This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Joe Shelby.
Original Post: right language for the right job...
Feed Title: Joe's Java Jottings
Feed URL: http://www.blog-city.com/bc/
Feed Description: Notes, observations, and occasional other stuff on Java, with concentrations on Swing, XML, and the Semantic (Object) Web.
bayard: I believe you have to have the soul of a programmer to be a good programmer, so, good programmers code as much for themselves as for a company, and Java is not a great choice for a single person. Ergo, good programmers probably shy away from Java, while teams shy towards Java.
Once again, someone utterly misses the point about languages and libraries. I use Java when its appropriate, I use php when its appropriate, I write shell scripts incorporating sed and awk when its appropriate, I avoid perl when its appropriate, I try to use python and find I simply don't have the time to learn it for this project and switch back to something I already know, when its appropriate.
Its all based on what the language and its libraries provide, what 3rd party tools you feel like using to build your project, and all that, that makes a language choice for you.
When I'm designing a project that involves a desktop GUI, I use Java in order to get access to Swing. If its a hack, I write it in rhino/javascript. If its more involved, I go straight to Java. Similarly, when designing a project with XML, I tend to use Java because the base libraries are more mature.
My webscraper is written in Java because I learned the java.net libraries 7 years ago, wrote a nice Facade over it (much nicer than commons-net, IMHO), and have been using it successfullly for 7 years -- as such, any project that needs webscraping capabilities is also written in Java because I don't want to have to rewrite that code in another language if I can avoid it.
When I'm designing a project that involves web pages, my first choice is php because that's a toolkit I can put on every single box I have access to, it has a clean mysql access library, useful String and regex functions, and doesn't use up the resources that Java/Tomcat does for the small amount of traffic I expect the site to get.
Java has been a great choice for the projects I use it on. PHP has been a great choice for the projects I use it on. Neither choice has EVER been because of the number of people working on the project with me. All choices in languages for me have been solely on technical merit and the learning curve.
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