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> On the other hand, many people seem to come out and say that Ruby is _very_ slow. > Is it heaven-and-earth slow? Comparatively, I would say yes. Granted

> On the other hand, many people seem to come out and say that Ruby is _very_ slow. > Is it heaven-and-earth slow? Comparatively, I would say yes. Granted, most of the time it won't matter because you are waiting on IO (disk/network), but if you are doing cpu intensive work, it is slow and you probably need to drop down to C or offload that work to another service. > How is Erlang more scalable than Java? In what area? horizontal vs vertical scaling? > developer's productivity (or team performance) scale? performance? speed? Erlang seems > to excel in a niche area (in a positive speaking). My guess would be in single server scalability. Erlang's write-once variables and actor model, combined with a good VM ("green processes") make it very single-server-scalable (verticle). It also has good built in node-to-node communication mechanisms (horizontal). Performance is probably slower than Java though. And I imagine the developer pool is much more limited than that of Java. > What about Haskell/Ada, how are they safer than Java? > Do they have better type-systems? handles NULL better than Java? > Bulletproof from developers? detect more bugs? I meant safer in the type-safety sense, yes. There are also classes of static analysis tools for both. Granted, my knowledge of these languages is quite limited. I certainly see your points (especially about liking the code hygiene of python), and agree that Java is not going anywhere soon. I guess I don't understand why a startup, or individual developer, would choose Java over other languages, even other languages on the JVM, for new projects. Thanks for the good discussion. :)

hello_moto 15y ago
Java ecosystem has a lot of static analysis tools that can integrate to almost all popular IDEs and Continuous Integration systems. Findbugs, PMD, JDepend, Sonar (recommend to check Sonar). Checkstyle is another tool that I use since I'm kind of the annoying dude when it comes to code-style. (Have you seen GWT API code? it's like written by one person as opposed to a few developers with different perceptions of "readable" code. I like that kind of thing). There are a few reasons why startup/individual dev would choose Java: 1) Previous experience in Java 2) Java fits better for the type of problems to solve (intensive computational that requires Hadoop like infrastructure) 3) Emotionally attached to static/compiled language with nice IDE so that one can navigate the source code easily whether the code base is large or small (sometime not all decisions are rational and I'm okay with that because developing software requires more than technical skill; it also requires passion). 4) Marketing (if you're targeting the enterprises). Zimbra, Jive Software, Compiere, Alfresco, Day software, Liferay, Salesforce used to be startups. Java ecosystem seems to learn and grow in a much better speed thanks to the following actors: - Rails (Spring Roo, Spring MVC, JPA 2.0, and possibly MVC framework from the upcoming JEE releases) - C# (Java 7 new features, Java 8 closures/lambda. Yes, Lisp does this first, but I think C# forces Java to implement closures more than any of its competitors). - REST/JSON/WS (Check out the latest JAX-RS, supports REST, JSON, XML, Atom-Feed, and JAX-WS) - I/P/SaaS + Cloud Computing (Targeted for Java EE7, deployment, infrastructure to support multi-tenant, etc). NB: Just so that I don't sound like a Java fan-boy, I use Java by day but I use and help to promote and organize Python community overseas (of course by not comparing Python vs Java :)).

hello_moto 15y ago

Java ecosystem has a lot of static analysis tools that can integrate to almost all popular IDEs and Continuous Integration systems. Findbugs, PMD, JDepend, Sonar (recommend to check Sonar). Checkstyle is another tool that I use since I'm kind of the annoying dude when it comes to code-style. (Have you seen GWT API code? it's like written by one person as opposed to a few developers with different perceptions of "readable" code. I like that kind of thing). There are a few reasons why startup/individual dev would choose Java: 1) Previous experience in Java 2) Java fits better for the type of problems to solve (intensive computational that requires Hadoop like infrastructure) 3) Emotionally attached to static/compiled language with nice IDE so that one can navigate the source code easily whether the code base is large or small (sometime not all decisions are rational and I'm okay with that because developing software requires more than technical skill; it also requires passion). 4) Marketing (if you're targeting the enterprises). Zimbra, Jive Software, Compiere, Alfresco, Day software, Liferay, Salesforce used to be startups. Java ecosystem seems to learn and grow in a much better speed thanks to the following actors: - Rails (Spring Roo, Spring MVC, JPA 2.0, and possibly MVC framework from the upcoming JEE releases) - C# (Java 7 new features, Java 8 closures/lambda. Yes, Lisp does this first, but I think C# forces Java to implement closures more than any of its competitors). - REST/JSON/WS (Check out the latest JAX-RS, supports REST, JSON, XML, Atom-Feed, and JAX-WS) - I/P/SaaS + Cloud Computing (Targeted for Java EE7, deployment, infrastructure to support multi-tenant, etc). NB: Just so that I don't sound like a Java fan-boy, I use Java by day but I use and help to promote and organize Python community overseas (of course by not comparing Python vs Java :)).