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Ask HN: What's a good practical web language to learn?

1 points| joshmanders | 14 years ago | reply

Hello fellow hackers. I have 12 years experience with PHP and MySQL, what I am wondering is, what is a good practical web language to learn?

I have thought about learning Node.js and MongoDB. Also even thought about Python.

Please give me practical reasons, not "X is better than Y because I said so".

Thanks!

3 comments

[+] richf|14 years ago|reply

My vote goes toward Node.js.

My reasoning for this is because of the versatility of JavaScript across the stack (both front-end and back-end) - you only need to learn one language!

As per database, call me old-fashioned, but I'm still with the MySQL camp. NoSQL databases like MongoDB have their uses, but MySQL is king for me - for now, anyway. :P

[+] joshmanders|14 years ago|reply

Thanks for the feedback. Sticking with MySQL would be best for me too as I know it, but it would be nice to learn a NoSQL database too.

[+] Exoseq|14 years ago|reply

I'd go with Javascript / Node.... 1 JS is universally deployed (1 language to learn) 2 JS works pretty well as a functional language, which is becoming much more important of late 3 Node(still a work in progress) covers the server side too, and the result is a scalable, single language solution.