[igreulich]

So coding in one language is a BIT of a red herring.

It only works if the paradigms your app uses are the same in the front and back. And I have nott seen a project where the KIND of problems that need solving (in the front vs back) were close enough for the same language to be a benefit.

I mean at the end of the day, I can build a house with JUST a screwdriver, but man, I'd rather use the right tool fot the specific job.

And at the end of the day, $LANG is a tool.

[osdiab]

My company uses Node with Typescript on the front and backend; we’ve strongly typed our APIs and thanks to the excellent io-ts library we’ve also automated the marshaling and unmarshaling data as it crosses the network boundary so that we can continue to use the strongly typed data, and also are constrained by the types to only call our APIs in valid ways.

Some subset of that can be achieved with stuff like GraphQL or Swagger and what not though I haven’t given it a serious try since we’ve never run into hiccups yet with this system, reliant on a very simple library.

We also use the same package manager (NPM) on both ends and can therefore invoke scripts all over our codebase with the same syntax; and although react code and node code is quite different in structure, they all have the same idioms and async syntax and stuff, so the amount of retraining necessary to convert someone from backend to full stack isn’t very large due to the same environment, and keeping code style consistent across the project is also easy.

So I feel like there’s definitely stuff to profit off of with sharing a single language.

[deusofnull]

Reminds me of yesterday's hn frontpager, the paper about a "programble programming language". they were talking about how domain specific languages within a single language become super distinct and ungrokable to people who are otherwise fluent in the parent language. Think like, an angular dev reading nest.js node backend stuff. With javascript this is sorta everywhere. JS DSLs arent like explicitly uninterpretable to otherwise-experienced JS devs but there is a context shift cost for sure.

Ive not worked with c# much, but is that not as much of a problem with it? Like, is there more of a standardized way of doing things? Python is kinda like that i guess.