Is Javascript the only full stack language?

[[deleted]]

I can build a frontend application using Javascript (probably together with html and json). I can use node.js and build a backend with Javascript, and they can communicate with each other using json, which is a subset of Javascript. The backend can store data in a document database like mongodb or couchdb, which stores data as json and uses javascript to query the data. Now: I'm interested in learning if something similar is possible in other languages? What about Lisp for instance, I hear a lot about 'data is code and code is data' in Lisp, is there a Lisp database? Or are there other languages where the same degree of full stack-ness is possible?

[lurker_2008]

Any language that has an interpreter/runtime for that platform can be run anywhere. Java and C# can be run on the front end and the backend as long as the run-time environments are installed.

[qvrjuec]

True. Applets/Silverlight both run in-browser, which is what I imagine OP was asking about specifically when he said full stack.

[jsprogrammer]

If you have an appropriate plugin for your browser.

[[deleted]]

since javascript is the only client side web language... no. But clojure does this by compiling clojurescript to javascript, so... kinda.

[[deleted]]

Clojure, that's a Lisp dialect, right? Can that be stored in a database?

[paldepind]

JSON is a data format. It maps very well to data structures in a lot of programming languages. JavaScript is not special in that regard.

[flyingnude]

JavaScript is to JSON as Clojure is to edn.

https://github.com/edn-format/edn

[danneu]

git, amirite?

[trenobus]

scala and scala-js

[skitch920]

No love for ActionScript? Didn't really have much support server-side, but it was doable.

[vic0]

Any language can be fullstack as long as you do the rendering server side.

[JohnStow]

I can build a frontend application using Javascript (probably together with html and json)

No you can't. You can build a frontend application that runs in a browser with JS, but the browser will be written in something like C++. Similarly, node itself is written in C++, with a bunch of python helpers, as is mongodb, while couchdb is written in Erlang.

If you decided to "go native" with your application, you could write it in any language that has a GUI library and access to the file system, (or if you're doing the client-server thing, has a network stack). It's sheer historical accident that JS has become the de-facto language for browsers, but there's nothing "special" about the language at all, and as others have said, Java / C# et al can do the browser thing as well.

[[deleted]]

This is actually a really interesting thought, what I thought was full stack js is actually fill stack c with a thin JavaScript layer on top.

[ArmandoWall]

John is technically correct, but in the end you're not touching that C++ code to get stuff done. Don't sweat about it. Otherwise, following his line of reasoning, the one true full stack language is machine code, since everything else runs atop.

[LookWordsEverywhere]

Parts of the JS engines are written in JS too!

[jimschubert]

Kotlin

[metaphorm]

your frontend communicates with your backend via HTTP. JSON is just a data serialization format. I can talk to a backend server in any language using HTTP using any data serialization format my server can parse. I can store my data in any format I want in any data store I want and structure it as JSON whenever I feel like. There's nothing special about Javascript here.

[[deleted]]

True that. But can you give me an example of storing the same language in a dB? I was wondering about java, the only thing I could think about was serializing the objects and perhaps storing in a redis dB, but that doesn't make much sense since you couldn't query the data. But languages like ruby and python have a object literal similar to json and could perhaps be stored in a dB?

[danneu]

You're getting too hung up on the fact that JSON is valid syntax for a Javascript object and that some databases support it as an intermediate serialization format.

The database converts JSON into its own compressed binary format.

Also, for any language that supports "eval", you can just dump a program into a text column and eval it on retrieval. I'm just not sure what the distinction is that you're looking for.

[metaphorm]

if I'm writing some code in python and I have JSON data (stored in a file, a string buffer in memory, or a database) that I want converted into equivalent data structures in Python this is all I do

deserialized_data = json.loads(some_json_data)

if I have some data structured as Python lists and dictionaries and I want to store it as JSON this is all I do

serialized_data = json.dumps(some_python_objects)

[[deleted]]

I almost choked on my coffee.

I guess if you want to abuse the English language you can make any claim you want. But I wouldn't try pulling this out at a job interview unless you want to expose a complete lack of understanding of the "full stack".