
Ask HN: Best language to learn for a Harvard MBA to prototype his own sites? - yogi123
Yeah I know I&#x27;m an mba - go ahead and flame me guys. I don&#x27;t see a lot of love for my type on here :(. I&#x27;m a serial entrepreneur. I&#x27;ve raised lots of venture capital. I&#x27;d love to actually build some of my own prototypes instead of hiring a developer, for a change. I haven&#x27;t programmed in 25 years. I was pretty good at Pascal, back in the day :). Recommendations? I&#x27;m looking to build a working site. No mobile app to start. Just a good ol&#x27; fashioned website with simple functionality to test some ideas. I&#x27;d love to learn a language where I can become productive quickly, but which is still powerful for building a real site. Also something in a mainstream language in case I hand it off to a professional developer, at some point. Thanks, you hackers you. I love you guys, even though I&#x27;m not sure you love me back.
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krapp
If you want a quick deployment without much hassle, I don't think you can get
much easier than PHP with a framework.

Laravel ([http://laravel.com/](http://laravel.com/)) if you want to pick up
best practices (yes, there are best practices in PHP) and mess around with MVC
and such, or Slim Framework
([http://www.slimframework.com/](http://www.slimframework.com/)) if you want
little more than the bare essentials. In both cases, I would recommend using
Twig for templates. None of this is particularly controversial, though, but in
my opinion the only faster way to get a site up is wordpress, but on the
programming side, that's a lot messier to work with.

Of course, the people who will recommend Ruby and Python and whatnot are right
too - you can get a reasonable set of frameworks and deployment strategies in
various languages. But the case for PHP is, essentially, lack of overhead and
low cost deployment. If you can stand an ugly looking weakly typed ad-hoc
language, that is.

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thenomad
Speaking as a semi-programmer and serial entrepreneur rather than a full-
fledged programming ninja, I'd agree.

Ruby on Rails is sexy as hell, Node + Javascript is very nice, but for
practical, workmanlike, somewhat-ugly-but-does-the-job prototyping, PHP is the
way to go, IMO.

It has the additional, significant advantage that there are far, far more
tutorials and general Google answers for PHP than any other language -
certainly than newer approaches like Node.

~~~
yogi123
Appreciate the input, thx!

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avmich
Would you like to try JavaScript? It can be used both on the client - where
it's the king since the Web was born - and on the server side, using
technologies like Node.js

You'd get to learn just one language this way. Besides, JavaScript has a
relatively easy learning curve.

~~~
jesusmichael
Yep... I'd have to second this. + PHP.

There's a ton of tools and frameworks and very large userbase. So you can get
help.

Or you could use Delphi...

~~~
yogi123
thx!

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cliffwarden
Balsamiq for the actual prototyping -
[http://balsamiq.com/](http://balsamiq.com/)

You can export from Balsamiq to HTML. See "Exporting your Mockups to Code" \-
[http://support.balsamiq.com/customer/portal/articles/135659-...](http://support.balsamiq.com/customer/portal/articles/135659-extensions)

~~~
yogi123
thx cliffwarden!

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djb_hackernews
2 suggestions:

1) rails + Heroku. Rails for the community and plethora of pre-built wheels,
and Heroku for the absolute brain dead deployment of your creations. (you'll
need to learn like 4 git commands)

2) I'll prototype your ideas in any language you want if you give me access to
your network. Deal?

~~~
yogi123
Thanks for the suggestions! I'll email you, b/c that sounds like a really good
deal. Happy to help...:).

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dasmithii
For productivity, ease of use, and general sanity, I'd recommend Meteor. It
has an incredible amount of in-the-box functionality, which is perfect for
prototypes as you say.

[https://www.meteor.com/](https://www.meteor.com/)

~~~
yogi123
thx!

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yunyeng
If you are thinking long term development, I would suggest modern Javascript
Technologies like NodeJS + AngularJS/BackboneJS but if this is few projects
things, then go with PHP, you will do everything with PHP+HTML ! Sky is your
limit.

~~~
yogi123
Thx! Sounds like php is the consensus in the comments.

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adam419
Ruby + Sinatra. This doesn't prevent you from having to create the html and
css for the webpages themselves, but sinatra is a dead simple server framework
for serving up webpages.

~~~
yogi123
Thx adam419!

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hershel
There was some book about building sites/businesses without coding. There's
also drupal which can do quite a lot without coding.

