Well, like I said, Wordpress defaults to placing all comments from new commenters in moderation.
It's a flawless test for internet tinfoilery; such people immediately allege scandalous CENSORSHIP when the software mindlessly does what it always does.
I think you missed the point of Jonathan's article as well. It wasn't even about COBOL. The point is that innovation needs to happen all the way around, not just in languages. The industries that still make use of COBOL are stuck in the 50's, and the language is just a small part of that issue.
You kinda have to agree that writing anything in Java isn't exactly... "fast". That said, I don't use Java for "quick answers" -- if I want something that super easy and needed tomorrow, I'll do it in Ruby (especially if I know that it's not going to need to scale massively or get tons a hits and requests).
I'll be honest, though I have my issues with Java, I've been following along with James Gosling as he's transitioned through different projects and I have to agree with one thing that I think really differentiates Java from newer languages--when you really need to scale in orders of magnitude (like Twitter), then Java is beast. It doesn't make it easy, but then again, the solution to difficult and large problems wasn't going to be easy to begin with.
> when you really need to scale in orders of magnitude (like Twitter), then Java is beast.
The core Twitter service is still a Rails app though. There is nothing inherit to a language that makes it scale better than another, but different languages are better suited to different problems. As a result, Twitter does make use of Java in some capacity, but they also use a plethora of other languages where they make the most sense.
I'm not familiar with scaling Java, but I've worked with the language itself on Android. What makes it so great for scalability as opposed to something like Ruby?
If you are using Rails, the database is the problem 99% of the time, not Ruby. MySQL can easily* be scaled / denormalised / sharded then if you need to you can just horizontally scale your app servers.
Thanks, Colin. Should have done that to start with. I really liked Michael's post and thought it could use some new visibility--which is why I wanted my blogs readers to see it (mostly Java guys).
If someone could find me some scientific data on usage (I've been working on this for a while with other languages) I would love it. Seems we will always be stuck with "non-scientific," volunteered information.
