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by Theriac25 4629 days ago
> In fact, it's unclear to me where java might be optimal.

I'd say server side processing of whatever. That's what we use it at work for, and I don't see how any of the mainstream languages would be much, if any, better. Our software has to run on our customers' servers, so portability is of utmost importance since we don't want to need to compile it for random OS's. This rules out languages that need native binaries. Performance is also important, since people don't want to buy bigger machines just because you wrote your software in Python/Ruby/whatever and is 10+ times slower than it needs to be. Also, our software is old enough that C# didn't even exist for many years.
1 comments
VeejayRampay 4629 days ago
Python/Ruby/whatever will most likely get faster as access to tools like LLVM and the JVM itself is getting more common these days. You'll still get the HUGE bump in development times (due to the inherent expressiveness of the languages) and at least a good portion of the speed benefits you'd reap from Java itself.
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CmonDev 4628 days ago
"You'll still get the HUGE bump in development times (due to the inherent expressiveness of the languages)"

Not sure if that is true. Maybe for small typical web-projects or server-side scenarios that benefit from thin scripting layer (like at Google). If it is true though, then Haskell and OCAML/F# would be even better because you get expressiveness without loosing the obvious advantages of strong static type systems.

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VeejayRampay 4628 days ago
Those language are too cryptic for people to adopt them en masse.

There's a reason why Ruby/PHP/Python are so pervasive, 95% of people simply do NOT care about monads and poly-variadic fix-point combinators for mutual recursion.

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