Scripting Languages vs. Compiled Languages for web development

Question

Though I come from a purely PHP background on the web development side of programming, I have also spent much time with C# and C++ on the desktop.

I don\'t really wa

Answer 1

I think that speed is a key concern in a web application, in particular

• how fast is it to write my code
• how fast is it to fix my code
• how fast is it to refactor my code
• how fast is it to test my code

That is, I am concerned about the speed of the slowest link: myself. Anything else is fast enough for Twitter-like loads.

Today, the number one on my evaluation list for a new project would be Tornado and Python.

If I had a choice of platforms, of course.

Ah, Python is among the fastest in scripting languages.

Answer 2

A programmer can write good/bad fast/slow scalable/unscable code in any language. Although, some language and technologies make it harder to do. In my experience, with scripting languages you can produce a small to medium scale application faster than you can with compiled languages like Java. However, as applications grow in size, compiled languages become more suited to the task I think this comes from strongly typing objects, deeper layers of architecture to manage tasks, and more QA frameworks to verify things are running as they should be as changes occur.

Answer 3

I'm a big fan of compiled languages everywhere, if for nothing more than the static typing. On the other hand, scripting languages are very convenient -- no binaries to deal with, only text files, which is a big win for web servers.

In the end, it doesn't really matter -- use whatever language you know and feel most comfortable with for the job.

Answer 4

I wouldn't draw such a sharp distinction between compiled and interpreted languages - this is really just an implementation detail, and tends to change with time (faster than the languages themselves change.) Case in point - thanks to Facebook, PHP is now a "compiled language" too. Another case in point - I enjoy web development with Scheme - and my preferred Scheme implementation now runs a VM and in that sense is at least as compiled as Java is.

So I think the issues to focus on are the expressiveness of the language, its performance, and its ease of deployment - compiled vs. interpreted is only important insofar as it relates to these things.

Answer 5

I find it to be mostly a matter of opinion. At first I hated the pre-compiled web applications asp.net provides, but I've gotten used to it so I don't hate it anymore. It has advantages and disantages:

Pro

• pre-compiled web applications are easy to deploy, often you'll only have to update the bin-directory
• pre-compiled web applications perform well
• you don't have to upload source code, which is nice imho.

Con

• updating a pre-compiled web app generally means the web application is reset, so unless you've changed the session state, it'll end all sessions and log everyone out
• rebuilding a large web application can take some time, which is added to the time it took you to write the changes in the first place. I am sometimes impatient.

I've always liked how easy it is to just update one file in a PHP project without having to rebuild a project or something like that, on the other hand, .net has a nice IDE that allows you to debug everying, from back end (C#, VB.net) to front end (Javascript), in one package. But again; both have advantages and disadvantages.

Answer 6

For scripting languages, anyone that has a copy of your software could potentially modify your source code because it's open source.

For programming languages, anyone that has a copy the software cannot simply modify your source code because it is compiled.

So I guess, it depends upon your preferences.