Going for .NET/C# would have likely limited anyone to using mostly Windows Server for their infrastructure. Not that it's a bad OS, but .NET Core was released only in 2016 and although Mono came out in 2004, sadly it never got the love it deserved and was rather unreliable (otherwise we would have seen way more cross platform development before .NET Core). Oh, also, turns out that LINQ (which is pretty cool) was only released in 2007, though that still puts them a bit ahead of Java I guess, although I can't comment on when it landed in Mono.
Going with Java would have meant using something like Java 6, whereas the first truly decent version (in my eyes) was Java 8, which came out in 2014. Of course, the older language version and runtime wouldn't be a huge issue, however projects like Spring Boot only came out in 2014 and before then most people would either use Spring, Java EE (now Jakarta EE) or a similar framework from back then. I've worked with both and it wasn't pleasant - essentially the XML configuration hell with layers of indirection that people lament.
I mean, either would have probably been doable, but it's not like other stacks are without fault (even the ones I cannot really comment on).
Java 6 would still blow the water out of Ruby's slow interpreter.
Being pleasant isn't relevant for performance.
Good for them! I guess it mostly depends on what you want to build your platform around, what the constraints are and what developer skillsets are popular in your market.
> Java 6 would still blow the water out of Ruby's slow interpreter.
Probably! I do recall major GC improvements starting from JDK 8 onwards, though when compared to Ruby even the older versions would probably be decent: https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/java-garbage-coll...
It would actually be fun if someone pulled out the old versions from back then and did some benchmarks, though maybe asking someone to build a full stack application in such a dated tech would be a tough ask, unless they're passionate about it!
> Being pleasant isn't relevant for performance.
If the discussion is just about performance, then that's true.
If we look at things realistically, then there's more to it - like using a tech stack that allows you to iterate reasonably quickly, as opposed to making your developers want to quit their jobs every time they have to debug some obscure Servlet related bug or to work with brittle configuration in XML (been there dozens of times), to the point where not as much could even get built in a given amount of time with a particular stack due to its challenges.
I do hate when people say that additional nodes are way cheaper than developer salaries, but they're also correct most of the time. Of course, there's also the humanitarian take to just not forget about the developer experience, otherwise we'd have written all of our web software in C++ even back then. It'd work really fast, but we'd have way less software in general.
Haskell, OCaml and D are niche languages, probably aren't mature enough now to use for a production system that needs to scale (in terms of org growth and building complex systems).
Java web frameworks were also terrible in 2006 (this is the Java era that gave Java it's reputation) and the only thing worse for productivity I can think of is C++ hahaha ...
All of them were faster and used less resources than a very slow interpreted language, by having JIT and AOT compilers, state of the art GC and great IDE offerings, even the niche ones had better tooling (Leksah and Merlin, versus nothing).
Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?
I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.
The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.
> Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?
I mentioned Lekshat and Merlin for a reason, way better than Ruby with TextMate and Sublime.
Yes plenty of people were using C++ for Web applications in 2000 - 2006, via Apache, ngix and IIS plugins. Microsoft had ATLServer, Borland/Embarcadero still ship their webserver to this day.
I can assert that plenty of Nokia Networks WebUIs, were powered by C++/CORBA and Perl back in 2006. Transition to Java started in 2005.
As did several CRM systems, like the original Altitude Software application server.
RoR is for people that don't care about performance to start with.
