James Gosling on PHP, Ruby and C# vs. Java

James Gosling: "Java Is Under No Serious Threat From PHP, Ruby or C#"

"There have been a number of language coming up lately,' noted James Gosling today at Sun's World Wide Education & Research Conference in New York City. 'PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.' He then dismissed C# as having had potential, but no longer: 'We were afraid [Microsoft] were going to do something really creative - but they're hopelessly focused on one platform."

I've been a Java advocate for a long time but I really think that James has missed the point, particularly with Ruby. Ruby is actually a good general purpose language which potentially goes beyond the creation of the small to moderate scale web based systems that Rails is currently targetting. If James is referring to Ruby on Rails then I can agree with him to an extent. Rails is a framework applicable to a limited class of application areas right now, albeit in a particularly elegant way. In time, other Ruby based frameworks, possibly as extensions to Rails or as separate frameworks will address other classes of application.

technorati tags: ruby, C#, java, rubyonrails