Speaking of Tim O’Reilly on Why Scripting Languages Matter covers some of the same points as his talk.
“The reason why dynamic languages like Perl, Python, and PHP are so important is key to understanding the paradigm shift. Unlike applications from the previous paradigm, web applications are not released in one to three year cycles. They are updated every day, sometimes every hour.” I discovered this in reverse after moving from a web to a traditional application development environment. Losing the freedom to update as often as I wanted to was a big adjustment.
Another of his points was that Linux’s killer apps aren’t the Gimp, or Open Office but google, Amazon and Yahoo. “People are so stuck in the personal computer paradigm that they don’t recognize that the nature of applications has undergone a profound change in the last decade, with most of the new killer apps running on what has been called the LAMP platform (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP|Perl|Python).”