Languages - Only part of the equation

I'm sorry did I miss the point where we started caring again about what language we are writing in. This was a discussion point 5 years ago when we didn't have powerful IDEs to help us write applications. Now it should be "what job do I want to get done?" and "what technology is going to deliver that the quickest, cheapest and highest quality output?

By technology I think there are at least four key areas to look at:

  • Skills availability (who's going to write the code)
  • Framework (.NET, Rails etc)
  • Tools (VS, Eclipse etc)
  • Language (Java, VB.NET, C#, Ruby)

And imho you shouldn't make a decision based on one of these factors alone.  Particularly in Australia atm where getting skilled developers in nearly any technology is proving very difficult.

Unlike Alex I don't much care for C# or Ruby for that matter.  I find that despite being more verbose VB.NET is still my preference but again this doesn't mean I will always pick it for the job.

Published Tuesday, July 03, 2007 11:30 PM by nick
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Comments

Wednesday, July 04, 2007 2:04 AM by Alex James

# re: Languages - Only part of the equation

My response...

Thursday, July 05, 2007 11:17 AM by Arun Kumar

# re: Languages - Only part of the equation

We decided to write the entire Kerika application (www.kerika.com) in Java, because we wanted a rich UI (richer than you could get with Web 2.0), and cross-platform portability, and that worked out well for us. You might find these blog postings interesting: http://www.kerika.com/2007/06/why-we-chose-java.html and http://www.kerika.com/2007/06/why-we-chose-jxta.html
Saturday, July 07, 2007 6:09 PM by Brian H. Madsen - .Net Powered by Caffeine

# Base4.net blogger, Alex awarded MVP Visual Developer - Solutions Architect

I've been secretly reading Alex's blog for a while, mostly because he seriously cracks me up

Saturday, July 07, 2007 11:33 PM by Ivan Porto Carrero

# The language debate

The language debate