Scripting Languages vs. Compiled Languages for web development

Question

Though I come from a purely PHP background on the web development side of programming, I have also spent much time with C# and C++ on the desktop.

I don\'t really wa

Answer 1

I wouldn't draw such a sharp distinction between compiled and interpreted languages - this is really just an implementation detail, and tends to change with time (faster than the languages themselves change.) Case in point - thanks to Facebook, PHP is now a "compiled language" too. Another case in point - I enjoy web development with Scheme - and my preferred Scheme implementation now runs a VM and in that sense is at least as compiled as Java is.

So I think the issues to focus on are the expressiveness of the language, its performance, and its ease of deployment - compiled vs. interpreted is only important insofar as it relates to these things.