plugins, language features, composer has them all (you can even puzzle together a custom framework from composer). See More

See All

Scala

Top Pro

Concurrency done the right way

With Akka & Akka Streams. See More

Top Con

Complicated type system

It tacks an elegant algebraic type system onto Java's half-baked object-oriented generic types. The result is daunting. See More

PerseveringMarzyana's Experience

A lot of powerful libraries, concise syntax, good IDE and tools. See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.12.6

Price:Open Source (Free)

Site:scala-lang.org

Top Pro

Strictly typed + type inference

Easy refactoring with compile-time validation of refactoring results. Plus many other obvious advantages of strictly typed languages. Common disadvantage of strictly typed languages is verbosity, Scala addresses it with different ways, like type inference. See More

Top Con

Slow compilation

With Dotty, the new Scala compiler I hope it will improve See More

Top Pro

Very concise

Top Con

Static type system inherits cruft from Java

The type system is too complicated yet still less powerful than Haskell's. See More

Top Pro

Good choice of web frameworks

Top Con

Can be intimidating for beginners

Scala is an industrial language. It brings functional programming to the JVM, but not with a "start small and grow the language" perspective, but rather a very powerful language for professional programmers. See More

Top Pro

Best of functional and object-oriented programming

Top Con

Horrendous unreadable code easily ensues

Scala is the new Perl. It offers a massive enticing rope to hang you and your colleagues with write-only code. See More

Top Pro

Very good online courses

On coursera you can find great introduction to Scala by Martin Odersky. See More

Top Pro

Type inference leads to a simpler syntax

Top Pro

Type inference

Scala offers type inference, which, while giving the same safety as Java's type system, allows programmers to focus on the code itself, rather than on updating type annotations. See More

Top Pro

Mature

Latest Scala versions have maintained source level compatibility. It exists since 2004. See More

Top Pro

Expressive functional programming abstraction for reusable and safe code

Top Pro

Immutable values

The immutable values make it perfect for working with concurrency See More

Top Pro

Multiparadigm

Scala supports both Functional and Object Oriented styles of programming. Beginners can learn both paradigms without having to learn a new language, and experts can switch between the two according to what best suits their needs at the time. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to JVM bytecode

Aside from Java itself, Scala is by far the most popular of the many JVM languages. If you're developing for Android, or a similar JVM-only platform, or otherwise need out-of-the-box cross-platform compatibility, but the performance of a compiled language, Scala is the way to go. See More

Top Pro

Many libraries

It has all Java libs and Scala libs. For example, it has many Scala specific JSON parsers, HTTP client libs, etc. See More

Top Pro

Good IDE and tools

Like, for example IntelliJ IDEA, Scala IDE. See More

See All

Ruby

Top Pro

Code is clean

Even when you see it after 6 months, you'll still understand it. See More

Top Con

Not the fastest around

Ruby did make a long way in terms of performance(and expected to go further in version 3) but there are still more performant alternatives(nodejs,java,etc). See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.6.0

Price:Open Source (Free)

Site:https://www.ruby-lang.org

GZipped size:15.9 MB

Top Pro

Outstanding ecosystem

Because of the large and engaged community you can almost find a library for everything you need. See More

Top Con

Lack of static type safety

Problems that could have been easily detected at compile time show up a run-time, which is terrible for back-end development. See More

Top Pro

A large ecosystem of tools & libraries

Ruby has a large ecosystem of tools and libraries for just about every use. Such as ORMs (Active Record, DatabMapper), Web Application Frameworks(Rails, Sinatra, Volt), Virtualization Orchestration(docker-api, drelict), CLI tools(Thor, Commando), GUI Frameworks(Shoes, FXRuby) and the list goes on. If you can think of it, there is probably a gem for that ( and if not you can create your own and share with the community). See More

Top Con

Monkeypatching

Requiring a library can change the rules of the language. This is very confusing for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Ruby on Rails

Lays out an easy to follow and opinionated MVC pattern that teaches best practices through necessity. See More

Top Con

More than one way to do it

A problem inspired by Perl. The core API interfaces are bloated. There's at least four different ways to define methods. More is not always better. Sometimes it's just more. See More

Top Pro

Widely used

Ruby is one of the most popular languages for developing web sites. As a result, there's an abundant amount of documentation, sample code, and libraries available for learning the language and getting your project up and running. The most popular features are just 'gem install' away. Additionally, it is easier to find Ruby jobs because of this. See More

Top Con

Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers

The ability for libraries to open classes and augment them leads to confusion for new developers since it is not clear who injected the functionality into some standard class. In other words, if two modules decide to modify the same function on the same class can introduce a number of issues. Mainly, the order in which the modules are included matters. Since you more or less can't tell what kind of "helper" functions a module might write into any class, or for that matter, where the helper function was included from, you may sometimes wonder why class X can do Y sometimes but not at other times. See More

See All

Kotlin

Top Pro

Literally a better Java

Integrates into existing ecosystems seamlessly, has the support of JetBrains and Google etc, is a node killer on vert.x. See More

Top Con

Too young, many child problems

hadruki's Experience

Like Java but better. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.3

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:http://kotlinlang.org

Top Pro

Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming

It's not overly OOP like Java and it does not enforce strict functional paradigms either. See More

Top Con

The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations

The need to make Kotlin interoperable with Java has caused some unintuitive limitations to the language design. See More

