If Ryan responds to your counter-counter-argument by deleting your comment, or resorting to ad hominem attacks on you, I could come to agree with that assessment. If, instead, he adjusts his position and expectations as he said he would, then I would fervently disagree with the assessment. If he does neither or both, well, then, I’ll just kill myself out of confusion.

1. “There have been a number of language[s]…”
   Ryan: “This part is notable because it’s actually true.”
   This part is notable because Mr Gosling didn’t speak those words.

2. “…but they are scripting languages”
   Ryan: “James pulled this directly out of…”
   Here’s what Mr Gosling actually said: Most languages coming up lately have been scripting languages - things like PHP and Ruby - and these are all perfectly fine systems.
   No “but”. No insinuations.

3. “…they just generate web pages”
   Ryan’s response was 2 part, to paraphrase: first there are lots of Ruby projects that don’t just generate webpages (and then there’s Perl and Python and …); second, he suggests Mr Gosling didn’t simply mean “generate web pages”.
   Mr Gosling mentioned PHP 7 times, Python 1, Ruby 1, Perl 0.
   Of the 7 Ruby Scalability/Performance links provided by Ryan, 6 of 7 are explicitly about Ruby on Rails. Most of the other 8 links provided by Ryan are about generating web pages with PHP.
   The lady doth protest too much.

4. “none of them attempt any real serious breadth in the application domain…”
   Ryan: “a really good example except that it isn’t; most of us aren’t…”
   Why would what most of us do have any relevance in judging the breadth of applications a language implementation could reasonably be used for?

5. “and they all have really serious scaling and performance problems”
   Ryan: “the massive set of material addressing this topic…”
   Mr Gosling clearly acknowledged that “if what you want to do is generate web pages they work pretty well” so from “the massive set of material” let’s find stuff that doesn’t have to do with generating web pages.
   PragDave “Clearly there’ll be times where you need to squeeze the most out of your CPU, where your application itself is the bottleneck and it’s CPU bound. In these cases, Ruby might be a bad choice.”

6. “stop spreading misinformation”
   Ryan: “stop spreading misinformation… just stop lying about them… impossible to attribute to anything but malice.”
   In “the massive set of material” addressing Performance we find a 6 year old comparison of miniscule Python programs with Blackdown JDK 1.1.7 programs - why would anyone put forward such out-of-date material?
   It’s so easy to find recent comparisons of Ruby 1.8.4 versus Java 1.5 or Python 2.4.2 versus Java 1.4 or PHP 5.0.5 versus Java 1.5

Well, then write a desktop app with a WS or integration database as a backend.

I think what people want is the zero-deploy advantage of webapps (see Paul Graham’s winding rant on the subject). To that end, Mozilla gives us XUL and Microsoft gives us XAML (eventually). We’ll see how successful these things are…

my position and expectations…

afaict your position is that we should treat your comments more favourably than Mr Gosling’s commments.

If you want desktop-like functionality, why not build a desktop app, right?

Except then it doesn’t do the things the web can do. Everyone wants the web, only without the “web” part.

Did anyone else pick up that remark the interviewer made with Jesse about moving to a “One Page Web”?

Yes! It scared the crap out of me to be honest. I believe the idea is that instead of having multiple top-level resources, you would have a single resource that used heavy AJAX to make requests and update the display. The advantage being that the whole interaction model would become even more like “normal” desktop apps. Of course, you’ll not be bookmarking anything, search engines will likely not be able to spider your content, and the URL will need to be reinvented for each application in a way that removes the “U”.

A “One Web Page” AJAX app would be no different from ActiveX, Flash, or Applets and considerably less functional. The whole concept is a web antipattern, IMO.

What really got me down about the comment was that it illustrates that there’s still some kind of weird contempt for the web. It’s the assumption that the web was thrown together in a bad way and needs to be upgraded to be more like other technologies. The media companies want the web to be just like TV, radio, and print. Desktop application developers want the web to be just like the desktop. The WS-* folks want the web to be CORBA/DCOM. It’s just kind of funny to watch considering that none of the things people try to turn the web into are going anywhere. If you want desktop-like functionality, why not build a desktop app, right?

I understand you feel the post was overwrought and I’d like nothing more than for that opinion to be shown correct although I find it extremely unlikely given the history.