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

[Judah McAuley]

Shawn K. Quinn wrote
> In summary, if you know just PHP, that's what you should be using. If
> it's not enough to get a given job done, you'll find out soon enough.
> PHP is probably among one of the most portable; there are some such as
> ASP and Cold Fusion that are decisively less so (the former being a
> Microsoft product, the latter being what an Adobe product by way of
> Allaire and Macromedia, both of which are Windows-centric and place you
> at the mercy of proprietary software vendors for licensing).

For what its worth, I think that ColdFusion is no more Windows-centric 
than PHP is *nix-centric. Its true that CF used to be Windows only and 
the first releases for Linux were, shall we say, a bit beta quality. The 
last two releases, however, are quite solid on Linux and they've done a 
very good job of making sure the language is not platform specific. Much 
better, in my opinion, than PHP actually. The code I write could be 
moved from a windows box to a linux box and back with little to no 
modification necessary.

As for proprietary vendors, I'll agree there. I think there are pros and 
cons to that, but it is certainly a controlled environment. In the 
interest of disclosure though, I'll note that there are competing CFML 
engines. BlueDragon and Railo are both commercial CFML rendering engines 
and there is a new project called Smith that is a collaborative, open 
source CFML engine.

All that being said, I still like writing php now and then and if php is 
what you know, you should certainly use that :)

Cheers,
Judah