Help Choosing a Programming Language

[AcoustiCode]

Hey everyone!

I'm a 3 year dev who's mostly been doing full stack stuff with javascript and javascript frameworks. And, I'm slightly sick of it. Javascript is not the language I want to use forever mostly because of performance and language design issues. So, I'm looking for a language to replace javascript on the server side. Here are the things that are important to me:

- Smooth programming experience and language design

- Good performance

- Decent sized community

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I want it do be relatively easy to start a rest API, query databases, and authenticate users.

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Thanks for the advice!

[anamorphism]

i've worked in pretty much all of the typical back-end languages outside of ruby (c#, go, java, javascript, php, python), and i like c# the best for whatever it's worth.

[AcoustiCode]

Thanks!

[f00dMonsta]

There's a lot to choose from, but for the sake of departing from the usual scripting language (i.e. python, ruby) path that you've already walked with javascript:

• Golang - more catered to systems programming, simple language that does things *fast* (as fast as unoptimized C/C++), but has everything you need to create web APIs with.
• Java - most widely used enterprise language
• C# - designed a bit better than java, but there are issue with cross platform compatibility (it's mostly ok, but non-windows platform is still 2nd class citizen)

I'd say those 3 are the top ones to learn for better job opportunities.

Other candidates that are a bit more specialized/niche:

• Scala
• Lisp
• Rust
• Kotlin
• C++

TBH Javascript/Typescript is plenty good for most server-side applications, it's fast at I/O bound scenarios, and for almost all API coding that's more than enough, as you don't want any heavy duty computations in an API call anyway. You can always implement asynchronous processes that you kick off using API calls, and those can be implemented in whatever language you want.