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dimanche, 27 mai 2007
Language expressiveness and competitive advantage
RailsConf is over and Martin Fowler posts his feedback. The general tendency is here, the expressiveness power of dynamic languages, gives them a more and more significant spread. As Martin Fowler says that more than 40% of their business in United-states use the Ruby platform. There is of course a bias from the Thoughtworks, the compagny Mr Fowler works for, positionning on this technology but I think that this tendency is well confirmed.
The Java platform has clearly a playing card and Sun has well understood that. On the technical side with the integration of the JSR-223 to Java 6 et JRuby as well as the promotion side with Sun‘s sponsoring for RailsConf.
The release of JRuby in a general availability will surely give a kick-off to a more lively interest. As a notice, Groovy has some leg up in terms of implementation. From a more general manner, the Java execution platform can become an infrastructure foundation and the host environment for another languages. The Java platform fullness is preserved but with an opening towards tools more adapted to specific tasks (Ruby and Rails for the web development for example, a small wink to Gilles who started with this technology for his project).
The expressiveness power is for me one of the main competitive advantages of programming languages. With this comparison, the dynamic languages are clearly winners. Nevertheless, beware to these metrics that can gives to Domain-Specific-Language an important expressivity measure but with a lack of softness. Hence the interest in metaprogramming techniques from these dynamic languages that permit the best of both worlds.
The predominence of advanced programming languages, like dynamic languages, in the evolution scale is on the march even if this evolution stays slow.
Technorati Tags: jruby dynamic languages
