

Ask HN: Most popular server-side high level languages? - stcredzero

What are the most popular server-side high level languages right now, by active user/developer community?  Is there a good way to filter client-side from server side development use in some kind of census?  Admittedly, the line between client and server is a bit blurry.  (Much of what's implemented on a Rails server is really UI, for example.)  I'd also be curious to see 3 numbers, one for definitely client, another for pretty much server, and a third for a bit of both.
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ihumanable
I use PHP for my day to day as well. The community and the language are both
very active, tons of cheap reliable hosting, well known and understood
performance and scaling profiles. PHP is easy to get wrong but not all too
difficult to get right.

The one thing I like about PHP more than anything is the lack of abstraction,
there is no "response" object you are writing to, you want 'some-crazy-tag-
with-weird-attributes' you don't have to trick your library into outputting
it, everything is just strings you echo out.

With the glut of web frameworks for PHP (CakePHP, Symfony, NOLOH, etc.) you
can go full blown MVC fairly easily. I prefer to work with Flourish
<http://flourishlib.com> as I find it to be the perfect core for a website.

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carucez
I use PHP as my scripting language. A lot of my server-side processing is done
in PHP, including sockets and statistical analysis. I know it best, and am
most effective with it.

Python is a bit more robust for all things higher-level, and I would recommend
that before PHP any day (for someone starting out in).

Client side stuff is (for me) all JavaScript, always, using the JQuery library
to ease my web pain.

HOWTO do divide Client from Server? Separate machines and insist that all
back-end processing and storage goes on one set, and all client-side
functionality goes on the other. Loading/parsing of archived data is a client-
side process, as far as I'm concerned. Use standard protocols and formats to
talk between the machines.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Ditto, except for me the breakdown is PHP for work, Python for personal
projects.

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chipmunkninja
"Popular" here is going to mean maybe 15% market share, if my memory serves
correctly. Popular server languages remain Java, PHP, ASP.NET, and
increasingly Ruby.

In my mind, the reality is that you should choose the programming language
based on the skills of you or your programmer(s) and the task at hand. If I
were going to implement a banking system, I'd probably look first at Java and
its J2EE libraries to see what options were available there. I've used PHP
recently (despite it being a reasonably painful language) because it has some
wonderful productivity and scalability features that we've been able to really
take advantage of.

However, I've nothing against any of the other platforms (with the exception
of a slight bias away from anything that requires me running windows servers),
and have been fiddling with Ruby, and also exploring Haskell, Erland, Clojure,
and even Scala.

Unless we're talking in-house applications using VB or C#, or mobile phone
applications using ObjC or Java, "client-side" almost always means HTML/CSS/JS
these days.

So, look at the task and the talent, and go from there. Most of the common
platforms that you've heard of are all going to have large enough communities
for support and libraries to perform various non-standard tasks.

Good luck!

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davidw
If you have any good ideas for how to discern those categories, I'm always
trying to think of new ideas for <http://langpop.com> .

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CyberFonic
I would suggest NodeJS. It lets you do many of the essential low level server
side operations. And if you already know JavaScript from working with
browsers, then you'll feel right at home.

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adn37
I've been using CakePhp for about 3 years, on sideprojects.

Planning to learn a Java/Scala based 'equivalent'.

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dawsdesign
Django and PHP (CakePHP, Codeigniter, etc), and obviously RoR.

My current favorite is Python/Flask.

~~~
dawsdesign
PHP is the quickest to get up and going and will probably be the cheapest to
host. Unless you go the Google App Engine route. PHP is probably the most
promiscuous though.

