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Reddit: Language vs. Platform (codinghorror.com)
18 points by mattjaynes on April 16, 2007 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


The ease with which libraries can be used appears to be the only metric that matters in high level languages.


when we first thought about ijigg's platform and language, Zaid was amazed by what people were saying about ruby on rails, even being a perl lover and experienced guy I asked myself: "Why not RoR?"

Three days after I started learning the magic and wonderful RoR I though: "WoW that's all that Java struts+expresso would like to be, this is fantastic! But there are small things that pisses me off."

I've like 7 years of experience with real development. From perl procedural coding without any framework to Objective C (to show the more bizarre language I've worked). I developed (not alone) a simple and small perl framework that is being used on iJigg and due to my experience what I can say is:

You have to choose the language and framework that will suit your application needs.

If your application will change everyday don't go for java or C, use these easy to change/handle languages like perl, python, php.

If your application deals a lot with IO and disk usage go for C, C++, Objective C.

If you have many programmers you need something like Java, that IMHO is good because people will code only what you let them code. A good programmer will make the same code as a beginner one. I always thought that Java was made for mass production.

About frameworks, you don't need them if you have something as simple as www.thankyou2006.com.

Frameworks are great, I couldn't live without them when building complex applications but there are many traps when using them. The learning curve and the freedom to hack it.

This comment is already too big, I've to write something more elaborated.


Believe me, it is possible to write very bad code with Java, and you can see the (huge) differences between Java code written by good and bad programmers.

I don't understand "people will only code what you let them code", how is that?


well I think I was very agressive (just because I'm not that a big Java fan), but I was intended to say that the java language is beautiful by itself, all that OO stuff and the fact that you don't have many ways to do the same thing (like you do when using those intepreted and crazy languages like perl) makes any code looks better.

But concerning that "only will code what you let them" I'm saying that Java lets you define the interfaces (I'm talking about MVC now) and your coder MUST implement that no matter what.

I'm sure that the distance between a bad code and a good code in java is nothing compared with a bad php code and a good php code not to say perl where you can write the same thing in many ways.


Platforms and languages should be orthogonal. They have become tied together because the glue provided by the OS sucks.


Hopefully Parrot should go someway to solving that




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