in reply to Advice of picking the language for my job, please

If I have to pick a suitable language for a project, a number of factors are of influence. But by far the most important factor is "in which language do the programmers involved feel most comfortable".

Another consideration is having to do a specific task for which a particular language has excellent tools, and others don't. But since your job seems to revolve around databases, it doesn't play much of a role. All important modern languages have excellent database interfaces to all major databases.

  • Comment on Re: Advice of picking the language for my job, please

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Advice of picking the language for my job, please
by xorl (Deacon) on Feb 04, 2005 at 16:42 UTC
    I agree with Anonymous Monk. It really is in which language do the programmers feel most comfortable with. If they're comfortable with all then let them pick.

    I'm sure I'm going to get downvoted for saying this, but my prefered language for any kind of DB to web work is PHP. Perl I prefer for most any other back end work. I'm just more comfortable with doing that stuff in PHP (and PHP's syntax for this stuff seems easier to me).

    IMHO either will handle the task. The language is also not the only factor to consider. The database and the webserver should also be evaluated as well as how well they all interact. I haven't used PostgreSQL (mainly b/c we're stuck with MySQL and Oracle) so I can't comment on how well it plays with Perl or any other language.

    Some semi-interesting links:
    http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue67/nielsen.html
    http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue69/nielsen.html

[reply]
      > It really is in which language 
> do the programmers feel most 
> comfortable with.

      [download]

      I do not agree here. Certain languages have certain advantages. A lot of programmers have a feeling about different languages. There are only a few studies about the effectiveness of different languages.
      A good starting point to understand the differences is an article available online:
      Lutz Prechelt. An empirical comparison of seven programming languages. IEEE Computer 33(10):23-29, October 2000. (http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprt_computer2000.pdf)
      Regarding DB, you should also reflect some performance issues. There was a section "how fast is the DBI?" in the CPAN documentation. I cannot find it anymore. Must have been removed.
      But I'd say it is not DBI itself you should point your finger if you have performance issues.
[reply]
[d/l]
        While I question that the tests in the document can be used to classify the languages into effectiveness, the summary of the article suggests to agree with what you are disagreeing with. From the article:
        In general, the differences between languages tend to be smaller than the typical differences due to different programmers within the same language.
        Which to me means that while some languages may be more suitable than others for certain tasks, their differences are smaller than the differences between programmers. Hence, programmers carry a larger weight on the appropriate choice of programming language than the language itself. Note that the world isn't black and white, and that the features of the language do play a role (as I indicated in another post). It just means the don't play the major role in the decision.
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom