On Saturday, 14 May 2016 at 10:29:59 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
[snip]
That a service is run in a certain language is no proof. I've
an old homepage that was written in PHP. It works, you can add
to it. But is it easy to maintain? Sure Google have loads of
coders who can maintain even the messiest code base. You could
write a service in Perl.
Perl and Php were never intended for writing larger programs,
so not sure how those can be used as an example.
Of course not, neither was Python intended to replace languages
like C++ or Java. You mentioned projects that are successful and
use scripting languages. Facebook uses (or used!) a lot of PHP,
that's why I mentioned it. But none of these scripting languages
were ever meant to be used for building large scale projects.
People just did it, because it was so easy. Now it's come back to
bite them.
The trend is that scripting is taking over UI programming. For
many applications the UI is a big chunk of the codebase.
Recompilation just to tweak the UI is annoying so I don't
expect this trend to change. This is an old trend too, emacs
being a prime example.
That's a good use of scripting languages. That's where SLs
belong, i.e. very specific domains where they make things easier.
