Decline and fall of scripting languages ?

[Paul Rubin]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> writes:
> Well, I tried sending this via email, but I can't derive a valid
> address from Paul's anti-spammed address.

Yeah, I should update that url since they turned off the forwarding.
It should be <http://paulrubin.com>.  But a thread titled "decline and
fall of scripting languages" is reasonably on-topic for clpy, and
discussion of non-Python languages is reasonable for a thread with
such a title.  So replying to the newsgroup is appropriate.

> If you're thinking about checking out Ada, you might want to take a
> look at D. I haven't gotten very far into it myself (I was attracted
> by DbC), but it looks like a modern redesign of C: GC, OO, and
> typedefs that actually define new types, while still being something
> it's possible to generate reasonably fast code for.

Yeah, I've looked at D and it seems pretty nicely designed, much more
tasteful than C++.  So far though, it seems to have only one
implementation and not much of a user base.  I dunno that I'm really
that interested in checking out Ada.  It seems like a dead end.  Its
main virtue is that it can target small embedded processors, which I
don't know if D can do all that easily.

Right now I'm mainly interested in OCaml, Haskell, Erlang, and maybe
Occam.  Haskell seems to have the happiest users, which is always a
good thing.  Erlang has been used for real-world systems and has
built-in concurrency support.  OCaml seems to crush Haskell and Erlang
(and even Java) in performance.  Occam isn't used for much practical
any more, but takes a purist approach to concurrency that seems worth
studying.

The idea is to use one of those languages for a personal project after
my current work project wraps up pretty soon.  This would be both a
learning effort and an attempt to write something useful.  I'm
thinking of a web application like a discussion board or wiki,
intended to outperform the existing ones, i.e. able to handle a
Slashdot or Wikipedia sized load (millions of hits/day) on a single
fast PC instead of a rack full.  "Single fast PC" will probably soon
come to mean a two-cpu-chip motherboard in a 1U rack box, where each
cpu chip is a dual core P4 or Athlon, so the application should be
able to take advantage of at least 4-way multiprocessing, thus the
interest in concurrency.