Don't you love it when people
take a simple innocent question and turn it into a language war? There are variations, but here is how it usually begins:
- Person A: "I'd like to work in language XYZ"
- Person B: "XYZ sucks and so do people using XYZ"
- Person A: ???
Paul Graham wrote an interesting classification of
ways to disagree, and I am happy to see that (in this particular case), people have actually been too smart to simply take the bait and start calling each other names ;-) There is a big community of PHP developers out there, and I am glad that they are looking for
constructive ways of making their case, rather than
getting tricked into some artificial dispute. Personally, I have not signed the petition. It's not that I don't like the language -- I simply don't care enough. Languages are tools -- some work better than others for a particular use case, but they will all get the job done eventually.
Instead of focusing on new languages, I think people should rather try working with what's out there (python) and rather request new features and APIs. Having said that: if I could wave a magic wand and have a new programming environment supported, it would probably be the JVM. Not Java per se, but the virtual machine its bytecode gets compiled to. Why? Well, it has the potential of giving us not one new language, but an entire set, such as
- Java
- PHP (through Quercus)
- Groovy
- Scala
- Javascript (through Rhino)
What do you guys think? Let the flame wars begin...
4 comments:
I want the Erlang Virtual machine (no matter what language implemented on top of it), because it is far superior in regards to performance, scalability, concurrency, fault-tolerance and code-reloading capabilities compared to the JVM or any other popular VM out there.
Ruby on rails would be my preference. It is such a nice environment to work with. I am struggling with django right now and I don't think its because I'm unfamiliar with Python. However, your point about flame wars being easier to fan than to sit down and learn something different is a very good one. I will struggle on...
With the same argument you could ask for the .NET framework. Then you could get:
(Iron)Python
(Iron)Ruby
and hundreds of other languages.
But it's a Microsoft thing, so won't happen anytime soon...
> With the same argument you could
> ask for the .NET framework.
Absolutely. The CLR is not a bad VM, and thanks to Mono and a couple of other implementations, it is also available outside the Windows OS.
The jist of the post was to focus on new features, since languages are replaceable. As long as it is portable and stable on many platforms and has good support for a multitude of languages, any VM would be fine for me. For the moment, I'm much more excited about new APIs, such as memcache, than whether I can compile my JSPs...
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