I’m looking for a programming language that can help me build a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux that’s not big but not small either. Additionally, I’d like to be able to build a website with the same language. I’ve been considering Ruby, Python, Golang and JavaScript. Python seems to be mainly used for scripting and ai, so I’m not sure if it’s the best fit. JavaScript has a lot of negative opinions surrounding it, while Ruby sounds interesting. Can anyone recommend a language that meets my requirements?
I think it would help narrow things down if you described what kind of website you want to build.
Spend a week or two with each if you can, even if you don’t stick with any you’ll be able to tell what parts you did or didn’t prefer or found difficult or easy that might help make a more informed choice. You might prefer the language features or syntax of one, but the tool chain or frameworks of another.
Take a look at Dart+Flutter.
Python would be OK. Ruby is nearly dead nowadays. JS itself is used rarely, better consider using TS (however I don’t recommend using them for anything other than web frontend). Go is a great language but it’s unpopular in GUI development.
Interesting bunch of takes…
Take a look at Dart+Flutter.
Google just laid off those teams so I doubt this is a good thing to learn if you want something useful in the long-term
Ruby is nearly dead nowadays
Demonstrably false. My career has been in the Ruby/Rails world and I just went through a job hunt where I found tons of Ruby positions
JS itself is used rarely, better consider using TS (however I don’t recommend using them for anything other than web frontend)
Full-stack JS/TS is very popular in the web-dev world.
Go is a great language
I disagree, but this is 100% a personal opinion of mine 😄
I would start with Python it’ll help demystify a lot of programming terminology and methods. I have managed to avoid JS for now but I have to learn it and for web you need at least a basic amount plus you could prob stay in the JS ecosystem for pretty much everything you want to do. Ruby is cool it’s coming back but like Python it tends to be more common on the back-end, that being said there’s some really interesting languages that have spun off it.
I would go Python till you hit a wall it’ll prob be the GUI then learn JS
If I want to build websites and gui apps, would you still recommend using Python over JavaScript.
Python is good for quick results and it’ll help maintain a good hits as your learning. But no there’s a reason JS is so popular and people keep spinning up tools based off it.
You will need more that just one language, if you think you can stay self-motivated for your goals I’d go JS.
Python can do both scripts and desktop apps no problems
Yeah but be prepared for a lot of pain if you want to distribute your app. Python tooling/infra is abysmal.
But what about websites.
So many websites out there are built on Django, Flask, etc.
It can do back ends with django and flask but the only choice for front ends is javascript or something like htmx
Javascript
WASM
Yeah, I’ve been using Rust with Leptos and Axum for a website I’ve been working on. Works great tbh. I don’t even know JS.
I’m writing a web app on Python + HTMX. Little to none javascript involved.
If it’s something simple you can check out FastAPI. For more complicated projects involving data models and relationships, check out Django.
May I recommend Litestar over FastApi?
But use type annotations everywhere and make sure your code is always checker clean (with checkin or PR CI hooks). And don’t turn off any lint checks through laziness, e.g. docstring checks. Even for a solo dev it’s always worth having everything typed, checker clean, and docstrings (even if they only effectively say “this thing really is what you’d assume”). It all saves time and effort in the long and even medium term.
I’ve worked on serious large scale Python projects and frankly it’s been very pleasant and productive, but only with the above conditions.
If “build the server and client in the same language” is a hard requirement, I believe your only choice is JavaScript…
The tone of the post makes me think you’re newer to programming, so I’ll leave it at that, as extensions to this question can overwhelm quickly, but yeah, JavaScript is a fine language for what you’re doing
Thank you alot for the response. And yes, I don’t have a lot of programming experience
JS or really anything you’d make a web app in (I use Rust with something like Dioxus/Yew/Leptos/Tauri), C#/.NET (I use F# because OO-style languages are ugly and a hot mess, especially C# and Java), Java/JVM (I use Scala whenever I can and Kotlin otherwise), C++ with GTK or Qt. There are a lot of options but obviously anything that’s not C++ or web is gonna give you a lackluster experience (though I have a thing against web apps and will go through a lot of hoops to have my application use a native interface)
Without saying what you want the app to do you can’t pick the language, it’s like saying what should I make my house out of? wood, concrete, or ice.
Electron is a well known framework for multiplatform apps. It could be your starting point.C#. Or Python if you must. Don’t use Javascript.
For a desktop app I would go with none of those.
If cross platform is the goal, the more important question, and independent of the programming language, is which GUI framework you will use.
