Well,
@Phares, if you looked at my first remarks I made it clear that at the end of the day, it really does not matter what language(s) you use. I will say this again in summary. What you achieve with your tools is almost entirely a factor of:
1) Your knowledge and experience with it and the associated tool(s),
2) Your understanding of the problem set and probably how you decide to approach it in its earliest stages.
There might be more reasons but am not really interested in them at this point. If everything else I say is irrelevant, at least don't forget the two premises above.
What you should understand is that language choices have never been rational choices as much as we would expect them to be. Most of the time, we have to make compromises even though it might be obvious that there are better ways to accomplish our tasks. For example you will see a huge Python shop like Google chose the
Dalvik V.M (yeah that is right) as the main platform for the Android family of devices simply because it has a syntax which closely resembles that of the JAVA programming language. The idea was to hook onto the large community that had grown around JAVA. The software development market place works in more or less same fashion.
I also never contradicted the fact that you can build awesome applications in the said "inferior" languages. Facebook / Wordpress / Flickr / Joomla / SugarCRM among others are great examples. My main point is that it takes *
A LOT LESS effort* to do so in other languages and tools for average developers. That is what @Dennis was highlighting which sort of got lost in the point of who is right and who is wrong. I would bet money that if Facebook was to be reWritten from scratch for instance, chances are high that it will not be done in PHP. At the moment, it actually works
as an extension of PHP written in highly optimized C++ executing as an Apache module for reasons of performance.
Fact: Microsoft would rather have developers
to not write more code in either VB6 and even
VB.NET preferrably over C# though this is a decision not in their hands right now. I can't find links to articles but it is Microsoft that started the campaign, "Friends don't let friends program in V.B 6" in an attempt to kill the product. That speaks volumes .......
<offTopic> Arguments against UNIX ( and C by extension) are degenerative since the "more dominant" Windows / most other compilers are either modeled or were originally designed after the former. The Windows program is written in C (a native on UNIX), most systems' programming will be done in C and most of the "Interesting stuff" always happens on UNIX (think Linux and Macs ...). Microsoft used to support their version of UNIX called XENIX before they made it big with Win ..... </offTopic>
Martin.
On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 9:50 PM,
<pkariuki@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm inclined to agree with Collins + Conrad and disagree with Martin + Dennis. Human nature never changes, there's an old adage that a bad workman blames his tools.
I am not a seasoned software developer, however, I have a few cases I can explore.
[1] When I was in high school, we had a system that was written in the early 90's that was used to manage and run conduct/grades for the students. That system run until last year, close to 17 years later. It was written in dBase. Easy to maintain, stable, easy to back up. It worked. It was finally replaced last year by a system running on PHP as web functionality was requested by the teachers.
[2] Facebook - the worlds largest social network still uses PHP. It works. I'm sure none of the language purists here refuse to use Facebook on account of its platform. We have technically 'superior' platforms. Additionally, if a job opening at Facebook for senior PHP developer at Facebook opened up, I'm quite sure some of the disdain for the language would be sacrificed on account of the exposure.
[3] VB6 has a longer shelf life than Windows XP http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/06/09/0240204/why-visual-basic-6-still-thrives
My point is that there is more to software development than choice of language. When looking at OS architecture, one can make the case that UNIX based operating systems are better. Nobody really cares, desktop battle is dominated by the 'inferior' Windows Platform. Software developers often get lost in analysis paralysis, trying to figure out the best tool to use for a particular problem, forgetting that they are consulted to solve a problem. Nobody (users) care what language your application is built on. They care that it works. Toyota's are the most popular cars in Kenya, they are *not* the best cars. When building an app, it might make more sense to use VB as opposed to Python if its not a web based application (if it runs on Windows, integration is better and you have a steeper learning curve for developers).
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Airtel Kenya