In its year-end roundup of software development’s winners and losers, InfoWorld deemed 2009 a great year for smartphones, scripting languages, the cloud, and open source, but not always a kind year for developers.
Here’s the assessment of scripting languages:
“When Google launched the Google App Engine, it pushed out the Python version first. PHP Web applications like WordPress and Drupal couldn’t be more common. Ruby on Rails continues to be more mature. If it weren’t for the fact that Java’s solid core supports most of JRuby and Jython, many programmers wouldn’t ever use a compiler. And the Java programmers themselves are enamored with Groovy, the slick mechanism that gives Java programmers all of the depth and strength of the fully typed and optimized API with all of the shorthand fun of a scripting language.”
