Now I recall an old article about the original developer for Yahoo Store, where he utilizes the flexibility and development speed of LISP to beat his competitors. It bring to light one thing, you could actually win by technicality, or by choosing the right programming language.
Nowadays everyone is using .NET or Java, which is pretty good languages. But I realize one thing; development on these languages is slow, it too bulky and move like a giant (VB6 is fast for development, but not so good for big projects). I have to make proper declaration, handle type conversion, too OO centric with all the patterns, compilation with its strict language rule and etc. Slow? No way. You will know that it’s slow, until you found something faster.
I was first impressed with the development speed of Ruby on Rail few years back. I tried it and found it to be quite enlightening and fast in development, but the language and platform isn’t quite matured yet by then. I like PHP as a language (cool and easy, with reallly intuitive function), but it lacks a good framework like Rail, until I found CakePHP. Its libraries and resources on the web is pretty abundance, and the platform is pretty common and efficient. The language is cool and useful, and scripting is fast and easy to develop. CakePHP Framework which was inspired by Rail is pretty good, and the MVC pattern is really good for productivity. I do a lot of ASP.NET development as well, but I feel that I could code faster and better on PHP on Cake, at least by 50%. I could push out a new feature in a day or two, and deployment is a breeze.
Scripting language is not perfect, but I think it suited well for web development given a proper framework like Rail (MVC style). .NET is pretty comprehensive and powerful for Desktop Application development. Now I have the same feeling as Paul Graham while he was at Viaweb developing the soon to be Yahoo Store.
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