[smt88]

Here are my thoughts, in no particular order.

- Don't work with a friend on a startup. You are very unlikely to be friends afterward. If you can't easily compromise on something as unimportant as your stack, you're going to disagree on way more important things. Why do you need two devs anyway?

- Two things that kills startups are analysis paralysis (always trying to make the perfect choice = wasting lots of time) and being afraid to leave your comfort zone. Both of you should be willing to use the other person's stack because it will end this pointless argument and also help you learn something new (and possibly something you like even better than what you're using now).

- If you're using Angular, you have an objective reason to slightly prefer Node: it allows you to use a single language on the front and back ends.

- One possible compromise would be to use TypeScript, which was created by the same guy who created C#, so it shares lots of the same philosophy. TypeScript is also the native language of Angular now, so you can use it on the front and back ends.

- Another possible compromise would be for one of you to work on the back end only, and the other to work on the front end only.

[keefe]

Using a single language on the front and back is a very nice plus, especially with ecmascript 6 support. My current job is doing that and it makes it much easier to break off features without having to get the server guy (me) involved. I personally feel like there is more javascript out there as well, so it's points for staffing.

C# I think is probably better documented, with fewer hair pulling bugs (I will frequently have to read code in a library to understand how exactly to use it in nodejs) and I'm very much missing a standard threading system, but I think early on it's more important to go fast so I would vote full stack JS over JS + .NET

[skylark]

I feel like if you use a lightweight node/express setup, you feel really productive because you're spending a lot of time coding, but you're actually far less productive than someone who uses an actual full fledged server side development framework (Rails/Django). For toy projects I do enjoy node, but if I was throwing myself into a startup, I'd use Rails without hesitation.