05.21.07
comparative programming linguistics
I have seen a lot of discussion over the years of the relative strengths (or weaknesses) of specific languages. People talk about why they use this language or that language, and they seem to always talk about specific linguistic constructs of their favored language.
“Mine has generics!” “Mine has macro expansion!” “Mine has closures!”
Sometimes the various devotees will give a nod to the richness of their language’s libraries, or to the robustness of their compiler, but rarely.
Recently, I’ve been working on a hobby project in PHP while reading up on tools like odb, JML, Daikon, Esc/Java2, javaspider, and EmmaECL. The contrast is stark.
PHP is stable enough, and seems to have plenty of libraries, but PHPEclipse quite downrev compared to Eclipse, the debugger doesn’t work at all for me (and I don’t now where to start troubleshooting), and there are essentially no additional tools. I felt like a dieter writing copy for a food magazine, shackled to PHP and pining for the abundance of the Java tools.
I am just about ready to swear fealty to Java, purely because of the richness of the third-party programming toolset.
