Tim: appreciate the clarification; i was trying to be circumspect regarding your committment to dynamic languages, and in the process undersold it. apologies.

Ryan: just read them, will have a follow up post. .
James M: will have a follow up to answer your questions.

James G: good citing

payroll processing is kind of mission critical. last time i didnt get paid i know it hurt me bad.

An ADP official agreed.

“So far, PHP has certainly scaled and I know from an architectural standpoint, we’ll have the capability of getting around any bumps in the road that we see,” said Mark Rankin, director of application architecture and infrastructure at PHP user ADP.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/10/20/php/index.php

Of course, you won’t find speakers from the Fortune enterprises to speak at conferences on this topic because no one would consider embarassing themselves to talk about there usage of dynamic languages. Sure, we have some on web applications that are customer-facing. I guess if the clever folks in the blogosphere want to overload the term of what an enterprise application is then they could rationalize anything.

I still defy anyone in the blogosphere to name a single ERP/CRM or other mission-critical application either currently being built and/or can be purchased that is or will be installed into production this year for any Fortune 200 enterprise. You simply can’t!

“… the end game for agile languages is to make it possible for end users to orchestrate services and compose them at some point in the future.”

McGovern came back with some questions that clarify his original post a bit and I think his position makes a little more sense now. Seems his post was more of an inquiry and less of a statement. I’d say he’s probably getting what he was after in your response plus the comments over there (which seem distinctly high quality, btw).

OT: Steve, what are the chances of getting some basic markup capabilities in comments over here? a, em, and blockquote is all I really need.

This blog entry of his from a few months ago is interesting though:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jag?entry=radlab_scripting_and_scale

quote: “Over the years I’ve used and created a wide variety of scripting languages, and in general, I’m a big fan of them. When the project that Java came out of first started, I was originally planning to do a scripting language. But a number of forces pushed me away from that.”

One thing that does spring to mind in these kinds of discussions though is that the “question” seems to get a little lost. Are we focusing on new trends? How much emphasis do we give: time to write a “hello world” level program, a pretty functional demo, getting a system into production or “TCO”? Do we factor in the effect tools have? Are efficiency, security, reliability or scalability special factors to consider or just part of TCO analysis? Are we interested in solutions where it’s harder for developers/managers to go wrong, or do we assume “best practicies”? Some of these are referenced in James’s blog entry but the above are my thoughts.

PS I do a lot of paid work in PHP and Perl but recently I had a small project using JSPs. Developed on one platform (using NetBeans) but deployed on a completely different platform in WebSphere. *sigh* It’s amazing how clunky that program is - the cross-platform issues were non-existant but WebSphere is so clunky in setup and use that it added a noticible bit to the overall project time. Just because the customer wanted to go via “support” to get software installed.

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/duckdown/114225134760338074/#44998

I’d love to get some hard argument out of him on this.

You’re right, McGovern’s wrong. -Tim

It sort of implies that the programming language instead of the people programming in it are responsible for the success or failure of the software project.

It’s not like an interpreter’s going to explode or anything.