I've worked on projects with a couple of hundreds of thousands of lines of PHP in a 'mission critical' environment.
I've also done work with Java, Ruby/JRuby or Groovy/Grails, JavaFX and most recently Salesforce.com's Apex. I've not touched Scala beyond starting to read a book on the subject. None of these long conversations about various pros and cons of languages tend to resonate with me, mainly because in the long run, I just don't think it matters. Sure, you have to write boilerplate in one language, but in another, you have to put up with terrible (or non existent) tooling or crummy documentation. I don't think any language is a silver bullet. Problems don't get solved, they get moved. The best you can ask for is that the problems you really care about get solved, and the ones you don't care about you can live with. And I guess, after all these posts on "lang a vs lang b" its what I'd like to see more of. i.e. If your problem is x, then language y offers you the following benefits issue. (Problem x being 'CRUD web app', 'Desktop application', 'Message processing system') I feel, if you know your tool well, you'll deliver well, and the possibility of a language failing you is not with its syntax, but with the limits of the platform it runs on (For instance, poor integration with features of the native operating system). Sure, one language may be more elegant than another, but I think that's just programmer ego and most of the time, in the commercial world, it doesn't matter how beautifully you've implemented it, but rather, did you get it done at all. Anyway, there are far smarter people on this list than I. Perhaps I'm not intellectually capable of engaging an the deeper merits of many of these concepts that get argued about - when you eventually all reach a conclusion, I expect I'll see the results in the "Developers wanted" section of my local employment website. Until then I hope to stay out of the way. :) On Sep 13, 1:49 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Serge Boulay <[email protected]>wrote: > > > The syntax issue is not a problem. I'm just so use to statically typed > > languages and the tools built around them that I never really considered > > anything else. I think I identify more with the work you are doing with > > Mirahhttp://www.mirah.org/wiki/MirahFeatures. > > Same here. To me, Ruby has become the replacement of shell, so that whenever > I need to write a script that is going to manipulate some files, do some > filtering (great for log files for example) or something simple like that, > Ruby is my default language. > > But because of the fact that it's dynamically typed, I would never consider > for anything longer than a few hundreds of lines, especially with a team of > more than one person. > > And Charles, I'd like to emphasize that what you did with JRuby is > absolutely outstanding. > > -- > Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
