Joel Spolsky on Language Wars

Joel Spolsky is the CEO of Fog Creek, a software company in New York. He also blogs about software development on his website, Joel on Software. In one of his older posts, he addresses the question of what language and framework is best for web development, and drops some giant blocks of stone-cold sense right in front of you. 

Some choice quotes, condensed from the article:

Which Web Server (Apache, IIS, or something else) should we use and why? 

People all over the world are constantly building web applications using .NET, using Java, and using PHP all the time. None of them are failing because of the choice of technology.   

All of these environments are large and complex and you really need at least one architect with serious experience developing for the one you choose, because otherwise you'll do things wrong and wind up with messy code that needs to be restructured.

How do you decide between C#, Java, PHP, and Python? The only real difference is which one you know better. If you have a serious Java guru on your team who has build several large systems successfully with Java, you're going to be a hell of a lot more successful with Java than with C#, not because Java is a better language (it's not, but the differences are too minor to matter) but because he knows it better. 

Yes. Absolutely yes. There are several different solutions out there, all of them work, and the best choice is likely to depend on something other than a theoretical determination of which one would be best in Plato's world of pure forms, for any number of reasons:

1. You probably aren't building the system from nothing. You are starting with an existing system, and adding on to it. Using whatever language or framework the system is already built from is a big advantage, because the new stuff needs to work with the old.
2. You know something but not everything. A Java-based solution would need something very special indeed to do better than a Python-based solution, if you already know Python backwards and forwards but you've never touched Java. 
3. There is already a standard solution. Someone has already designated a language or framework as standard in your organization, hopefully after carefully weighing costs and benefits, but maybe not. In any case, using anything else would require an arduous process of argument and justification, and every day you spend on the fight is a day you could have spent designing and building your system.

Go read the article. Really. Giant blocks of stone-cold sense. Here's that link again.