[moonchrome]

C# in 2006 was a joke, probably worse than Rails in performance. This was the webforms era and old EF - meant for enterprise customers with a couple of hundred active users max... ASP.NET being a competitive/performant framework is a very recent development (since core basically which became usable past 2.0)

Haskell, OCaml and D are niche languages, probably aren't mature enough now to use for a production system that needs to scale (in terms of org growth and building complex systems).

Java web frameworks were also terrible in 2006 (this is the Java era that gave Java it's reputation) and the only thing worse for productivity I can think of is C++ hahaha ...

[pjmlp]

A joke is this comment.

All of them were faster and used less resources than a very slow interpreted language, by having JIT and AOT compilers, state of the art GC and great IDE offerings, even the niche ones had better tooling (Leksah and Merlin, versus nothing).

[p8]

Nobody cares about performance if you build a business application with a couple of users, a common use-case in 2005. The reason a lot of Java people jumped on the Rails bandwagon, was that an application that would take a month to build in Java with Spring/Hibernate, would take a day in Rails. See also: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/

[moonchrome]

No they weren't - ASP.NET webforms and old EF was such a pile of shit it didn't matter how fast C# was (and back then it really wasn't, granted order of magnitude better than ruby/python, but way behind JVM). The applications built with it were dog slow and buggy - they couldn't even scale in enterprise setting.

Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?

I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.

The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.