[thelist] What is the best programming language for the web?

[Judah McAuley]

John didn't claim based on "total development costs" from what I read. 
He said that CF was pretty much unassailable on the first and final 
metrics, which were "speed of development" and "learning curve" 
respectively.

As for speed of development, sure, people are going to click better with 
some languages than others because of the way they think or their 
background. But I think you could make some reasonable comparisons about 
how much code it takes to accomplish common tasks. Coldfusion has a 
number of  built in tags for many of the most common tasks (and a lot 
more coming up in CF 8) and you can work in either a tag-based syntax or 
a ECMA Script-style syntax. .Net has a large number of built in 
components for doing handling tasks like dataset binding and such and 
that's really nice. But there are other areas .net requires more code, 
like building connection strings and sql statements as variables and 
then passing them as arguments to an sql execution statement.

Learning curve? I like that CF allows both ECMA-script style and 
tag-based style. I started from an HTML background more than a C 
background (although I did some of that too) so the tag syntax was much 
quicker for me to learn than perl (ASP was v1 and PHP didn't exist yet, 
so ymmv) but as I advanced, I use script-based syntax much more often 
now because I find it more economical and easier to read. I don't know 
of any studies done on speed of language acquisition but I would be 
surprised if CF didn't rank up pretty high in terms of ease of learning.

Oh and .jeff is sitting right near me and I'm going to not drag him into 
the conversation because we've got work to do :)

Have fun with the holy wars,
Judah

Paul Bennett wrote:
>> I've never seen anyone completely document total development costs.
>> 
> 
> A) Probably best not to claim language a is better than language b
> based on something as intangible as 'total development costs' then? 
> B) It is very cool that we have someone from Adobe on this list, and
> I've definitely appreciated your input in the past, John. C) I'm
> guessing .jeff's not around anymore, as I'm sure he would have waded
> in swingin' by now :)
> 
> Paul