Why are so many web languages interpreted rather than compiled?

interpreted-language
Rich Bradshaw picture Rich Bradshaw · Dec 4, 2008 · Viewed 11k times · Source

Why didn't languages such as C end up being using for web dev? Surely the speed increases from being compiled would be useful for heavy load sites?

Answer

Stein G. Strindhaug picture Stein G. Strindhaug · Dec 4, 2008

Another good reason is that on a big server execution speed is not so much an issue as the connection speed anyway. Most of the time is spent sending and receiving data, not number crunching. And actually in certain web services which do a lot of computations, the hard crunching is probably run as a compiled program.

Plus interpreted languages don't need compiling (which on a large project can take time), thus it's more suited for the typically agile development of web solutions.

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