Linked by snydeq on Tue 14th Oct 2008 16:58 UTC
Peter Wayner examines the platforms and passions underlying today's popular dynamic languages, and though JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy, and other scripting tools are fast achieving the critical mass necessary to flourish into the future, 10 forces in particular appear to be driving the evolution of this development domain. From the co-optation of successful ideas across languages, to the infusion of application development into applications that are fast evolving beyond their traditional purpose, to the rise of frameworks, the cloud, and amateur code enablers, each will have a profound effect on the future of today's dynamic development tools.
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Member since:
2006-07-26
Just read this from Slashdot. They linked to a version that is all on one page....
http://weblog.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/...
The article took the words right out of my mouth.
Some good lines...
"Frameworks are becoming even more dominant. Some people identify themselves as Django developers even though they're writing Python code."
Applications are becoming their own worlds. There are 23 job listings for WordPress developers.
I completely agree with those two statements. With languages like this being so easy to learn, its not about the language any more, it is about the framework or the application's api. That is where you invest your time.
But will PHP be able to shake the casual structure that encourages beginners to whip up spaghetti code? Will it be able to continue to mix the presentation layer and the application layer without driving everyone insane? Will Zend's collection of server optimizations provide enough performance to overcome any limitations of the language?
That stuff really turned me off of PHP. I just learned Django and am pretty fond of it. Makes you do stuff the right way. You can't mix html and python. It makes you use it's own template language that is pretty dumb...just your basic for loops and stuff. This forces you to do anything complicated in a different file in a different language (Python).
In five years, there's a good chance you'll be able to imagine you're writing Python while the code is interpreted by something called JavaScript.
Did someone do something like that before using LLVM. Writing code in one language that gets translated into JavaScript?