10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting

snydeq writes "InfoWorld 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 cooption 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."

Comments

OOP: use with care

[Tablizer]

PHP is much more like a natural human language, with all its flaws, than a language like Ruby. Most of the time you are scripting, you are hacking strings together and it doesn't really help if they are objects are not.

Some things work well as objects and some don't. Thus, its good to have a natural way to do procedural when needed. Languages created by object purists sometimes are difficult outside of object-land.

One thing I wish PHP had done was make no distinction between objects and associative arrays. Thus, foo.bar would be the same as the less natural foo['bar']. (The second needed if funny characters used.)