[Web4lib] Web Languages

[Cloutman, David]

Tim,

You may be right in the long run, if Ruby follows the evolutionary path
of PHP, though I think PHP will adapt, with better frameworks emerging
(like Symfony) and native Unicode support in PHP 6. As far as Java goes,
I think it is the COBOL of the future. If you know if, you'll probably
be able to find a legacy application to support for the rest of your
life. And for many things, I still think it is a choice development
language. For heavy duty OO programming, I really think a strongly typed
language works better, and for that reason I do not see Ruby or Python
being Java killers.

I would not totally discount your book sales data. It certainly
indicates the level of interest in learning a technology. However, I
don't think it is necessarily indicates traction for any particular
technology.

My own unscientific metric for languages is searching the Craigslist job
listing for the SF Bay Area. (This includes silicon valley.) For my
purposes, I look at "internet engineering jobs" and "web design jobs".
Here are today's numbers by keyword.

                             PHP    Java   Ruby   Python PERL
internet engineering jobs    110    71     22     19     109
web design jobs              167    246    85     98     31


It will be interesting to see how these numbers shift when the first ROR
apps reach legacy status, as is currently happening with PHP and
happened a few years back to PERL.

- David

---
David Cloutman <dcloutman at co.marin.ca.us>
Electronic Services Librarian
Marin County Free Library 

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2008 7:40 PM
To: Dan Scott
Cc: Marcie Pierson; Thomas Dowling; web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] RE: Open source support models


Incidentally, lest you think I'm being a language snob or bending the
evidence to my own ends, I was a Perl hacker once and I program in
PHP. I do not know Ruby-or Python for that matter. But I've tried to
hire smart, young programmers-for Perl when I was at Houghton Mifflin
and for PHP at LibraryThing. The top talent out there now has mostly
gravitated to Ruby and Python. I *hate* that, but it is a fact.

These is not some sort of bull feeling of mine, but are exhaustively
documented every year by Tim O'Reilly in his yearly book-industry
analyses. PHP, Java and C/C++ have shrunk five years running. Ruby
came out of nowhere and is now quite significant--particularly as Ruby
programmers seem to be less book-oriented than some others.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/03/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-23.html

Tim

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Tim Spalding <tim at librarything.com>
wrote:
> Thanks for the correction on Evergreen.
>
> I wouldn't say I needed correcting on VuFind, though. Saying that
> VuFind isn't mostly PHP because there are chunks of shell scripting
> and HTML is like saying that a car isn't made out of steel and glass
> because it also has leather seats and pockets of air. Much the same is
> true of SQL and, depending on what you're doing with it, JavaScript.
> And if you're going to count lines HTML against lines of code, you
> should also factor in all the GIF and JPEG images, not to mention
> Cascading Style Sheets. This way lies madness.
>
> Tim
>
>> Ha! Fact-checking is readily available for a few of these projects at
>> http://www.ohloh.net/projects/evergreen/analyses/latest (for
>> Evergreen) and http://www.ohloh.net/projects/10977/analyses/latest
>> (for VUFind).
>>
>> So a correction: the business logic of Evergreen is written primarily
>> in Perl and SQL, with a few optimized sections rewritten in C. The
>> current catalogue interface is primarily JavaScript with XHTML, and
>> the staff client user interface is written in Mozilla XUL (XML +
>> JavaScript). The user interface for most new staff client
>> functionality is being built with the Dojo JavaScript framework.
>> Python is used for the internationalization build infrastructure and
>> for the new EDI piece.
>>
>> The choice of language in the project largely comes down to using the
>> most appropriate tool for the job. That's one of the advantages you
>> get from building an application using a service-oriented
>> architecture.
>>
>> --
>> Dan Scott
>> Laurentian University
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Check out my library at
http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
>



-- 
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding


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