Welcome to the Treehouse Community
Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.
Looking to learn something new?
Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.
Start your free trial
Coding Panda
211 PointsHow is node.JS compare to Python as a back-end solution. I've preciously created a small social network with PHP.
So I am a PHP fan-boy, Yes hard-core fan boy. But still I been watching a lot of videos on talks from big tech companies like UBER who started in 2009 when node.JS was spanking brand new on the scene. They wanted to use node.JS to make server calls as fast as possible.
My question is to those who have experience creating or developing or have had experience using both node.JS and Python for back-end programming. In the mist of learning a new modern back end full stack language who will give a competitive edge when building modern web software applications.
1 Answer
Eric M
11,546 PointsIt depends. What do you love about PHP? What sort of web apps do you want to build? What sort of "competitive edge" are you looking for?
If you're after fine grained back end control you could write a back end web server in C (this is not a recommendation), if you wanted C like performance but guaranteed safety you're talking about Rust. Something that can get your app running quickly? Lots of people would recommend Go, others Django or Flask for Python, others Node.js.
If you want a language for both front end and back end then it's almost impossible to go past JavaScript because when talking about modern web app front ends it's almost impossible to go past JavaScript.
Keep in mind that Uber is a huge company with a complicated back end and front ends on multiple platforms (browser, iPhone, Android). The back end is actually a mix of Node.js, Python, Go, and Java (not to mention the infrastructure the code sits on and interacts with) and the front end is determined mostly by what device it needs to run on (it's React (a JavaScript front end framework) in the browser though).
It's always great to learn more programming languages and see how things are done differently. If you already know a bit of JavaScript (which I suspect most PHP programmers would) then you can focus on the Node parts of Node.js. After that though definitely check out something like Java or C#, it will expand your perspective and likely make you a better coder everywhere.