Can you really develop complex web apps just using scripting languages

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865746

by joubee • 17 years ago

3 8 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Is it really possible to write complex web application using just python or another scripting language like Ruby?

What have you found Python to be best for when doing web apps and what development sets do you most commonly use?

gsmaverick• 17 years ago

What do you define as complex web applications?

joubee3• 17 years ago

Good point! At the moment I am playing around with realtime data and displaying it according to a users preference. The data is being taken from other websites (Not a twitter app!) and is using Oauth to access several external websites.... Some collaborative fuctionality like diagramming and also charting. Using SQL 2008 as well. I'm only playing and was re-evaluating / thinking of trying a new language :)

joubee3• 17 years ago

I don't know if that's complicated or not (it's hardish for me)

icodemyownshit• 17 years ago

Why would I want to develop anything complex?

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

Python, to take one example, is a great general purpose language. It is terse, expressive, introspective, and high-level, and it supports multiple programming paradigms (imperative, OO, functional). Its standard library is robust and full-featured, and it also benefits from a vast ecosystem of third-party libraries that do just about everything imaginable.

It will never be as fast in execution as, say, C (though we can expect impressive speed improvements through the improved use of VMs); but in terms of developer productivity you can't beat a high-level dynamic language.

For any complex app, you need good project management software, version control, unit testing, clear and comprehensive documentation, and so on. I can't think of any reason why you can't apply these techniques using a dynamic language.

tptacek• 17 years ago

The more complex your application is, the better off you are in a "scripting language" like Python.

joubee3• 17 years ago

So where does C# and Php sit in all this? Do you really need it if you are familiar with python. Isn't phython oo in the same way php is oo?

foobaroo• 17 years ago

are you trollin'?

~90% of the web apps you're using on the web are written in scripting languages.

Can you really develop complex web apps just using scripting languages

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