Programming languages for long-term projects

• http://richorama.github.io/blog/2014/12/31/languages/
  • Perl did not even get mentioned. If it did, it would probably be given the same response as PhP.
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818926

Discussing programming languages is always a good way to start a flame-war. And naturally, someone will say that Lisp is the best choice. Is Lisp the best language that's hardly used?

Server-side web apps can use a language that's different from the middleware or behind-the-scenes processes, such as messaging queues, data stores, etc.

Maybe Lisp is a good choice to create a Redis-like app. But is Lisp a good choice to create a wiki app?

Reddit was originally created in Lisp, and Reddit is a different take on the message board idea, so it seems that a wiki, blog, or CMS type of app could be created in Lisp. But I wonder why the Reddit crew eventually rewrote their site code in Python.

And while PhP seems to power most of the World Wide Web, at least the server-side part that interacts with users, it's supposedly the language to run away from.

Hilarious. Maybe instead of fretting over a language choice, a programmers should pick one that they enjoy using, and go with it for a project, and don't worry about longevity.

If C or C++ will be around a 1000 years from now, and the scripting language interpreters are written in C/C++, then it will be possible to build the interpreters like Php, Perl, etc. to support legacy code and to support the coming around full-circle idea of what's old is new again.

In the aught years, programmers allegedly fled Perl and PhP to use Ruby and Python, or more specifically, the respective Web frameworks for those languages: Rails and Django. If Perl had a web framework in early 2000, then maybe that language would have been used more.

Anyway, now in the mid-teens, programmers are allegedly fleeing Ruby and Python to use Node.js and Go. That probably means that in 5 to 10 years from now, programmers will be leaving Node.js and Go for something that has not been created yet.

I can see Node.js hanging around because it's JavaScript, and at this point, nothing will replace JavaScript for client-side work in the browser, unless every site becomes a native app.

It's amazing the ecosystem that surrounds Node.JS. It's easy to find a module or a library to support just about anything, which has been a strong point for Perl's CPAN.

Programmers are still creating and updating modules for Perl, even though that's a language that nobody uses.

Thus far, my experience with Node.JS has gone well, and it has been fun. But I'm also relying on the Express web framework. I never used a web framework in my Perl web apps.

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