Your best bet, at least if you are looking for a stable GUI framework, the best candidate may be C++ and Qt. But that’s a hassle in its own right - both C++ and Qt.
TypeScript will have some solutions for you, with web rendering as a desktop app. Golang will have Qt bindings or other more experimental/not thoroughly established+popular GUI frameworks.
My personal favorite ecosystem is .NET. It has an official cross-platform UI project MAUI, but without an official Linux target. Community extensions probably exist. Personally, I dislike the way the UI is declared and bound though (XAML).
My current interest, which I have not explored or validate yet, is using .NET but then host a web or Blazor app in it with Webview2. .NET supports cross-boundary programming, crossing web+managed/native development, and crossing web(HTML+JS)+managed.
Most of the time GUI and the framework technology is a hassle. Your question is too broad and unspecific, so there’s not a good answer.
If it’s not a “serious” project that you depend on [for your livelihood], pick and start with whatever [looks good or interesting] and go from there. If it is a “serious project” do a bit more GUI framework exploration and assessment, and pick and commit to something. If it’s a big commitment or risk, do prototyping with your candidates for verification and assessment - beyond the most simple examples, and for your specific usage.
You can count Ruby out immediately. Terrible language.
Also replace JavaScript with Typescript. It’s strictly superior.
I don’t think Go has any mature GUI libraries.
For desktop GUI your main options are:
- Qt, via C++. Probably the best option but if you don’t know C++ that’s a huge barrier.
- Qt, via Python. Reasonable but Python is quite a shit language. It’s very slow and the tooling/infrastructure is absolutely abysmal. Be prepared to bang your head against the wall trying to e.g. get relative imports to work.
- Dart/Flutter. This is quite nice but not super mature for desktop apps. Also the Dart ecosystem is very small so libraries you want may not be available.
- Electron/Typescript. This is quite a good option. Nobody here will recommend this because nerds have a slightly weird hatred of Electron because the minimum download size is like 80MB. But normally it doesn’t really matter. Especially for big apps.
For the web frontend you basically want Typescript. For the backend you can use literally any language.
I would recommend Electron for the GUI and Typescript for the web frontend and Electron GUI. It means you can use the same language everywhere and you won’t need to even implement the same program twice.
If you’re worried about the download size / RAM usage you can look into Tauri which uses your OS’s browser engine. I’ve never used it though.
Regarding tauri: One and a half years ago I looked into it as a potential alternative to using electron.
Back then I had to decide against it for my use case, because when the goal is that it’s a cross platform app, then one has to make sure that whatever “webview version” is used on all target OS, they all have to support the features one needs re one’s own app codebase. Back then I needed some “offscreen canvas” feature that chromium supported (hence electron), but which
webkit2gtk(used on Linux) didn’t at the time.https://tauri.app/v1/references/webview-versions/
So it’s not always easy to give a clear recommendation on using tauri over electron. One really has to get somewhat clear on what kind of “webview requirements” the resp. app will have.
But I do hope this will (or maybe already is) less of an issue in upcoming years (things are moving fast after all).
You can count Ruby out immediately. Terrible language.
wow.
Ever tried to follow a large Ruby codebase like Gitlab? Absolutely nightmare. Not only does it not have type annotations, so you can’t follow code by clicking, but you can’t even follow it by grepping because Rubyists seem to love generated identifiers. Even the syntax of the language makes grepping worse, e.g. the lack of brackets prevents you from grepping for function calls like
foo(.You’re talking about rails. That’s like saying Kotlin is a terrible language because your only exposure to it is with something that decided to use Glassfish Webfly Swarm and Camel.
type annotations
You can literally follow code perfectly fine in an IDE like RubyMine. It actually works much better than Python because Ruby is incredibly consistent in its language design, while Python is an absolute mess (same with JS. Try opening a large Python or JS project in PyCharm or WebStorm).
No clue what you’re talking about with grepping though. Use an IDE like I said and you can literally just “Find all usages” or “Jump to declaration”, etc.
In any case, you shouldn’t be using any of these for large projects like gitlab, so it’s completely inconsequential. Saying something like “Java is terrible, have you ever used it for a CLI? It’s so slow it’s impossible to do anything!” is idiotic because of course it is. That’s not what it’s built for. Ruby is a scripting language. Use it for scripting. It kicks Python’s ass for many reasons, JS is terrible for scripting, and while you can use something like bash or rust, the situation is incredibly painful for both.
None of this has absolutely anything to do with the language design. You’re talking about language design and equating it to being terrible and then saying it’s because you don’t use any sort of tools to actually make it work.
