The backlash against scripting languages has begun

Chris via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon May 16 03:41:59 PDT 2016


On Saturday, 14 May 2016 at 10:29:59 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
[snip]
>
>> That a service is run in a certain language is no proof. I've 
>> an old homepage that was written in PHP. It works, you can add 
>> to it. But is it easy to maintain? Sure Google have loads of 
>> coders who can maintain even the messiest code base. You could 
>> write a service in Perl.
>
> Perl and Php were never intended for writing larger programs, 
> so not sure how those can be used as an example.

Of course not, neither was Python intended to replace languages 
like C++ or Java. You mentioned projects that are successful and 
use scripting languages. Facebook uses (or used!) a lot of PHP, 
that's why I mentioned it. But none of these scripting languages 
were ever meant to be used for building large scale projects. 
People just did it, because it was so easy. Now it's come back to 
bite them.

> The trend is that scripting is taking over UI programming. For 
> many applications the UI is a big chunk of the codebase. 
> Recompilation just to tweak the UI is annoying so I don't 
> expect this trend to change. This is an old trend too, emacs 
> being a prime example.

That's a good use of scripting languages. That's where SLs 
belong, i.e. very specific domains where they make things easier.



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