> To avoid the complexities of C++ we turned to Perl which was fast to write in but wasn’t ready to be a web server. In earlier days, people were writing perl

> To avoid the complexities of C++ we turned to Perl which was fast to write in but wasn’t ready to be a web server. In earlier days, people were writing perl first using CGI, and then using mod_perl. Where are you getting the idea about perl being a web server? > And Perl had no frameworks to help write web apps so we wrote a lot of boiler plate crap every time just to get started. If we are talking about earlier times(say 1996), "perl had no frameworks" compared to what? Web related libraries and frameworks were in their infancy at that time for all languages, and perl wasn't a special case. If anything, perl had more vibrant ecosystem owing to CPAN and people actually using it for web programming. > Java also had threading really well integrated from the start so we could handle many requests at once which was starting to become a problem by 2005 or so Threads, non blocking io, processes with copy on write predate Java. > .NET was really just another Java for Windows. Nothing is fundamentally awesome about it over Java except that the engineers got to learn from Java’s mistakes. And learning from mistakes and not making those mistakes doesn't make it better? Current C# is a much cleaner language. > The difference between the old days of Perl and today is that we’ve made the real web server in C++. Apache was released in 1995. And what is this real web server you talk about? > That’s why Ruby and its surrogate languages will eventually disappear No, they won't. They will just be selectively replaced with services written in more performant language, which isn't any different from how it is today. Non cpu intensive tasks doesn't gain anything from being written in a more performant, but less expressive language.