Ask HN: Best language to learn for a Harvard MBA to prototype his own sites? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best language to learn for a Harvard MBA to prototype his own sites?

8 pointsyogi12319 comments

Yeah I know I'm an mba - go ahead and flame me guys. I don't see a lot of love for my type on here :(. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've raised lots of venture capital. I'd love to actually build some of my own prototypes instead of hiring a developer, for a change. I haven't programmed in 25 years. I was pretty good at Pascal, back in the day :). Recommendations? I'm looking to build a working site. No mobile app to start. Just a good ol' fashioned website with simple functionality to test some ideas. I'd love to learn a language where I can become productive quickly, but which is still powerful for building a real site. Also something in a mainstream language in case I hand it off to a professional developer, at some point. Thanks, you hackers you. I love you guys, even though I'm not sure you love me back.

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If you want a quick deployment without much hassle, I don't think you can get much easier than PHP with a framework.

Laravel (http://laravel.com/) if you want to pick up best practices (yes, there are best practices in PHP) and mess around with MVC and such, or Slim Framework (http://www.slimframework.com/) if you want little more than the bare essentials. In both cases, I would recommend using Twig for templates. None of this is particularly controversial, though, but in my opinion the only faster way to get a site up is wordpress, but on the programming side, that's a lot messier to work with.

Of course, the people who will recommend Ruby and Python and whatnot are right too - you can get a reasonable set of frameworks and deployment strategies in various languages. But the case for PHP is, essentially, lack of overhead and low cost deployment. If you can stand an ugly looking weakly typed ad-hoc language, that is.

Speaking as a semi-programmer and serial entrepreneur rather than a full-fledged programming ninja, I'd agree.

Ruby on Rails is sexy as hell, Node + Javascript is very nice, but for practical, workmanlike, somewhat-ugly-but-does-the-job prototyping, PHP is the way to go, IMO.

It has the additional, significant advantage that there are far, far more tutorials and general Google answers for PHP than any other language - certainly than newer approaches like Node.

Appreciate the input, thx!

Cool, thx krapps. Will investigate these and thx for sharing your knowledge.

Would you like to try JavaScript? It can be used both on the client - where it's the king since the Web was born - and on the server side, using technologies like Node.js

You'd get to learn just one language this way. Besides, JavaScript has a relatively easy learning curve.

Yep... I'd have to second this. + PHP.

There's a ton of tools and frameworks and very large userbase. So you can get help.

Or you could use Delphi...

thx!

Researching this as well avmich. Thx!

Balsamiq for the actual prototyping - http://balsamiq.com/

You can export from Balsamiq to HTML. See "Exporting your Mockups to Code" - http://support.balsamiq.com/customer/portal/articles/135659-...

thx cliffwarden!

2 suggestions:

1) rails + Heroku. Rails for the community and plethora of pre-built wheels, and Heroku for the absolute brain dead deployment of your creations. (you'll need to learn like 4 git commands)

2) I'll prototype your ideas in any language you want if you give me access to your network. Deal?

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll email you, b/c that sounds like a really good deal. Happy to help...:).

For productivity, ease of use, and general sanity, I'd recommend Meteor. It has an incredible amount of in-the-box functionality, which is perfect for prototypes as you say.

https://www.meteor.com/

thx!

If you are thinking long term development, I would suggest modern Javascript Technologies like NodeJS + AngularJS/BackboneJS but if this is few projects things, then go with PHP, you will do everything with PHP+HTML ! Sky is your limit.

Thx! Sounds like php is the consensus in the comments.

Ruby + Sinatra. This doesn't prevent you from having to create the html and css for the webpages themselves, but sinatra is a dead simple server framework for serving up webpages.

Thx adam419!

There was some book about building sites/businesses without coding. There's also drupal which can do quite a lot without coding.

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