Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Web Language That's Long-Lived, and Not Too Buzzy?

adelayde (185757) writes "In my day job, I work on a web based service with a lot of legacy code written in that older (and some may say venerable) web-scripting language, Perl. Although we use Modern Perl extensions such as Moose, the language just seems to be ossifying and we're wanting to move to a more up-to-date and used language for web applications, or even an entire framework, to do new development. We're still planning to support the legacy code for a number of years to come; that's unavoidable. This is a fairly big project and it's mission critical to the business. The thing we're afraid of is jumping onto something that is too new and too buzzy as we'd like to make a technology decision that would be good at least for the next five years, if not more, and today's rising star could quite easily be in tomorrow's dustbin. What language and/or framework would you recommend we adopt?"

Perl still works, and PHP is fine

[ShaunC]

Perl may be legacy to an extent, but it's a Swiss army knife that will get any job done. I don't see it going away anytime soon.

I know it's in vogue to hate on PHP, but PHP is relatively modern, robust, and fully capable of handling enterprise tasks. It's widely adopted and there's support everywhere. Probably half of the websites and services you use every day are built on PHP, it's certainly not the worst language you could choose.

Re:Perl still works, and PHP is fine

[xmousex]

If you are concerned about getting in employees who know the language from school or have experience at several prior jobs, and come in at affordable rates, or have a concern about available contractors, PHP is going to give you a larger available talent pool that you can swap people in and out faster then continuing with perl or going down just about any other path where the knowledge pool will be fairly limited. There are a lot of platforms in PHP that can aid with this, providing frameworks that everyone can follow regardless of how stable or unstable your development team may be.

Re:Perl still works, and PHP is fine

[Vellmont]

Anyone cosidering PHP should read this the now infamouns "PHP is a fractal of bad design".

http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/... [eev.ee]

Perl says your garbage is just that

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it says it in it's own polite way:

$ perl -e '/&%#%^&*)^ADVkjR$%^$E)!HJLGAZ^&R%\jkghlk/^ && print "Valid? No way!"'
syntax error at -e line 1, near "^ &&"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

Re:Node.js

[jbolden]

Javascript executes client side. It is the interpreted language that rendering engines are being built around. You can't have scriptable interactions with low latency without something like it and it is at this point usually the best choice.

Fractal rant makes about six good points

[tepples]

Anyone cosidering PHP should read this the now infamouns "PHP is a fractal of bad design".

Which must be balanced with the "hardly" rebuttal [devshed.com]. For example, PHP lets a program solve the exception/warning dichotomy cleanly in about six lines of code; see the manual's page about the ErrorException class. This leaves about a half dozen legitimate complaints:

• No way to turn off the language's loosely-typed comparisons.
• Parse errors and undefined function errors are fatal rather than throwing an exception that the caller can catch.
• Inconsistent naming conventions in the standard library.
• Associativity for the ternary ?: operator is the less useful side.
• PHP allows the server operator to change program semantics in ways that are annoying to work around, such as not allowing a shared hosting subscriber to turn off "magic quotes" or not following HTTP redirects in libcurl.
• PHP versions change the semantics of existing programs in ways that encourage shared hosting providers to continue to offer only outdated versions of PHP, making it impossible for web application developers to take advantage of new features.