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The future of back-end development (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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What are your opinions on the future of back-end web development? Is the Java ecosystem going to wither away as more modern and better solutions are emerging and maturing?

If so, which language/framework and/or programming paradigm do you think will become the new dominant player and how soon?

Personally I would love to see Rust becoming a new standard, it's a pleasure to write and has a rapidly growing ecosystem, I don't think it's far away from overtaking Java. The biggest hurdle imo is big corporations taking a pretty big risk by choosing a relatively new language that's harder to learn compared to what has been the standard for decades.

Playing it safe means you minimize surprises and have a very large amount of people that are already experts in the language.

Taking the risk will definitely improve a lot of things given that you find enough people that know or are willing to learn Rust, but it also means that you're trading off Java flaws with Rust flaws. That's the case however with every big change, and Java flaws are a good enough reason to make a big change.

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[–] keef 24 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I’m surprised no one has mentioned golang. We have the usual dichotomy of java and rust but there’s a very very good option for those who are worried about rust adoption.

I vastly prefer writing rust code but go on its own gets you very very similar performance at the cost of developer experience. I think sum types are the #1 requested feature so once that comes I’ll be a much happier boy.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think Golang had the potential to take over just because it's so easy to pick up and start contributing.

My last position was Golang focused and our hiring was never focused on experience with the language because we knew that if you understood programming concepts you would succeed in Golang.

Today, I'm working on Rust and while I enjoy it for what I'm using it for (Systems level instead of Web Services) I'd be hesitant to suggest it for most backend application just due to the ramp up time for new developers.

tl;Dr Golang will have an easier time hiring for because no language specific experience is required.

[–] keef 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah it’s pretty crazy how fast you can get going in go. As long as you are aware of a pointer you are mostly good to go.

Just wish it felt better 😫

[–] echindod 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is it about go that doesn't feel good? I have this feeling myself.

I didn't enjoy parsing JSON with Go, and I the documentation sucked. But it was really really easy to stand up a simple API endpoint. I would have reached for go for the project I am currently working on, but it didn't have the libraries I needed. It's interesting.

[–] keef 3 points 1 year ago

It’s the usual if err != nil return err critique.

If you could yoink the question mark operator from rust AND support sum types that would be the dream.

The marshaling isn’t too bad unless you need to do more specific things. I vastly prefer how rust’s serde does it but that language is the forbidden fruit

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