You’re talking about rails.
Maybe other Ruby code is better, but people always say Rails is the killer app of Ruby so…
Use an IDE like I said and you can literally just “Find all usages” or “Jump to declaration”, etc.
That only works if you have static type annotations, which seems to be very rare in the Ruby world.
In any case, you shouldn’t be using any of these for large projects like gitlab, so it’s completely inconsequential.
Well, I agree you shouldn’t use Ruby for large projects like Gitlab. But why use it for anything?
Maybe other Ruby code is better, but people always say Rails is the killer app of Ruby so…
I’ve literally never heard anyone say that…
That only works if you have static type annotations, which seems to be very rare in the Ruby world.
no. it literally works for any ruby code in any project. you do not need static type annotations at all. I can tell you’ve literally never even tried this…
Well, I agree you shouldn’t use Ruby for large projects like Gitlab. But why use it for anything?
because it’s a fantastic scripting language with a runtime that is available on almost every platform on the planet by default (yes most linux distributions include it, compared to something like python which is hardly ever included and if it is it’s 2.x instead of 3.x). It’s also much more readable than bash, python, javascript, etc. so writing a readable (and runnable everywhere) script is dead simple. Writing CLIs with it is also dead simple, while I think Python has a few better libraries for this like Click, Ruby is much more portable than Python (this isn’t my opinion, this is experience from shipping both ruby and python clis for years).
I’ve literally never heard anyone say that
Well you didn’t listen then. Google the phrase.
I can tell you’ve literally never even tried this…
I do not need to try it to know that this is fundamental impossible. But I will try it because you can go some way towards proper type knowledge without explicit annotations (e.g. Pycharm can do this for Python) and it’s better than nothing (but still not as good as actual type annotations).
It’s also much more readable than bash, python, javascript, etc. so writing a readable (and runnable everywhere)
Bash definitely. Not sure I’d agree for Python though. That’s extremely readable.
Jump to declarations or usages has absolutely nothing to do with types so I have no clue why you think type annotations to make jump to useful.
If Ruby is interesting, check out Crystal, it’s like Ruby but static typed and compiled.
There’s no answer to this. All can do what you want in varying degrees. With Opal you can compile Ruby to JavaScript for your frontend for example. Or with electron you can use JavaScript as desktop application.
You gotta say much more about the actual requirements to make any meaningful comparison.
Most people use JavaScript for this nowadays, but most commentary also hates on it.
I’ll be real with you. There’s a reason JavaScript keeps being chosen despite the hate. It’s so much easier and the dev experience is much more polished for creating desktop apps.
The reason it’s hated on is that it is running a browser in the background, which people view as too bloated for a desktop app. Moreover, JS tends not to play well with system-wide themeing like GTK or QT.
But in the end, as a developer, you’ll be dealing with a lot of messiness going with anything else. If you’re up for a challenge, do try other things. But if you just want something that works and looks nice, do Js
To be fair, all three can probably do what you’re asking for, in building a desktop application. So the real question comes as which flavor of language do you want to write. The only language of the three I can’t speak on is Ruby, as I haven’t used it.
Python is a “scripting language”, but by that token technically so is Javascript. It’s an immensely popular language due to its simple syntax, yet complex features as you get better with it. Python can build large-ish applications: web apps, desktop apps, terminal apps, and yes also of course AI, bulk data processing, etc. For GUI applications, I’ve personally used pyqt (4? 5? 6?)
Much of the same can be said for Javascript. As you said, there are “negative opinions” about JS, but everyone has their opinions (most factually-based) on the goods and bads of languages (although, yes, JS does get more negative opinions than others). Yet, Javascript is still a widely used language, and you’ll probably end up needing learning it anyway if you decide to go into web development.
What I personally suggest is this:
- See the learn x in y minutes pages for Python, Javascript, and Ruby. Make sense of the quick-tour of the languages.
- Make a simple project using each of the three languages. Something that just reads something from STDIN, does some work, prints stuff, as an example. This helps you get to know the basics of the syntax, tooling, and quirks of a language, and helps you narrow down which language you’d like to be working further with.
- Pick one of the languages you’re leaning in favor of and go build your application. If you come to a point where you feel like the language you choose is no longer suitable for what you wanted to do, you can always retry with another language, and then you will know at least a fair part of more than one language.
I think I’ll just focus on learning one thing at a time to get a better feel for the basic concepts, rather than worrying about what’s the best approach and then try out some, thanks a lot for the response! It really helped me decide to just get started instead of dwelling on the details.
