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

[Edwin Martin]

Sales @ Lycosa schreef:
> I would like to open up a discussion on which programming language is 'best'
> for web programming.
>
> I have been using php for some years now, but I was recently told that C
> could run up to 170 times faster. Raw speed is not necessarily an issue, but
> it made me think about using other programming languages.
>
> I am interested to hear other people's opinions, and to see what languages
> you use. In particular, I am interested in speed of development, cost,
> processing speed/server load and learning curve.
>   
PHP is very slow. But because it's easy to program in, the development 
costs are much lower than with C. The difference in speed can be 
compensated by buying more hardware. In almost every case this is much 
cheaper. Add that there are no web-libraries of frameworks for C and you 
can do the math (ofcourse there are web-libraries for C, but nothing 
serious).

Also keep in mind that for most webapps. the database is the slowest 
part. So the language is not the most critical.

Companies who do care about speed use modern and mature languages like 
Java. There are lots of good IDE's, frameworks and libraries for Java to 
choose from.

Microsoft-shops use ASP with a mix of languages (C#, JScript etcetera).

There are lots of other programming languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, 
Coldfusion...) but their use is only a small percentage.

Edwin Martin

PS Please don't write a new post by replying an a random post in a thread.