91–100 of 122 posts
PHP people seem to have an inferiority complex, always defending and rationalizing. Here's a secret for you guys, all the choices suck in one way or another.
"Being enlightened gentlemen, we split all programming languages into two groups, sucks and doesn't-suck and put all of them into the first group."
We still build in Coldfusion with core modules in Java. In its tag based days it was annoying but now that you can work in pure CFScript it's a lot cleaner.
I think that the languages used by people who voted for "Other" are the most interesting to see in this context. Could you please post what language you're using in your project if you use a language that is not listed? I use Erlang.
I'm suspicious about people who put too much importance into their language choice, maybe because I'm tempted to be one of them. You can love beautiful programs, or programs that get things done. The former people tend to gravitate toward things like Haskell, which is very pure, conceptually beautiful, and feels like using the LHC to crack nuts. But hey, you're using LHC, great fun. The latter will pick whatever ugly…
Your characterization seems a bit too binary. When I have a choice I code in Python, because it seems to provide a really nice balance between beauty and practicality. It's an elegant, well-designed language that also has a rich, diverse, mature ecosystem of standard and third-party libraries and frameworks.
Also agreed, I'm quite binary, if not caricatural, in my characterization. But it gets the point across, and I trust readers to put grains of salt wherever appropriate.
This being said, if like most projects, yours is more about reusing existing stuff than about writing software components that have never been released by anyone else before, and better-fitting components exist in PHP than in Python, You'll be better off writing ugly and not-fun PHP code. Some people can swallow this, others can't; the latters are probably better off not going the startup way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it a little surprising that you use both perl and ruby. Is it an issue of "one guy likes perl, another likes ruby", or are there things you find easier in one than the other, in both directions? Or is ruby just there for your API and your internal stuff is perl?
I hadn't done web programming for about 8 years when we founded Directed Edge, and the last time I had Perl was still riding high. So the old stuff, and a lot of the maintenance scripts are in Perl. Ruby has, however, begun eating into the Perl usage. I still find Perl a little better suited for straight text-processing tasks, not to mention that it's a lot faster than Ruby for such. It's tempting to say, "It doesn't…
I'm suspicious about people who put too much importance into their language choice, maybe because I'm tempted to be one of them. You can love beautiful programs, or programs that get things done. The former people tend to gravitate toward things like Haskell, which is very pure, conceptually beautiful, and feels like using the LHC to crack nuts. But hey, you're using LHC, great fun. The latter will pick whatever ugly…
While that is ultimately true, in the first days (especially pre-investment), the largest expense is programmer's salary, whether that is something you pay, or an opportunity you forego. Thus, getting to a fundable prototype twice as fast, or to a more robust system at the same time IS a factor. Regardless of how much focus you put on it, it is usually the first "hard" decision everyone has to take in their tech-supp…
Unless you go to a completely unchartered territory (as e.g. Viaweb did), and there's no library to get you halfway done, you should pick the best library and just accept the language it happens to be written in.
Of course, a good language supported by a great community has better chances to have the best libraries. I'd even go further, and argue that "language goodness" should be defined by its ability to let great libraries and community emerge, rather than how fun and concise it is to code in it. This property is not entirely determined by the language's syntax, semantics, or even implementation, but it is what truly matters, what gets things done or not.