For reference, this is a Jan 2019 Ycombinator post describing a go-to stack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18829557

TLDR:

• Frontend: React with TypeScript
• Backend: Django (Python) or Rails (Ruby)
• Databases: Postgres
• Serve using: Nginx, with cookies for authentication
• Tooling: Use VS Code for Javascript, and something called json-server in npm for a quick REST API

(I understand REST is sort of a language describing APIs that can be imported into various web frameworks?)

This sounds like what I have in mind, but I know a lot of people have strong opinions and I like to hear them.

For what it's worth, I found out that React has a really cool tutorial for a client-side tic-tac-toe game. See https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html

if you're already comfortable with javascript, i would suggest express, but if you're totally new to the web dev game, i would suggest something like django or rails as they tend to be more "batteries included" and both python and ruby have less "gotchas" in terms of weird edge-case behavior than js does.

my all-time favorite web framework is actually phoenix, which is written in a newer language called elixir that runs on the erlang VM. this is a slightly more esoteric choice, but it's far from unproven technology (it is used at many companies you have probably heard of), and phoenix has a lot of nice features that i now miss any time i go back to the other choices i've listed here.

You probably don't need a front end but yea React is everywhere. Vue is a little saner than react.

I'd go with Django because Python is everywhere. I'm big into php but that's because I'm old.

Postgres is great.

I've never done the basic level server stuff, you can use a service like https://www.pythonanywhere.com/ that handles that. That all sounds right tho.

This poster uses VS Code, which everyone uses now and it's good but like I've said before, IDEs are really nice. Jetbrains....

And yea that's an easy way to make an API but if you're not having external applications interacting with your app you might not need one.

I find Ruby to be a fun language and I wish it had more uptake. Sadly, I never see anyone talking about it except alongside rails. And I never hear about rails anymore.

That being said I'm more on the backend side of things so it's not surprising that I wouldn't know the fronted stuff as much. So it could well be a thriving language. I hope so. It's very fun to use.

Python is far more ubiquitous though and it's also very fun.

I, the experienced web dev, would do this in PHP. My reasoning is:

• It sounds like the big frameworks are completely overkill for this use case. PHP makes it super easy to make applications like these without a framework.

• PHP runs as a daemon/is integrated into the web server, so there's no application server you have to manage yourself. Single .php file, drop in www directory, it's ready to go.

i am also bummed about ruby’s lack of popularity

Ruby isn't dying by any means but yea it's no python

you could say ruby is a hidden gem

i played a little bit with ruby awhile ago, but i've mostly stuck with python. are there things about ruby you prefer over python?

Ooh I've seen two people recommend PHP so far here! My understanding of PHP was always that it was universally hated by everyone who ever used it, but the way you describe it actually sounds quite appealing.

Django sounds appealing to me since I already love Python a lot. Phoenix appeals to me because of the name, and then I can tell people "Yeah I have a side project using Python and Phoenix" and it sounds really rad, like I'm a sorcerer in a fancy tower