The evolution of programming languages (COBOL -> Ruby/Perl)

This O'Reilly article is interesting: How to Love a Framework You've Never Used

The gist of the conclusion of the article is this:

The dynamic languages make programmers so much more productive that even conservative business types are forced to sit up and notice. That's why I love Ruby on Rails, despite having not used it.

David Hansson, love him or hate, has created a killer app which is turning even diehard Java enthusiests to dynamic languages. There's a reason why Amazon, LiveJournal and Slashdot rely so heavily on Perl. There's a reason why Yahoo! decided to start using PHP. There's a reason why Rails is written in Ruby and not Java. I think we've finally hit the turning point where the economic forces at work are too great too ignore. Of course, Java will be around for a long time to come — COBOL is still widely used, for example — but it's simply math. The faster your programmers can turn out good applications, the more money you save (and can therefore earn).

I also love this quote from Randall Schwartz:

This power can be summed up in a response noted Perl guru Randal Schwartz made in response to a Java enthusiest (a student, I believe) asking him how he dealt with Perl's lack of "strong" typing. He replied "I just smile and move my program into production before the Java programmer has his first compile."

Truly smugness deserving of a Unix user ;)