From: Alex Young <alex@...>
Date: 2006-09-04T02:13:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming

David Vallner wrote:
> Utter pants. I mean, you used the word "bloat", which should make people 
> lose any debate by default.
> 
> Alvin Ryder wrote:
>> Java and C# are no guarantee for success. 
> 
> Neither is Ruby / Rails. *No technology* is a guarantee for success, no 
> technology ever was, and I'll bet a gold bar against a plastic spoon no 
> technology ever will. Technology used is a very important decision to 
> make, but it never single-handedly moves you from doable to undoable or 
> vice versa.
That's the wrong argument to pick.  Try calculating the full dynamics of 
a modern metropolitan water supply network with just pen and paper. 
Technological advances *do* move us from undoable to doable, and it's 
specific technologies that do it.


>> you seem to need 10 instead of 3 people and 5 times as long.
> 
> Pure, unadulterated shite. Give me numbers. Credible statistics and real 
> research, not random anectodal success stories that are too pathethic to 
> sell Herbalife diet pills.
I'm not going to address this - research on this level is heavily 
funded, and heavily trend-driven.  The answers you get depend too 
heavily on what questions you ask.

> Also, initial development cost isn't a very important factor. Recalls 
> your uni software lifecycle charts about how much of a project's life is 
> maintenance. For a successful project, the numbers are very much true. 
> With a successful product comes the responsibility of supporting it and 
> keeping it successful, and in some cases this responsibility creates 
> ongoing costs that dwarf the initial development horribly.
No argument there whatsoever.

>> Ok, sure Java's OO may be nicer than Perl 5's but once you brew
>> HTML/Javascript/JSP/JSTL/EL/tags/JSF or Struts together the result
>> isn't exactly what I'd call pretty. Java is in no way a safe bet.
> 
> Noone cares about pretty. It's also a completely irrelevant issue when 
> deciding on implementation language if you're at least remotely 
> responsible.
Actually, pretty does matter.  The comfort of a problem solver directly 
impacts his/her approach to a problem.  That's just human nature.

> Speaking purely theorethically, Ruby can not be made as performant as 
> Java or C# could be made if they had ideally performing implementations. 
> Latent typing makes it almost impossible to do certain optimizations as 
> static typing does. That's pure fact. 
I remain unconvinced by this - and it's mainly JIT optimisation that 
keeps me on the fence.  Dynamic optimisations can beat static - but not 
in all cases.  I believe this is what one calls an "open research" question.

-- 
Alex