Choice of Language for Large-Scale Web Apps?

anyon wonders: "PHP is the most popular language for the web. eBay uses ISAPI (C), Google uses C/C++ (search), Java (gmail), and Python. Microsoft uses ASP (what else?). For small web site, it really doesn't matter. What's your take on language choice for large-scale web applications? Maybe language choice is irrelevant, only good people (developers) matter? If you can get the same good quality people, then what language you would chose? Considering the following factors: performance, scalability, extendibility, cost of development (man-month), availability of libraries, cost of libraries, development tools? Has there been a comprehensive comparison done?"

Comments

Hmmmm

[bryan986]

I prefer english

Perl.

[Anonymous Coward]

For everything.

all these new languages are hype

[Dysenteryduke]

For large scale applications, java, c/c++, perl, PHP just don't cut it. You should really check out mod_fortran. Everything you love about fortran with none of the hype.

Re:all these new languages are hype

[deaddrunk]

Even IBM COBOL has web extensions and an XML parser these days; I've used them to generate reports.

Re:all these new languages are hype

[Ryosen]

>>Everything you love about fortran with none of the hype.

I read that as "Everything you love about fortran with none of the hope."

Fortran? Seriously, what's the matter? Was Emacs not available?

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Lotus Domino

[Kenja]

Hell, if I have to suffer so should all of you.

(yes I program with this monstrosity of a system)

Re:Lotus Domino

[legLess]

Suddenly, your sig makes much more sense.

Re:Lotus Domino

[LS]

run away from your job... NOW!!! If you are able to get a functional system out of domino, you are definitely skilled enough to use a real environment to build web-apps. run now before your resume is subsumed!!!

Re:Polyglot

[ScytheBlade1]

Repeat after me: Java is not Javascript, Javasctipt is not Java.

If you are a singlehanded developer

[00_NOP]

Perl is a great choice. You can do anything with it and nobody else understands what your code does so they have to get you to maintain it :)

Brainfuck!

[Tablizer]

Recommend Brainfuck to your company. Sure, they will eventually fire you when they realize what they got into, but you will go out with a hell of a snicker.

Re:Polyglot

[pyite]

"All tools are hammers. Except screwdrivers which are chisels."

Everything, huh?

[LibertineR]

And people wonder why geeks dont get laid.

It is Saturday, and instead of being out in the sunshine, taking in rays, talking to women, GOING OUTSIDE, here we are, in front of our screens debating about which language to build our web apps with? Can we suck enough?

Dont bother replying, because when this damn compile is done, I am going outside if it kills me. I wont be here to read any replies, dammit.

Re:Everything, huh?

[cornface]

I wrote a perl script to go outside once.

It worked!

Re:Everything, huh?

[LibertineR]

Thats funny. No, the fuckin compile broke. I'm still here.

Re:Everything, huh?

[Jeremi]

and instead of being out in the sunshine, taking in rays, talking to women, GOING OUTSIDE, here we are, in front of our screens debating about which language to build our web apps with?

The problem with talking to women is that so few of them have anything interesting to say about whether or not C++ is better than Perl... ;^)

Re:Nothing like...

[andreyw]

You forgot -

VI vs EMACS
GNOME vs KDE

Re:Java Java Java!

[timeOday]

Writing efficient assembly code today is at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude harder work than it was in the 60s or 70s

4 orders of magnitude - so if it took a whole week to master assembler back then, it takes 192 years now? I'm just glad today's experts had the foresight to begin studying assembly back in the year 1813.

[blank] rocks!

[Tablizer]

[fill_in_the_blank] is the way go to. See [blank].org for more. For anyone who's built custom sites based on [blank], I think they would agree with me. [blank] is really easy to use for building big apps for use in web stuff, and [blank] provides an easy-to-code-for application framework that saves lots of time and money.

Best of all, it is [blank]-oriented so that you just snap functionality together like Lego blocks to get an instant app that runs at the speed of light almost right out of the box! And [blank] scales to every user on the entire planet. And it plugs into XML.

Only a Devry graduate would use anything different. Go with [blank]!

Orders of magnitude are base 2 in assembly lang.

[SimHacker]

Orders of magnitude in assembly language are measured in base 2, not base 10. So four orders of magnitude more than 7 days would be only 112 days (a bit more than 1/3 of a year), not 70,000 days (almost 192 years).

Of course you also have to adjust for a few orders of magnitude in the other direction, now that registers are larger.

Here's how to add two 32 bit numbers on the 8 bit 6502 (C = A + B):

CLC
LDA A
ADC B
STA C
LDA A+1
ADC B+1
STA C+1
LDA A+2
ADC B+2
STA C+2
LDA A+3
ADC B+3
STA C+3

Oh man, that was exhausting.

-Don

Re:Polyglot

[FredFnord]

Who has wood bits anyway?

I'd have to guess it would be people who got theirs shot off in the war.

-fred