I happened to listen to a talk Marc Andreessen did called , "2005: A Web Odyssey" <http://osc.gigavox.com/shows/detail994.html>; where Andreessen talks about commodity hardware and how it effects programming language choice.
"... programming has moved from being machine dependent and complicated to become a dynamic and easy-to-learn process ..."
Andreessen talks about how languages are moving up the ladder from machine languages to "high level, dynamic languages" by looking at increasingly comoditised, powerful hardware. He notes that Java should now be thought of as a system language. JS in browsers was created in '95 to bridge the gap b/w HTML & Java. Java was deemed too complicated for HTML users. The original idea was JS to be server side. But it never took off due to lack of effort by Netscape to create an Open source version and the tool problems.
"PHP is to 2005 what Java is to 1995"
A lot of the talk he talks about how "PHP is to 2005 what Java is to 1995" The talk was done in 2005. So for Andressen PHP or PHP like languages (Ruby, Python etc) are what he suggests. But right near the end of the talk he talks about Sajax and JPSpan where server side PHP (python,perl) transparently talks to higher level JS code in the browser.
You can find more about Sajax and JPSpan following:
I happened to listen to a talk Marc Andreessen did called , "2005: A Web Odyssey" <http://osc.gigavox.com/shows/detail994.html>; where Andreessen talks about commodity hardware and how it effects programming language choice.
"... programming has moved from being machine dependent and complicated to become a dynamic and easy-to-learn process ..."
Andreessen talks about how languages are moving up the ladder from machine languages to "high level, dynamic languages" by looking at increasingly comoditised, powerful hardware. He notes that Java should now be thought of as a system language. JS in browsers was created in '95 to bridge the gap b/w HTML & Java. Java was deemed too complicated for HTML users. The original idea was JS to be server side. But it never took off due to lack of effort by Netscape to create an Open source version and the tool problems.
"PHP is to 2005 what Java is to 1995"
A lot of the talk he talks about how "PHP is to 2005 what Java is to 1995" The talk was done in 2005. So for Andressen PHP or PHP like languages (Ruby, Python etc) are what he suggests. But right near the end of the talk he talks about Sajax and JPSpan where server side PHP (python,perl) transparently talks to higher level JS code in the browser.
You can find more about Sajax and JPSpan following:
- Sajax http://www.modernmethod.com/sajax
- JPSpan http://sourceforge.net/projects/jpspan