Wasn't expecting to see PHP, but I feel like maturity does get so overlooked as a quality of a language. Lack of maturity in so many ways is my absolute biggest frustration whenever I work with JavaScript.
I wasnt't expecting to learn PHP, actually. Python has been a dear friend for quite a few years, but for my projects often Django and even Flask felt like an overkill. And I often struggled with packages for functionality that seemed very important to me, especially user management. I had a very bad opinion about PHP, mainly because of Wordpress' wild source code, some very strange plugins from its ecosystem and documentation that is so scattered around the web and often not reliable. But Composer, Packagist, Symfony and also the great learning resources (Laracasts, Laravel-News.com) really are my go-to learning places right now.
After 15 years of PHP, Python/Django was a breath of fresh air... sandwiched in there was Ruby. I could never see Flask as overkill for anything, it is pretty much a framework with nothing - how did that become overkill?
Django with Rest Framework allows me to create backends in an instance with full admin CRUD for whatever front-end of the week (been through Angular, React and now Ember) I would do a bakeoff any day of the week against PHP and Laravel (I could even bake-off against myself, hehe...)
PHP has it's merits, but I am so glad to be rid of a the toolbox with too many dysfunctional hammers and screwdrivers.
Personally I'd rather use a stack that's tried and tested, and that I know will still be around in a few years time. I've had heaps of issues getting Node.js sites working after server upgrades, whereas PHP sites I created 10+ years ago are still happily running on PHP 7 with no issues and only minor updates required. For new sites I'd stick to PHP or ASP.NET, the server-side JavaScript ecosystem is just too volatile for me to even consider using it for any serious development.
Yeah. Elixir doesn't really resemble Ruby as a language fundamentally, but the whole ecosystem was clearly designed to be friendly to the Ruby community's expectations.
Well, you cannot use Elixir outside of the Erlang VM because it is required as part of the language. But you don't have to dive into Erlang and write it as part of your day to day. One thing you will find after writing a bit of Elixir is that Erlang becomes more approachable and understandable. Elixir just expands out to Erlang using macros, and then compiles to Erlang VM byte code to be executed by the VM.
Erlang (and Elixir). Despite being 20 years old, Erlang seem strikingly suited to many modern challenges (high availability, distributed processing, fundamentally concurrent, network transparent, live upgrades, etc).
Ruby/Rails. I'm starting to get into Shopify app development and while I could use a language I'm already familiar with to build the apps, I'd rather use the Shopify API gem to help with building out the apps. And it's a good excuse to learn a new language!
I want to learn a functional language that I can use for backend development. At one point I thought that would be Elixir/Phoenix but now that I've written a lot of Elm code I've become very partial to strongly type languages. But then I look at Haskell and it doesn't seem nearly as practical is Elixir/OTP so it's likely I'll be learning Elixir this year.
From my point of view, Haskell seems less practical because there is very little writing on Haskell web frameworks written for regular folks like me. Phoenix and Elixir seem much more approachable for a relative newcomer to FP.
From my limited poking around, F# looks really cool.
Oldest comments (235)
PHP because it seems to have grown mature – and has Laravel with its fine ecosystem for business apps.
Wasn't expecting to see PHP, but I feel like maturity does get so overlooked as a quality of a language. Lack of maturity in so many ways is my absolute biggest frustration whenever I work with JavaScript.
Same. I often find myself getting frustrated with JavaScript's volatile ecosystem.
I wasnt't expecting to learn PHP, actually. Python has been a dear friend for quite a few years, but for my projects often Django and even Flask felt like an overkill. And I often struggled with packages for functionality that seemed very important to me, especially user management. I had a very bad opinion about PHP, mainly because of Wordpress' wild source code, some very strange plugins from its ecosystem and documentation that is so scattered around the web and often not reliable. But Composer, Packagist, Symfony and also the great learning resources (Laracasts, Laravel-News.com) really are my go-to learning places right now.
After 15 years of PHP, Python/Django was a breath of fresh air... sandwiched in there was Ruby. I could never see Flask as overkill for anything, it is pretty much a framework with nothing - how did that become overkill?
Django with Rest Framework allows me to create backends in an instance with full admin CRUD for whatever front-end of the week (been through Angular, React and now Ember) I would do a bakeoff any day of the week against PHP and Laravel (I could even bake-off against myself, hehe...)
PHP has it's merits, but I am so glad to be rid of a the toolbox with too many dysfunctional hammers and screwdrivers.
Personally I'd rather use a stack that's tried and tested, and that I know will still be around in a few years time. I've had heaps of issues getting Node.js sites working after server upgrades, whereas PHP sites I created 10+ years ago are still happily running on PHP 7 with no issues and only minor updates required. For new sites I'd stick to PHP or ASP.NET, the server-side JavaScript ecosystem is just too volatile for me to even consider using it for any serious development.
Also see: Happiness is a Boring Stack: expatsoftware.com/articles/happine...
Ruby because I want to have a better foundation with Ruby on Rails.
I enjoy Ruby Tapas as a source for continuously learning new things about Ruby. It's a funky language with lots of neat features hidden away.
Elixir and Phoenix. I'm a huge Ruby/Rails fan and seeing Elixir/Phoenix resemble those makes me happy.
Yeah. Elixir doesn't really resemble Ruby as a language fundamentally, but the whole ecosystem was clearly designed to be friendly to the Ruby community's expectations.
Can you learn Elixir without knowing Erlang?
Absolutely, it's definitely a boon but far from a requirement
Well, you cannot use Elixir outside of the Erlang VM because it is required as part of the language. But you don't have to dive into Erlang and write it as part of your day to day. One thing you will find after writing a bit of Elixir is that Erlang becomes more approachable and understandable. Elixir just expands out to Erlang using macros, and then compiles to Erlang VM byte code to be executed by the VM.
Erlang (and Elixir). Despite being 20 years old, Erlang seem strikingly suited to many modern challenges (high availability, distributed processing, fundamentally concurrent, network transparent, live upgrades, etc).
Ruby/Rails. I'm starting to get into Shopify app development and while I could use a language I'm already familiar with to build the apps, I'd rather use the Shopify API gem to help with building out the apps. And it's a good excuse to learn a new language!
Python, because it's an interesting language that is not limited to a specific platform.
Heya, this might be of interest to you leanpub.com/pythonforprogrammers
I really wanna learn Swift and finally get into iOS development.
Any functional language to try something very different from JavaScript I use almost exclusively in the past few years.
I want to learn a functional language that I can use for backend development. At one point I thought that would be Elixir/Phoenix but now that I've written a lot of Elm code I've become very partial to strongly type languages. But then I look at Haskell and it doesn't seem nearly as practical is Elixir/OTP so it's likely I'll be learning Elixir this year.
Have you had a look at OCaml? It is very similar to Elm and in use at Facebook as part of the toolchain for Flow/Reason/Infer.
OCaml is very similar yes and you can also have a look at F#
Also: Why does Haskell seem impractical? IMO it has quite strong support for Webbackends - have a look at Servant / Servant-Elm for example
From my point of view, Haskell seems less practical because there is very little writing on Haskell web frameworks written for regular folks like me. Phoenix and Elixir seem much more approachable for a relative newcomer to FP.
From my limited poking around, F# looks really cool.
Reason - Functional programming with an approachable syntax. 💖
Reason is fascinating. Do you have any plans to release anything with it, or is it purely for learning at this point?