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The State of Scripting Languages
Esther Schindler writes to tell us that Lynn Greiner has another look at the state of the scripting universe as a follow on to the same topic three years ago. Greiner talks to major players from each of the main scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby, and Javascript) to find out the current status and where they are headed in the future. "The biggest change since 2005 has been the growth of richer Web applications that perform more of their computations in the browser using JavaScript. The demand for these applications has forced developers to learn and use JavaScript much more than before. There's also been a lot of interest in Ruby, another dynamic language, spurred by the release and growth of Ruby on Rails. As a result of these changes, many developers are becoming more comfortable with dynamic languages."
That was a pretty reasonable guess, except it isn't correct. :-)
Lynn understandably went back to the same people, initially, since it would be easiest to say, "Hey, three years ago you said this... change you mind on anything?" Some of the guys didn't have the time (for example, Guido's a little busy with the next version of Python), so she asked who they'd recommend she speak with instead. To my understanding, Dave Thomas suggested Lam. Though he might have suggested someone else who suggested Lam.
IOW it had nothing to do with Microsoft. Though, come to think of it, it could be a good idea to ask all the Scripting Dudes and Dudettes from Microsoft for their opinions on stuff. Hmmmmmm.
It was a conscious omission... or perhaps semi-conscious. Lynn and I thought that if we were going to revisit the topic we should look at the same languages we did before.
I do want to cover Groovy at CIO.com, honest. Just haven't had a good hook for it yet. I feel like there's an opportunity for "&number; programming languages your developers wish you'd let them use" aimed at CIOs and IT managers, with Groovy probably top on the list. But I don't know what else ought to be on the list, so I haven't done anything with this idea. Suggestions always welcome.—Esther