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Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Web Language That's Long-Lived, and Not Too Buzzy?
adelayde (185757) writes "In my day job, I work on a web based service with a lot of legacy code written in that older (and some may say venerable) web-scripting language, Perl. Although we use Modern Perl extensions such as Moose, the language just seems to be ossifying and we're wanting to move to a more up-to-date and used language for web applications, or even an entire framework, to do new development. We're still planning to support the legacy code for a number of years to come; that's unavoidable. This is a fairly big project and it's mission critical to the business. The thing we're afraid of is jumping onto something that is too new and too buzzy as we'd like to make a technology decision that would be good at least for the next five years, if not more, and today's rising star could quite easily be in tomorrow's dustbin. What language and/or framework would you recommend we adopt?"
Nobody is forced to program that way in Perl. It can be fun and may or may not look cool on a t-shirt but no one recommends that as a way of doing it. Just because there's more than one way to do it doesn't mean you should choose the worst way.
And to the submitter, I agree with the OP.
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Nobody is forced to program that way in Perl.
Mobody is forced to write Perl that way, but many people are forced to read that kind of Perl.
Sure, on paper it looks like you'll have a large number of viable candidates, but when you start interviewing you learn that the PHP "talent pool" is mostly just a pool.
It's just as quick to hire a real developer and train them in PHP.
... because people saying that something is "ossifying" and jumping to the next fad is EXACTLY what makes things "buzzy".
Agree. Also .NET MVC is really getting pretty good as a framework.
A good language ... should do its very best to make sure you CAN'T code sloppily.
Exactly, just like a good spoken language should make sure you CAN'T use profanity.
...But then, what about when profanity is appropriate? What if you need an emphasis that is so fucking strong that simply changing the tone of voice doesn't suffice? What if your whole damned speech is in reference to something condemned by a deity, or referring to Mohammed the thief, who assumed the name of the prophet?
The point of any language is to express. For programming languages, the idea is to express instructions for two different processing styles simultaneously: the deterministic and predetermined understanding of the parser, and the non-deterministic and subjective understanding of colleagues. Similarly, spoken languages must account for the subjective understandings of every listener, some of which may have very different rules regarding obscenity.
There is much more to coding "cleanly" than mere syntax. Structure is equally important, and it must change as the system design demands. If the rules of a language are too strict, then the whole program starts to look the same, and it's more difficult for future interpreters to understand the intent of the program.
There is an art to writing clean code, just as there's an art to writing eloquent language. Strict rules don't always improve that art.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.