The future of programming.
February 16, 2005
For the last several years, when asked about what programming language that I thought people should jump into, I would automatically make Java my first choice – things are changing now.
There is growing appreciation for flexible dynamic scripting languages (like PHP, Python) over strongly-typed compiled languages like Java.
Why?
I see two big reasons why people are looking to the scripting languages as a viable alternative to Java:
- Speed of development.
- Ease of use.
There is no argument (among sane people,) that you can build applications in a scripting language in a fraction of the time that it takes to build the same application in Java.
The Java zealots would argue:
- Scripting code will not be maintainable.
- Scripting code will run too slow
About code maintainability:
The reality is that code maintainability has as much to-do with the programmer as it does with the language – you can write crappy Java that is not easy to maintain or extend … I’ve seen it more than once – maybe even 3 times!
🙂
The same thing can be said of scripting languages …
Another interesting point, is that you can usually write an application with far less code than you would in Java – many times we are talking 1/4 to 1/5 the code! A thousand lines of code is much easier to maintain than 5000!
About speed of code execution:
Again, many times that comes down to the programmers skill. Having said that, the evidence shows that for many applications, the scripting languages out there run more than fast enough.
Anecdote: PHP seems to be fast enough for Yahoo.
The old argument that Java people used when defending Java’s speed (relative to C++ ) can be applied to scripting languages: computers are really fast these days … as such the difference in execution speed (most of the time) is negligible.
Java’s ever increasing complexity- benefits the few at the expense of the many:
It seems to me that the Java community has made the platform more and more complex (in favor of huge projects,) at the expense of productivity of small to medium sized projects. The problem is, that the vast majority of the projects out there are small and medium sized.
Conclusion
I’ve written most of my software in Java over the last several years, I like Java. But these days I don’t look to Java anymore because it just takes too much time to get anything done. Even small Java applications have a lot of overhead in just setting up – xml descriptors, frameworks etc. I’m not even going to get into the verbosity of the code itself …
These days I look to PHP to write my web apps – it’s just too easy and fast to ignore. PHP has got some baggage from its’ roots of being a ‘web designers language’ but it is fast, has support from big players like IBM and most important , it’s everywhere!
What about Ruby?
Looks very cool, but it is a marginal language – nobody uses it these days. Last I checked, in comes in as the 28th most used language – below COBOL, Python, VB … you get the idea.