Top Pro

Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases

Since it has such a good interoperability with Java, Java libraries, and Java tools. It can be adopted for an existing Java codebase at little to no cost. The codebase can be converted from Java to Kotlin little by little without ever disrupting the functionality of the application itself. See More

Top Con

Immature

Top Pro

Great tooling support

Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc... See More

Top Con

May be hard for programmers already used to imperative style to learn functional programming from Kotlin

Since Kotlin does not enforce any particular paradigms and is not purely functional, it can be pretty easy to fall back to imperative programming habits if a programmer comes from an imperative background. See More

Top Pro

Easy adoption for existing Java programmers

score 58 · Accepted Answer

Elixir

Top Pro

Fault-tolerant

Elixir applications are composed of lightweight processes, mainly divided into workers and supervisors. When such a process crashes it can be automatically restarted in a number of ways so that there is minimal downtime. See More

Top Con

Lack of static typing

Should be mentioned that Elixir also has its own way to check type safety : pattern matching, guards, typespecs and dialyzer. See More

Hasnat Babur Raju's Experience

Still requires to know Erlang See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.8.1

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

GZipped size:3.61 MB (without required Erlang VM)

Top Pro

Great concurrency and scaling

Processes in the Erlang VM are lightweight and run across all CPUs. Thread handling is simpler and more intuitive, and does not require developers to specifically impliment multi-threaded solutions. With multi-core CPUs now mainstream, and octocore not uncommon, this will have a significant effect on performance now, and likely more-so in the future. See More

Top Con

Takes some time to wrap your head around around OTP supervisors trees

This (unique?) feature of the OTP is quite uncommon and takes some time to get into understanding what is going on, when, and how to use all it's features and servers like GenServer, Agent, etc. See More

Top Pro

Pleasant Ruby-like syntax

Default Erlang syntax (which is Prolog-based) is very unpleasant for newcomers. Elixir on the other hand solved this problem with creating more familiar syntax while keeping Erlang expressivity and all features. See More

Top Con

Bad for CPU bound processing

Top Pro

Easy interoperability with Erlang libraries

Elixir which is build on top of Erlang's BEAM can directly use Erlang libraries and code, without any trouble. This gives developer access to over 30 years of libraries development for Erlang without any penalty and trouble. See More

Top Con

Requires some knowledge of Erlang

Sooner or later you will be forced to dig into internals of the libraries that you use and some of them are written in Erlang, which has slightly different syntax. However after understanding some Elixir it becomes easier. See More

Top Pro

Built-in support for hot-upgrades and hot-downgrades

As built for telecommunications system Erlang VM requires support for application updates without interruptions in running system (imagine that your call was unexpectedly ended due to software upgrade in your provider relay station). This allows you to update your system without disconnecting your users from yours services. See More

Top Con

Deployment is still not as easy as it should be

Top Pro

Great for concurrency

Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM. 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

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 Con

Still requires to know Erlang

Still requires to know Erlang See More

Top Pro

Powerful metaprogramming

Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself. See More

Top Con

Immature backend runtime environments

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 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 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

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 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 Ruby's syntax which many people love. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming

Top Pro

Types don't get in the way

Gradual typing is a wonderful middle-ground for those who like dynamic languages but see the value of typing. See More

Top Pro

Distributed mode

Distributed mode included by default See More

Top Pro

Regular expression-based method overloading

Method overloading works in a unique manner for very clear understanding and ease of maintainability See More

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

The Best 1 of 21 OptionsWhy?

Elixir

My Recommendation for Elixir

My Recommendation for Elixir

Fault-tolerant

Lack of static typing

Great concurrency and scaling

Takes some time to wrap your head around around OTP supervisors trees

Pleasant Ruby-like syntax

Bad for CPU bound processing

Easy interoperability with Erlang libraries

Requires some knowledge of Erlang

Built-in support for hot-upgrades and hot-downgrades

Deployment is still not as easy as it should be

Great for concurrency

Some design choices may seem strange

Great documentation

Still requires to know Erlang

Powerful metaprogramming

Immature backend runtime environments

Easy to download libraries

Full access to Erlang functions

Great getting started tutorials

Scalability

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

Functional programming

Types don't get in the way

Distributed mode

Regular expression-based method overloading

Built in Redis and MySQL

Soft real-time

20 Other Options Considered

Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

Compiler prevents memory management and concurency mistakes

Hard to find learning resources or libraries

Catch errors at compile-time

Very new and untested

Support for macros

Asynchronous I/O is not (yet) a part of the core language

Threads without data races

Lifetimes can be tricky to learn

Compiles to machine code allowing for extra efficiency

Generics support

Lifetime semantics have benefits in other languages

Easy to write understandable code

Built-in concurrency

Supports cross compilation for different architectures

Makes developers write optimal code

Zero-cost futures or Async IO

Most popular programming language 2017

Python

My Recommendation for Python

My Recommendation for Python

Easy to learn

Slower than alternative languages

Lots of tutorials

Not type-safe

Cross-platform

Slow to run

Easy to get started

Speed can matter

Comes with extensive libraries

Hard to debug other people's code

Clear syntax

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Very similar to pseudo-code

Language fragmentation

Active and helpful community

Might not be very future-proof

It's really simple

The process of shipping/distributing software is reatively complicated

Can be used in many domains

Does not teach you about data types

Lots of framework choices

Unflexible userbase

Good documentation

Limited support for functional programming