On Nov 20, 2010, at 8:25 AM, Benedikt Meurer wrote: > You can develop web services using probably any programming language > available in the world. That's what I was about to say, it doesn't matter > from a technological point of view. So if the programming language is > irrelevant, but you have to pick one, you'll start looking for arguments to > prefer one over the other (based on available libraries,
I think this is the key, available libraries and tools around the language. > marketing, etc.). Some argument made Facebook pick PHP (instead of Perl, > Java, Ruby, C/C++, OCaml, Haskell, Standard ML, whatever), probably something > trivial like availability of PHP developers You think smart people in startups make big decisions based on such trivial things ? I guess they've chosen PHP in 2005 because it made sense to choose PHP in the context of what they were doing: prototyping a social website as soon as possible by reusing as much as possible (Apache, Mysql, etc). I know OCaml, I know PHP, I know Java, and in 2005 I've written my homepage in PHP, not OCaml, not Java. > , or simply because PHP was popular at that time (i.e. there were people who > knew the term "PHP"). > > Now the world looks different of course, there are hundreds of millions lines > of existing code, and really porting all that code to a new language would > involve a lot of effort, money and time. > > Benedikt > _______________________________________________ > Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: > http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list > Archives: http://caml.inria.fr > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs > _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs