What makes a great platform? Available libraries...
I enjoy participating in the USENET groups for Common Lisp and Smalltalk, even though I spend almost all of my time (professionally) developing in Java.
There is an incredible amount of hype and argument over the benefits of Java vs. Lisp vs. [pick your favorite language].
To me, the issue is more: which language/platform has reliable and robust libraries and infrastructure software for a project - not whether a language is dynamic, or strongly typed or not.
My strongest "emotional" ties are with the Lisp languages - starting well over 20 years ago, Lisp was what I would use for fun and interesting projects between FORTRAN jobs. One frustration that I have with Common LISP is the lack of core inrastructure like solid web service support (SOAP, WSDL, etc.). VisualWorks Smalltalk does support robust web services, but I don't have the strong emotional attachment to the Smalltalk language that I have for Lisp.
Meantime, Java almost always slips in as "good enough" in most categories. For example, with IDEs like IntelliJ, Java programmers have effortless refactoring and code inspection. With Java ruling the market, there is a cornucopia of available infrastructure software (web services, XML, XSLT, etc.).
Still, it is great to have fine alternatives like Lisp (my favorite is Xanalys LispWorks) and Smalltalk (my favorite is VisualWorks) for the occasional jobs for which these languages (and more importantly platforms) provide advantages.
8:02:22 AM 
|
