Ask HN: What is best programming language for a startup's first prototype? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is best programming language for a startup's first prototype?

1 pointmacsym6 comments

Hi, guys! I worked as the main designer at a startup for one year and as a team we built many great prototypes to test our ideas and iterate.

But I've always felt frustrated not being able to deliver more than mockups to our team. So my question is: coming from a design background, what is the most accessible, device-agnostic programming language to build fully-interactive prototypes?

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No one cares what technology you're using.

Just fscking do your prototype in whatever language that you're comfortable with.

Use Python. Build your prototype. Demo/display it. Throw it away and take what you learned building your prototype, as well as the feedback from your investors, and pick the right tools to get the job done. There is no "one lang" to rule them all.

The language you know. If you don't know any language, toss a dart at a wall full of pieces of tape labeled with the names of different languages.

For an acessible stack to build prototypes, coming from design, you'll probably benefit from a templating framework backed by a dynamic language, possibly with some data-access (CRUD) scaffolding built-in. Two popular ones are Ruby on Rails (Ruby language) and Django (Python language).

Nice to read. I've heard about Ruby on Rails for some time now, but when I suggested it to my friends, they were quite sceptic and recommended javascript coupled with some well used libraries (angular.js + node.js). What's your opinion?

Node.js fits the general idea of a stack that has a templating framework and a dynamic language (JavaScript in this case). There are also data-access libraries. As a designer, you probably already know some JavaScript, so this could be an acessible option. But Node's programming model requires particular attention to deal with its asynchronous nature. Anyway, I would recommend you to pick one, do the tutorial and try to build a simple prototype. You'll learn a lot.

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