Slashdot Mirror
Sophistication in Web Applications?
whit537 asks: "Anyone who uses Gmail for 5 minutes can see that it's a pretty dern sophisticated web application. But just how sophisticated? Well, first of all, the UI is composed of no less than nine iframes (try turning off the page styles in Firefox with View > Page Style). But then consider that these iframes are generated and controlled by a 1149 line javascript. This script includes no less than 1001 functions, and 998 of these functions have one- or two-letter names! They're obviously not maintaining this script by hand in that form. So do they write human-readable javascripts and then run them all together, or have they developed some sort of web app UI toolkit in Python? Does Gmail need to be this complex or is the obfuscation a deliberate attempt to prevent reverse-engineering? And are there any other web apps that are this sophisticated?"
Kirby
This is a myth, and has been proven false countless of times, such as by these guys, or these guys, or even these guys, or, God forbid, you may have heard of these guys.
First, the term "interpreted dynamic language" is vague and misleading. Interpretation has nothing to do with code maintainability. (You can interpret C, and you can compile putatively interpreted languages such as Java and Python to native code; indeed Java has been natively compiled for years, and the fact that it is just-in-time compilation is irrelevant).
And what does "dynamic" mean? Do you mean a dynamically, as opposed to statically, typed language? Do you mean runtime introspection? Self-modification and metaprogramming? Runtime name resolution? What? I suspect you mean a combination of these. Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Haskell, Lisp and OCaml have these features. C++ can be considered a "dynamic" language, as can Java, C#, etc. So why do you claim that these languages are not maintainable?
These newfangled languages are more rapid to develop in than lower-level languages. Maintenance is simpler because the languages are simpler, higher-level and more easily maintained. For example, the absence of a separate compile/link cycle means I can get from changing a source line to testing the source line quicker.
In many cases, reproducing or debugging a bug is simpler in, say, Python than in C, because the infrastructure itself is simpler. Pure Python, for example, does not have memory access violation errors; there's no way your Python code can read or write an invalid pointer, write beyond the end of a buffer and so on; a whole class of pointer errors, most of which have security repercussions, are annihilated by this feature. Similarly, Python uses exceptions, so nobody can forget to check and propagate a function's error return value.
More often than not, errors that surface in these languages are high-level problems, which is good, because those are simpler than the ones involving someone forgetting to call free() on an allocated buffer or accounting for overflow when shifting a bit mask.
The uncertainty involved in the dynamic typing/late binding model of such languages is compensated for through unit testing.
Oh, and JavaScript, a "dynamic language", is being used by Google in a production system, and Google is known to use Python and Ruby in their systems. I suggest you call them up and tell them their languages aren't suitable.