In “Gosling didn't get the Memo”, Ryan Tomayko wrote about how wrong he believes Gosling was in describing scripting languages as:
“get[ting] their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.”
On the same day, I find this article on “Ruby vs. Groovy” by Eric Armstrong which seems to have a very pragmatic conclusion about Ruby vs. Java:
“If you need a scripting language, Ruby is a great one.
When it comes to building an application with multiple authors and long term maintainability, I‘d say there‘s a lot of decision-making to do before going with Ruby. If you‘re going agile with a small team that can easily teach each other its favorite idioms, Ruby will probably work. If you adhere to a more structured methodology and have a large, long term project with many lines of code — so you can expect a fair amount of turnover among the people who will be maintaining it — then Ruby probably isn‘t a good fit.”
I thought this was the best explanation of modern scripting language use I have heard so far. Probably since this coincides with my own thoughts on the subject but what am I without an opinion. I am definitely not against scripting languages when they are the best tool for the job but not just for the sake of “less code“ and developer “cool” factor. Maintainability costs are still the dictator of overall software success, in my opinion.
