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From Miami to Nassau

posted under category: General on February 14, 2017 by Nathan

You want to travel to the Bahamas and you have to pick a web programming platform to take you there.

ColdFusion is a cruise ship with almost no other passengers. It's all inclusive. It's a smooth ride, but sometimes it docs 50 feet from the port and you have to swim the rest or book the last bit with Java.

Java is a full cargo ship. It's slow to get moving. You have a very safe room in the center of the boat but you have to catch any cargo containers if they fall on you. You'll get to Nassau, eventually, and it's safe because there are a lot of boats here in these shipping lanes.

ASP.NET WebForms is a yacht that drives backwards and only responds to events like when you run into a dolphin.

ASP.NET Web Pages is a very small yacht that tows the ASP.NET MVC yacht where all the parties are thrown.

ASP.NET MVC is a yacht with an iron hull. It sits heavy in the water, but it can clip along at a good pace and there are nice rooms. Many parts are actually designed well, and it should because it cost you a pretty penny.

Go is a navy destroyer. It's much faster than the published speed, but not very comfortable. Unfortunately, you only wanted to go on vacation. As you get on board, you unintentionally sign with the navy. You can't stop talking about how much you love it all.

PHP is a tug boat with tires tied to the outside. Why would you go to the Bahamas in a tug boat? It can get you there, but where is the bathroom? Everyone except Ruby is passing you and it seems like they're all having a better time.

Ruby is a beautiful steam-powered riverboat with a huge rotating paddle in back. Nothing matches its charm and luxury, but it's going to take you forever to cross the ocean in this, and it might just break on the waves. You hope for good weather and set out before finishing any seaworthyness work because it's already floating.

Python with Django is a sailboat with big white sails. If you know what you're doing, and you trim your whitespace sail in the correct position, you can get moving very quickly.

Python with Flask is a windsurfing board. It's basically a sailboat, but it's very basic. Extend it with a surfing kite to head out across the ocean.

Node.js is 370,799 tiny interconnected boats that let you walk to the bahamas. Only one person can move at a time. (Note, the NPM repository at this time has exactly 370,799 packages in it.)

CGI with C++ is an ocean row boat. It's a lot of effort but you're definitely going to get there, so long as you don't give up.

C is a life raft, deployed a few miles off of Miami. Good luck.

Assembly is a stick. You hold it over the water, hopefully the ocean will part. It's an older way of sea travel, granted, but if you know what you're doing, and you pointed it the right way, you can drive a ferrari to Nassau. Also, you question if anyone's really done this.


Nathan is a software developer at The Boeing Company in Charleston, SC. He is essentially a big programming nerd. Really, you could say that makes him a nerd among nerds. Aside from making software for the web, he plays with tech toys and likes to think about programming's big picture while speaking at conferences and generally impressing people with massive nerdiness and straight-faced sarcastic humor. Nathan got his programming start writing batch files in DOS. It should go without saying, but these thought and opinions have nothing to do with Boeing in any way.
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