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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.

[–] philm 5 points 1 year ago

I’d be hesitant to suggest it for most backend application just due to the ramp up time for new developers.

I would probably suggest Rust for that exact reason, you'll have to fight the language a little bit at the beginning (at least if you'll have a very "interior mutable" experience instead of a functional background), but it teaches you how to write your code in a nicely relatively uniform compositional safe style, that IMHO can be read quite well between different people (team) and I think is easier to review (as long as it's not some super magic trait-heavy/proc-macro code of course, but I think for actual applications (vs libraries) that part will be rather low)

Also I think nowadays the barrier into the language is much lower than it was a few years ago. The tooling, specifically rust-analyzer (and probably Intellij Rust too, never tried it though) and the compiler itself got really good in the meantime (I actually think Rust-analyzer is by now the best LSP for any language I know of), so that getting into Rust is likely not that hard anymore (you'll have to learn/understand a few concepts though, like heap/stack and the lifetime system, but I think that it's not that hard to learn).

Go just often feels very hacky to write with a lot of quirky things like handling errors, and a lot of missing features like pattern matching or a relatively good type system, I don't think it really promotes that nice architectures (or limits the programmer kinda).

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