Posts tagged “programming languages”

I've been a die-hard PHP developer for a decade, but I can feel it dying the same death Perl died when PHP beat it. Rails seems like the obvious successor but it's too slow and ActiveRecord is a mess. The real problem: PHP's replacement simply doesn't exist yet.

PHP is dying the same death Perl did before it. Rails is the obvious successor, but after 7 months living in it daily, I can't recommend it: the performance costs are brutal, ActiveRecord is a mess, and Rails is just another framework bolted onto a language. PHP's true replacement doesn't exist yet.

GWT's cross-browser compilation idea is sound and inevitable, but its layout manager approach is dead wrong. Someone will eventually build a proper high-level language that compiles to universal HTML and CSS, and it needs to stay interface-first. Google's halfway there, which is as good as nowhere.

Curl is a new web language co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee that replaces the HTML/JavaScript mess with one clean, powerful solution. It needs a plugin now, but so did Flash once. If IE bundles it, this could be huge.