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Open Source Languages Rumble At OSCON
blackbearnh writes "Everybody knows what the best programming language is, it's whatever one you like the most. But is there a best language overall? Or even a best language for a given purpose? This question has been debated since the first time there were two languages to choose from. The argument is still going on, of course, but maybe a little light will be shed on the issue this week at OSCON. On Wednesday night at 7PM Pacific, representatives of the 5 major open source languages (perl, PHP, Python, Java and Ruby), as arbitrarily decided by O'Reilly, will meet to debate the merits of their various languages. If you're not going to be at OSCON, you can watch it live on a webcast and pose questions or comments to the participants. The representatives are: Python: Alex Martelli, Google; Ruby: Brian Ford, Engine Yard; PHP: Laura Thomson, Mozilla; Perl: Jim Brandt, Perl Foundation; Java: Rod Johnson, SpringSource."
It looks to me like they mean "high level" languages... the sort that allow you to deal with arbitrarily complex datastructures without burdening the programmer with the manual management of memory allocation and pointers.
Perl barely qualifies for this category (no pointers, but "references"), yet it was one of the first high level languages, so it should get some respect.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
. . . yet it was one of the first high level languages . . .
Missed it by a few decades. LISP was arguably the first high level language. You could also make a case for COBOL.
Not a typewriter
I'm assuming that they meant "dynamic languages", which is relatively difficult to define as well. Is Java technically "dynamic"? (I honestly don't know how to answer that, BTW)
Java is definitely the exception, however: static-typing, and the requirement to compile to bytecode. Also, Java is the only language here that's suitable for math-oriented programming, the rest of the languages are primarily used to handle text and/or manage data-structures that contain strings as their edge(leaf?) nodes.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I disagree. C is still the major language used in embedded electronics. In addition, ideologically, it's importance is crucial since c syntax now lies at the core of nearly every major language.
Just checked: 33,242 C projects on Sourceforge, compared to 44,784 C++, 58,559 Java, 15,562 Python, and 10,871 Perl. (My shock there is Java... sourceforge projects are voluntary... people actually CHOOSE Java?) I'd also claim Javascript as an important, open-source language. You don't see a lot of full apps written in it, but globally it's VERY important, with fingers in all sorts of areas.