[smcq]

You're effectively arguing that all languages/frameworks are equal within an order of magnitude. I think this has been demonstrated false time and time again, and you even demonstrate it again in your own post (saying Forth is unacceptable for web development).

Why so negative?

[davidw]

I'm arguing that languages that are currently used and honed for this type of programming are going to be difficult to beat by an order of magnitude. I said that you could lose a lot by using something that's just plain wrong. In other words, it's very difficult to go faster than Lance Armstrong on a bike, but pretty easy to go a lot slower.

Perhaps there is some room for radically new implementations; something along the lines of Erlang, which makes it possible to do what is quite difficult with other languages.

I think there is more room in frameworks for existing languages, but still, an order of magnitude seems quite dubious to me.

I'm actually not at all negative about new languages (I hack on a simple one myself), startups just don't strike me as the place for them. What they're doing does look cool, but what happens when you need to process an image, or send email, or talk to a different database, or deal with any of the other various things that are often covered by language extensions? Maybe this would have been better as a hack/framework on top of Javascript.

[raganwald]

Maybe this would have been better as a hack/framework on top of Javascript

Did you see the bit where they can drop into raw Javascript at will?

[davidw]

It seems to me that the core concept here is the declarative nature of the framework, and the logic that ties things together that comes from the compiler. On one side, it has to spit out Javascript, so perhaps it would have made sense just to do the whole thing as a hack/extension/whatever to Javascript?

I guess without actually seeing the code behind it, it's difficult to really say with certainty.

[coliveira]

Where has this order of magnitude difference been "proved"? I would say that even developing in forth is not one order of magnitude slower than ruby, as long as reasonable libraries are available.

[smcq]

Every single day when we don't program in COBOL. I'm at a bit of a loss, have you never switched to a more productive language and cringed when you went back to the old language?

[coliveira]

> have you never switched to a more productive language and cringed when you went back to the old language.

Yes, but the difference is not one order of magnitude. Not if there is some level of sanity in the language (e.g., I am not talking about brainfk). For example, even though one can program faster in Python, it is not 10 times faster than in C, especially for large-scale software.

[smcq]

I easily program software 50x faster in python than C. If I didn't, I would be using C for speed.

[coliveira]

This just talks about your personal skills (or lack of) in C. I know people that can write an application in C faster than most can do in Python.

[smcq]

You know, I was going to point out how amazingly brain dead that comparison was, and how inappropriate it was to try to guess my skill level in various languages based on my claim that a language that requires 1/20 the LOC is 50x faster.

I will however finish with, there's a reason C applications don't have features or agile development cycles, and it's not because the coders are absurdly productive. Also, please don't ever try to be a manager.