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

[kasimir-k]

Sales @ Lycosa scribeva in 24/05/2007 8:44:
> which programming language is 'best' for web programming.

The question is wrong - correct question is: which language is best for 
a given project. The answer depends on things like what needs to be done 
and who is doing it.

> Raw speed is not necessarily an issue

Exactly, for web apps that are not particularly computing intensive, 
speed of the language is rarely an issue - often more time is consumed 
querying DB than running the app's code.

> 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.

When the speed of development is a concern (it often is :-) one should 
probably be using some sort of a framework, and there are good ones for 
most common languages.

One cost issue is that of hosting (if your apps are happy to live in 
shared hosting). It's easier to find good and cheep shared hosting for 
PHP than say for Java. If your app runs on dedicated server(s), this of 
course is not an issue.

Regarding learning curve I'd say that it's easier to learn new languages 
once you've learned some different kinds of languages :-) Which 
something every developer should do - not only it gives new tools, but 
also new ideas and approaches to do things.

.k