Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, and AI

I bought Joe Armstrong's new Erlang book as a beta PDF early this year and have been enjoying the material (the book is now in print). Erlang definitely has a lot of hacker mindshare but I have been unable to convince my customers to use it (so far). This may be a generalization, but those of us who love to program in Prolog are very likely to also enjoy working with Erlang. Erlang is certainly a great tool but I think it is unlikely to be very popular for two reasons: it does not provide instant gratification like Ruby on Rails and there is no large company promoting it (e.g., like Sun, IBM, etc. promote Java). That said, Erlang has a great open source community behind it and learning Erlang is very worthwhile if you occasionally need scalable applications. A comparison with Java is interesting: Java (especially with the new concurrency support in JDK 6) scales well on single servers with large numbers of cores while Erlang probably has the advantage when scaling to multiple servers.

Labels: Erlang, Prolog

Based on experience with consulting jobs developing web applications using several Java frameworks, Ruby on Rails, and Portable AllegroServe with WebActions (open source Common Lisp frameworks), I believe that choice of framework is less important than:

• Programming language: choose a language that both fits the application domain and has good library support for your application
• Data modeling: while I believe in interactive bottom up development, spending time up front getting object models 'right' makes development easier
• Object persistence: there are lots of good choices (prevalence, object relational mapping for relational databases, distributed memory only, etc.) but choose a scheme that makes sense both for development and deployment

I think that these 3 issues are all more important than choosing a web UI framework.

I have been investing a fair amount of time learning Erlang this year and the ErlyWeb framework (that uses the high performance Yaws Erlang web server) looks very good for both interactive development and distributed deployment. For web applications that map well to Erlang, ErlyWeb allows Erlang to be the development language of choice, but again the important choice is programming language selection rather than web framework.

Labels: Erlang, Java, Lisp, Ruby, web applications