I’ve stumbled upon a very nice interview of James Gosling, the father of Java, where he discusses about Java and its future compared to LAMP, Ruby on Rails and AJAX.
Personally, I agree with James. Every one of those solutions has its niche. Java (J2EE) whether streamlined or not is good for mission critical applications. And I love my LAMP weblog and photo album.
He mentionned two scripting languages built atop the Java virtual machine: Groovy and JRuby. I have to check them. I am a programming language maniac :-)
(Image courtesy of C|Net News.com)
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jag?entry=radlab_scripting_and_scale
Don’t you think the commenters are mostly ignorant? They infer that he’s bashing Ruby and discard his comments as worthless. Yet we’re talking about the creator of a language that drives applications for multinationals. The Ruby bigots live in a dream world, thinking that Ruby could replace Java overnight and perform just as well.
My favourite comment must be from the guys questioning the need to spawn transactions across several tiers :-) Helloooo? Ever heard of distributed legacy applications? Instead of re-inforcing my good opinions about Ruby, these people have simply talked me out of it through their rudeness.
“When one only knows how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail…”
I am in the opinion that knowing (relatively well) many programming languages (and especially many paradigms and many frameworks) and really appreciate why they exist is the only way to become a very competent (and open-minded) software developer.