Scripting languages. Dynamic languages. Agile languages. Actually OO languages.
Whatever you want to call them, there is a lot of talk about them at the moment.
People get very religious about kind of thing, which is particularly strange. They are all tools, and if you use one of them, it doesn’t mean that you can not pick up another, or that you must hate all other tools.
Noone programs/expresses themselves in one language anyway! SQL/bash/*ML, …
So, some people are getting into a tissy arguing about Rails vs. “insert Java framework”, or Ruby vs. Java, etc. Let’s settle down, and try to work out how we can learn from eachother, and when it makes sense to use a given tool for the job at hand.
A bunch of leading scripting language experts were seperately interviewed via email in the article: The State of the Scripting Universe.
It is very interesting to see how much consensus there is on dynamic languages use.
This shows, that often, the leaders in the community mimic their silent users. They just want to get stuff done.
March 22nd, 2005 at 1:21 pm
I wish there was more case studies on how people are ‘really’ using technology to solve real-world problems with whatever framework/language, etc…
We seem to spend more time doing comparisons instead of creating value for our customer (whomever they are). I happen to use JAVA primarily, some core, but mostly j2ee. There is the occasional need to work with PHP, Perl, Unix Shell, etc…
To me the bottom line, Ruby on Rails, Java on the Trail, Python in the sand, let’s get to work man.
March 22nd, 2005 at 2:33 pm
I’ve been trying to spread the term “pragmatic languages”. I don’t remember if I coined the term, or picked it up from elsewhere (possibly Dave Thomas).
March 22nd, 2005 at 2:45 pm
So Java isn’t pragmatic? :)
That is a bit harsh. It isn’t that language A is more pragmatic than language B. They are just different tools, for different jobs.
It can be more pragmatic to use C, or assembler to hard core real time robotics.
Dion
March 22nd, 2005 at 3:37 pm
I can’t imagine using the phrase “Ruby on Rails” in an interview. I think at most companies you’d get some very strange looks. I’m sure these projects have their places (and probably many of them), but I haven’t run into anyone using them.
March 23rd, 2005 at 8:51 am
Here’s my problem. I used Groovy for a rather sizeable script that did som data shuffling. In the end we decided to convert it back to Java, because of productivity issues, namely in the way of lacking tool support. Tab completion in IntelliJ made it faster to type the same code, and other people could more easily read the Java code due to the code browsing features in IntelliJ (Ctrl-B). Also, it took way too much time to compile our 5-page Groovy script (>30secs), which just isn’t ok. So in the end Java just worked better. Go figure.