Web Applications Should Be Compiled

Actually what I would most miss in C is really basic stuff like dynamic strings, dynamic arrays and hashes.

Your comment adds less to an intelligent discussion than does the article you're calling a troll.

First, this isn't a troll. The guy posted a blog post on his own blog. He didn't post off-topic content to a thread and didn't try to provoke an argument in an otherwise civil conversation. The only possible way that you can characterize this as a troll is that he uses some crude language, and says some things that are unpopular on HN. But say what you will about the content, he didn't try to make you read it.

Second, the guy has a point. I've had a rant like this building in my craw for a long time, and this guy nailed nearly every point I've wanted to make. From a software engineering perspective, web development is in the dark ages. What's worse, it's a luddite process -- a totally self-made exile from the benefits of 50 years of progress: Type safety is shunned. Language efficiency is ignored. Data structures beyond the hash table are exotic and rare (and worse, I've met more than one "professional" web developer who couldn't tell me the difference between open and closed hashing!)

I understand very well that programmer time is more valuable than computer hardware, and that the speed/development time trade-off is often biased toward development time. But if you ask me, what was once an intelligent guideline is now becoming a cult. It is possible to do rapid development in a compiled language, and there are some really good reasons -- beyond execution speed -- to revisit the idea.

I think your point is exacerbated by the fact that it's hard to get web UIs "right". I was critical of languages like python and ruby until I had to do the frontend for some company code. Box looks like it needs to be shifted a few pixels right? Modify code, compile, check. Logo looks better with an offset? Modify code, compile, check. Writing in a scripting language makes it just Modify, check.

You just can't do that in compiled languages, and the compiled language of choice for the web-- Java --isn't known for blazing compilation speed. You'd probably also have to jar it up and copy the damn thing over, whereas psps could be modified in-place. I think this is something that compiled folks like me simply failed to grasp: all the things about scripting languages that make them orders of magnitude faster for developing, especially for the web.

I've worked on a webapp under serious load, and I think he's right.

You're correct that database queries and resource bottlenecks are the usual problems for web application scaling, but even taking that into account, I've had more than one problem that was caused by the simple fact that Ruby is a dog of a language. Python is better, but only just so. Perl is faster than both, but still nowhere near as fast as a C++ program.

But let's ignore execution speed, since one can make a reasonable argument that even the slowest scripting language can saturate the network I/O on modern hardware. I think I'd still consider using a compiled language, because the type-safety and compile-time guarantees of a statically typed language would go a long way toward eliminating a huge class of silly bugs that we deal with on a daily basis. That's developer time in the bank.

It's a bit crippled.