The Joel on Software Discussion Group

Woohoo!  Feel the Python love!

Yes it is nice to see Python being loved.

I only have one question. How the hell is not being able to have two <form>s on a single page with ASP.NET is considered a "gotcha"? It is an atrocity.

Ah, this one takes me back to the earl, JoS articles of Back When.  :)

I'm not sure how language wars still exist in this day and age.  Really, people need to grow up if they're arguing over languages.

Joel is spot-on as usual, though; there are a handful of languages that the market prefers and your best bet is to use the one you are most productive with.

I notice there's a lot of C# going on at FC these days.  I recall Joel saying long ago that moving to .NET wasn't worth it and wouldn't be happening anytime soon.  Granted, that was a couple of years ago.  I wonder what circumstances changed to make .NET look more attractive to FC?

*earl, = early

Ooops.

I have to disagree on Perl.  I've been seen it do everything J2EE is typically ever used for.

If you choose your initial tools out of fear you may be the next Myspace, I'm afraid the greater danger is you'll never get started.

I'm going with Rails on a persal project now.  I'll worry about tremendous success when it gets here, then rewrite in Lisp for performance.

But seriously, just balance what you're good at against what the language is good at.  Use more than one.  I have a pretty big Java app at work.  I need a cronjob that runs a single query and moves a ton of data and files around Unix systems, I choose Perl.  We have a couple apps that are completely trivial, using 2-3 tables each in complete isolation.  These are written in PHP (and one gratuitous use of Rails).

The far demand is learning the underlying business processes.  Learn those right and the language hardly matters at all.

I also find it funny to see so many of the Java crowd knock Python and now Ruby as not being ready.  That never stopped them from jumping on the Java bandwagon.

> I wonder what circumstances changed to make .NET look more attractive to FC?

His complaint used to be that C# doesn't have a linker.

Now, he's saying that "our newer in-house code is C#".

A change in circumstance that makes .NET look more attractive is that he's using it in-house, not trying to ship it.

"A change in circumstance that makes .NET look more attractive is that he's using it in-house, not trying to ship it. "

Aaaaah yes.  That would be an important distinction.

I'm righteously indignant that coldfusion wasn't even considered in this language shootout :P

Hmmmm does anyone else wonder why Joel mentions MySpace as if it means something, yet fails to list the language in which it is developed as one of the "safe languages"?

It's Coldfusion. Fusebox-driven.

BlueDragon CFML to be exact.

http://www.newatlanta.com/corporate/news/myspace_announce.jsp

Go figure huh?

Oh. And learning that ASP.NET cannot have more than 2 forms (??) in one page made me roll all over the floor, frothing at the mouth in mirth. MS's "Where do you want to go today?" TV advertisements of a few years ago make me think that "backwards" should not be considered a valid choice!

As usual one stack is missing:

Tcl/AOLServer/Oracle/whatever

Extremly robust, scales very well, fast and powerful and useful and in use for lots of mission critical stuff.

See:
 http://www.aolserver.com
 http://www.tcl.tk

Summary of Joel's Article:

1. Don't Use Unproven Languages for Business Critical Applications

2. We wrote FogBugz in Wasabi (FogBugz funds our entire business)

Or, did I miss something?

Aaron, did you read the page you linked? "BlueDragon for the Microsoft .NET Framework now allows MySpace to retire their existing Macromedia® ColdFusion servers and redeploy these CFML applications as native .NET web applications."

Aaron, so? The code is still coldfusion, and it's what it was developed in.

Not to be pedantic, but you can have multiple forms in an ASP.NET page. The constraint is that only one of them can be marked as runat="server".

Donnie

It almost sounds as if Joel acknowledged Java as something other then useless.  Joel, you are the Dvorak of programming language wars...

R. Orrock,

One more thing:  Leverage existing skills - they matter more than relative language merits.

Giacomo: Aaron, did you read the page you linked?

Yes! How awesome is that, seriously? New Atlanta took CFML and repurposed it so that now runs on .Net AND J2EE.

Even though it runs on a .Net server, it is still CFML - Coldfusion markup language. Remember, .Net is not a language, it's ... well ... you know ... a framework :-)