5 ms·

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

8 points by yogi123 12y ago

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.

hershel 12y ago
There was some book about building sites/businesses without coding. There's also drupal which can do quite a lot without coding.
- yogi123 12y ago
  thx!
dasmithii 12y ago
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/ https://www.meteor.com/
- yogi123 12y ago
  thx!
cliffwarden 12y ago
Balsamiq for the actual prototyping - http://balsamiq.com/ http://balsamiq.com/ You can export from Balsamiq to HTML. See "Exporting your Mockups to Code" - http://support.balsamiq.com/customer/portal/articles/135659-extensions http://support.balsamiq.com/customer/portal/articles/135659-...
- yogi123 12y ago
  thx cliffwarden!
adam419 12y ago
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.
- yogi123 12y ago
  Thx adam419!
avmich 12y ago
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.
- jesusmichael 12y ago
  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...
  - yogi123 12y ago
    thx!
- yogi123 12y ago
  Researching this as well avmich. Thx!
krapp 12y ago
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/ 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/ 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.
- yogi123 12y ago
  Cool, thx krapps. Will investigate these and thx for sharing your knowledge.
- thenomad 12y ago
  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.
  - yogi123 12y ago
    Appreciate the input, thx!
  - yogi123 12y ago
    Appreciate the input, thx!
djb_hackernews 12y ago
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?
- yogi123 12y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions! I'll email you, b/c that sounds like a really good deal. Happy to help...:).
yunyeng 12y ago
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.
- yogi123 12y ago
  Thx! Sounds like php is the consensus in the comments.