Posted by Andy Dingley on 01/25/06 10:15

On Wed, 25 Jan 2006 07:48:35 +0000, David Dorward <dorward@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>Andy Dingley wrote:
>
>> The many other options are a long way behind these "big three" in
>> usefulness.
>
>Rubbish. There are plenty of other good options out there. Perl, Ruby and
>Python spring to mind as three very powerful and popular options.

Those are clearly the three next-closest candidates, but I don't think
they quite cut it.

Perl is a dog. mod_perl is bad enough, but I'd hate anyone to read an
old book and still think that CGI Perl was a sensible option for new
projects.

Python is a lovely language. Now find cheap (PHP-grade) hosting for it,
or build a real _big_ site with it.

Ruby / Rails is a close contender for Java and I think it might very
soon be a credible option. Not quite today though.

The advantage of Java over Python or Ruby isn't the language, or even
the core platform, it's in the _community_. Think of a need for a web
toolkit to do <foo> and Java already has a good, stable, free open
source one out there already. From Eclipse through to log4j, this stuff
is just sitting there waiting for you to be ready to use it. ASP will
never do that. Perl did it, but the language is too nasty. PHP did it,
but they were written badly by half-competent coders.

--
Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods

[Back to original message]