I spotted a recent article while on the Riding Ruby blog in which James Gosling of Sun – aka: “Father of Java” made extensive comment regarding Java’s placing with Ruby, PHP and other platforms.
“PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems, but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.”
Scaling and performance problems have been shown to be null and void when Friendster switched from a Java platform to a PHP platform and had a noticeable speed improvement – Friendster is no shrinking violet, once boasting the largest social network on the web.
Scripting Languages?
That comment jars a little as its a far out dated term normally reserved for cheap pot-shots. I’ve had numerous discussions with Java advocates in which Ruby, Python and any other dynamically typed language has been dismissed as a meer scripting language. It doesn’t look like I’m the only one either as Ryan Tomayko at Lesscode.org seems to have paid comment to Goslings post in quite some depth and I recommend a read!
UPDATE: The Artima Developer forums have a thread sicussing this topic available here.
