Developers make an application great, not language.

In response to blog post http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jag?entry=scripting_flamewar. I see it as nothing but a the flame war.

It's not the language that makes an application great, its the developers.

PHP, Java, Ruby, Perl and many others can scale, can use both free or proprietary DB and Http servers and I always believed a good programmer can create his own framework depending on the systems he/she is working on to avoid the following pitfalls:

1. Insisting on using a framework that doesn't fit to the system because developer has adept skills in using the framework. Try to learn to build your own and never depend on a third party framework since you'll never know how long it will be supported as well as the possibility that certain frameworks has its disadvantages that isn't announced publicly.

2. Modifying the system to fit the framework which would eventually cause the system run inefficiently. This should be the last case.

3. Insisting on using costly software because they provide the functionality that the developer cannot create. I'm skeptical to persons who says this, its like saying that only certain developers can acquire the required knowledge while others can never learn it. I often find developers insisting on using costly DB's like Oracle because it provides easiest way to cluster DBs while doing the same thing

4. Insisting on using open source because the source is freely available. This is not always be for the better since most of the times we are working on proprietary systems that are already in place. We must first make use of the proprietary APIs included.

5. Insisting the system can do everything. This is a nice goal but it may come with a hefly price. Sometimes its better to make things work first efficiently before making it possible for everything to work; the same experience developers encounter that sometimes its better to start from scratch than continue on a design that doesn't fit well (an example is Firefox 3 -- which rumored to be designed from a separate HEAD).

Finally, Lets us invest on our developers, they are the IT industry's raw materials. The one that truly makes great software and designs the best hardware.