The thought exercise is a bit silly, but it does reflect a real dilemma (so obvious to us that it isn't even mentioned in the text);
1 - people who write web apps can choose language what they want to use.
2 - PG and others claim that language choice can determine the success of a project.
3 - if you don't like PHP or the LAMP paradigm, at this stage of web history there aren't any clear winners.
4 - switching languages mid-project is perceived as a potential project killer, or at least not very fun.
I wonder though; do we have any empirical data to support #2 and #4? That is, do we know how big a factor language choice is for project success, and do we know if switching languages is really all that hard? Reddit switched languages, from Lisp to Python, and it was not a fatal blow.
I'm wondering if the right answer to "What language should I use" is just "Who cares? Start coding."
My day job is PHP, and I'm determined that my personal projects are not going to be PHP. Unlike the OP I am not as, um, decisive in the face of paucity of evidence, so I have gone down a rathole of evalling other langs (Haskell, Erlang, now looking at Scala).
1 - people who write web apps can choose language what they want to use.
2 - PG and others claim that language choice can determine the success of a project.
3 - if you don't like PHP or the LAMP paradigm, at this stage of web history there aren't any clear winners.
4 - switching languages mid-project is perceived as a potential project killer, or at least not very fun.
I wonder though; do we have any empirical data to support #2 and #4? That is, do we know how big a factor language choice is for project success, and do we know if switching languages is really all that hard? Reddit switched languages, from Lisp to Python, and it was not a fatal blow.
I'm wondering if the right answer to "What language should I use" is just "Who cares? Start coding."
My day job is PHP, and I'm determined that my personal projects are not going to be PHP. Unlike the OP I am not as, um, decisive in the face of paucity of evidence, so I have gone down a rathole of evalling other langs (Haskell, Erlang, now looking at Scala).