Comparing Languages

SimonTemplar wrote: »

There was a recent thread about PHP and many posters were of the opinion that PHP is not a good language.

Aside from personal preference for syntax, what other features of a language would be used to critique and compare languages.

Thanks

Can't really make such comparisons without specifying a problem domain.

SimonTemplar wrote: »

Fair enough. How about a typical business web application such as an online-shopping site or a ticket management system (such as Jira)

For enterprise systems the go to is .NET or Java. Really other than the languages its the ecosystem around it automated build tools, libs, available documentation etc

Well ruby seems to be a strong player in that world too and it avoids the corporate nature of .NET and Java. Depending on your audience, that can be a good or bad thing. I haven't worked with Ruby but the number of SaaS products developed with it seems to be quite extensive.

In relation to your original question.

An area where I see a fair amount of critiquing at the moment is concurrency. Languages that manage concurrency well are getting a lot of coverage these days. Examples of this are Go, the new Google language, and Erlang, an older language that seems to be on the rise. But this only matters for certain types of applications such as servers or other multi-threaded applications.

Another area is functional programming. Most people are coming to the conclusion that it many cases it makes more sense to program by telling a computer what to do than how to do it. So during language selection functional aspects of languages are under a high level of scrutiny. Functionally written applications are generally less verbose so they are smaller which generally improve code quality and readability. Even languages that are considered procedural are becoming defined by their functional aspects, e.g. C# and LINQ (which is a functional approach to querying objects and databases).

Then you get other heated subjects like static vs dynamic typed languages.

These are just some examples of language aspects that people consider but in almost all cases business needs will trumps technical considerations. There is a reason financial institutions are so reliant on VBA and it has nothing to do with how great a language it is.

The Corinthian wrote: »

C# is considered a procedural language?

My bad, imperative is what I was going for. I've always used imperative and procedural as much the same thing. I did not realise procedural was indicative of a non-object oriented approach.