Language Niches (long)

[Paul Prescod]

Courageous wrote:
> 
> > * Java was the only way to do client-side graphics and then evolved
> >into "Servlets" and "EJBs"
> 
> Note that this quickly went by the way side. The vast majority of all
> web-served client-side graphic technologies are not Java. Javascript
> (which is most emphatically not Java) dominates the landscape here.

Yes, it is clear that languages can outgrow their original niches.
That's why I mentioned Servlets and EJBs. My understanding is that use
of these technologies allow you to achieve scalability easier than in
languages where you must do it all "yourself". But that's just hearsay.

> > * Perl was also the defacto way to do CGI in the early web
> 
> Funny, too, as it never had to be, and you could easily gen up a
> C program which did your CGI duties with vastly higher efficiency
> (n.b.: assuming you didn't badly screw up in string management).

Why would you write ten or a hundred times as much code to solve your
problem? Early CGIs tended to be small and simple so Perl's
maintainability was not that big of an issue.

> >cross-platform general-purpose rapid application development. Moore's
> >law is slowly making type declarations irrelevant....
> 
> While I actually agree with this sentiment, note well that in compile-
> time type checking communities, the primary argument in favor is
> compile-time error checking, not speed. The speed argument is
> actually close to dead, because a good optimizing jit VM can
> achieve speeds nearly equivalent to C within about a factor of 2
> much of the time, even without declared type information.

I agree. But the type check argument is abstract and therefore weaker
than the performance algorithm. If someone asked me if they could write
a commercially competitive relational database in Python I would have to
say: "No." If they asked me "could you build a large system in Python" I
would at least have a chance of convincing them.

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