[Fluxx]

> you're just given some basic data structures that handle pretty much everything under the sun, and you go from there

This only works because the size of your n is small, possibly a few hundred, so it doesn't matter. When you start dealing with millions or billions of records this stuff matters. Quite a lot.

So really, it's not the language, it's the size of your data - or the size of n that matters.

[k3n]

Exactly, and how many web apps deal with millions of data points? Not many, as far as the view layer is concerned. Perhaps you'll have millions of rows in your DB, but you typically won't process all of those, at once, within PHP or JS. At least in my experience, most data processing on that scale happens in your OLAP layer (and thus is fully removed from the jurisdiction of PHP and JS).

Especially given single-page apps, you should never be dealing with millions of objects; with pagination and such, it's usually under a 1000 at a time, more typically 100 or so.