[moonchrome]

C# in 2006 was a joke, probably worse than Rails in performance. This was the webforms era and old EF - meant for enterprise customers with a couple of hundred active users max... ASP.NET being a competitive/performant framework is a very recent development (since core basically which became usable past 2.0)

Haskell, OCaml and D are niche languages, probably aren't mature enough now to use for a production system that needs to scale (in terms of org growth and building complex systems).

Java web frameworks were also terrible in 2006 (this is the Java era that gave Java it's reputation) and the only thing worse for productivity I can think of is C++ hahaha ...

[pjmlp]

A joke is this comment.

All of them were faster and used less resources than a very slow interpreted language, by having JIT and AOT compilers, state of the art GC and great IDE offerings, even the niche ones had better tooling (Leksah and Merlin, versus nothing).

[p8]

Nobody cares about performance if you build a business application with a couple of users, a common use-case in 2005. The reason a lot of Java people jumped on the Rails bandwagon, was that an application that would take a month to build in Java with Spring/Hibernate, would take a day in Rails. See also: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/

[pjmlp]

Some Java people did, there is a reason why Ruby is hardly used outside Rails, while Java rules most of the backend workloads, a mobile OS, and plenty of embedded workloads.

[p8]

There's also a reason Kotlin has become the language of choice for the Android development industry, Scala became a thing, and ThoughtWorks recommended against using JavaServerFaces.

[pjmlp]

Because Android team had some Kotlin shills that pushed for it with management blessing, and they are in bed with JetBrains for the Android IDE, that is why, and even them had to accept updating Java support, otherwise Android/Kotlin would lose the ecosystem of Java written libraries, hence Java 11 LTS last year, and Java 17 LTS this year going, back to Android 12 with APEX archives.

Scala became a thing indeed, where it is now besides Spark?

ThoughWorks is a consultancy that recomends whatever brings new projects.

[p8]

So where are the Shopify's of that era build on Struts and JSF?

[moonchrome]

No they weren't - ASP.NET webforms and old EF was such a pile of shit it didn't matter how fast C# was (and back then it really wasn't, granted order of magnitude better than ruby/python, but way behind JVM). The applications built with it were dog slow and buggy - they couldn't even scale in enterprise setting.

Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?

I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.

The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.

[pjmlp]

Stackoverflow and plenty of Microsoft shops are enterprise enough.

> Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?

I mentioned Lekshat and Merlin for a reason, way better than Ruby with TextMate and Sublime.

Yes plenty of people were using C++ for Web applications in 2000 - 2006, via Apache, ngix and IIS plugins. Microsoft had ATLServer, Borland/Embarcadero still ship their webserver to this day.

I can assert that plenty of Nokia Networks WebUIs, were powered by C++/CORBA and Perl back in 2006. Transition to Java started in 2005.

As did several CRM systems, like the original Altitude Software application server.

RoR is for people that don't care about performance to start with.