Beyond Java - Bruce Tate [52]
What I don't like
In Japan, Ruby has good commercial financial backing and support. Outside of Japan, Ruby has an embarrassing lack of commercial backing. Its relatively small community shows in the dearth of niche frameworks. The JVM support is immature (although it is admittedly improving rapidly). Early attempts to produce a version of Ruby running on the JVM had a few false starts. Still, the JRuby framework has seen a resurgence of sorts in early 2005, so it may well produce a credible Java alternative on the JVM. Ruby is on the radar; it just needs a tighter affinity with the JVM and the continued success of Ruby on Rails.
PHP
PHP is a scripting language. With PHP, you effectively start with HTML, and mark it up with tags that can tie your application to a database, or other back-end systems. The tags get interpreted on the server, which returns pure HTML to the client. It's effectively a JSP. Here's a "Hello, World" app in PHP:
Hello world
'; ?>What I like
PHP success seems to be ramping up sharply, mostly on the strength of converted Visual Basic programmers. It's very well suited for its "sweet spot," controlling database access from a web page. It's easy to understand and easy to learn. PHP, more than any other language, is taking advantage of the frustration in the Visual Basic community due to changes in .NET.
What I don't like
PHP is theoretically awful. The model tightly couples the user interface and database together, and that's usually a bad idea, because changes in one can ripple through to the other. Since PHP grew rapidly and haphazardly with a heavy Perl influence, method names are often inconsistent, with some opting for underscores between words (stream_get_line) and some opting for concatenation (readline). PHP effectively has a reputation for productivity and rapid innovation at the expense of a consistent language that promotes sound architecture. As a Java programmer, you've probably already seen JSP pages that try to do too much. They're quick to write, but the solution bogs down in a hurry.
C# and Visual Basic
C# is effectively a Java clone. It has many of the same benefits and drawbacks. Visual Basic on the .NET environment seems to be losing momentum, because the older Visual Basic developers don't seem to have the same fervor for VB.NET. Microsoft has other languages as well. In the end, Microsoft will always have a core set of developers. That's effectively a closed ecosystem, though. It's limited by the success of the Windows platform, which is adopted broadly on the client, but decidedly less so on the server side. I'm not predicting success or failure; I just think that Microsoft languages depend on the success or failure of Microsoft platforms as a whole, rather than on the strengths or weaknesses of any given language in it.
Smalltalk
Invented in the early 1970s, Smalltalk is a well-established, hard-luck object-oriented language. Many see Smalltalk as the first object-oriented language, but it never really caught on commercially, despite some attempts as late as 1995 by IBM. It's hugely productive, slightly awkward, and quirky to the extreme. There is a vibrant, but small, Smalltalk community. Most of it is centered on a highly productive, continuation-based application development framework called Seaside, which we'll discuss in Chapter 8.
What I like
Smalltalk has a clean object model, incredible expressive power, and an intelligent design and community. It's got some solid free implementations, and a potential catalyst in Seaside. Glenn Vanderburg is fond of saying that all things will probably return to Smalltalk, but they won't be called Smalltalk anymore. When you see the influence of Smalltalk on languages