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Everyone talked about the App Engine yesterday and folks seem to go in either of the extremes of loving it or hating it. I’ve seen conspiracy theories about giving Google access to your data but also how this could be the start of many simple applications that wouldn’t see the light of day without something like this.

And there is the response from Giles. I work with Giles, respect him a ton but I think he’s wrong here or at least it’s too early to see if he is right or not.

Google App Engine is a joke. You can’t create apps in Rails, Haskell, Erlang, Seaside, Perl, PHP, or Lisp. You can’t even leverage Unix. You get all the restrictive corporate BS you’d have to deal with if you worked at Google, but you don’t get the stock options, the salary, the free food, or even a parking space for your trouble. Packing Google with partisans who favored a particular language to unreasonable degrees resulted in a product which just isn’t even worth considering. This is why polyglot programming matters. The age of one dominant language is over, and Google’s attempt to make Python numero uno just means wasted time and wasted money.

I think the focus on Python-only is missing a couple of things that seem fairly obviously. One, the main config app.yaml file has an option for saying which runtime is being used and states that other languages / runtimes may be supported in the future. And yes, I do see that it isn’t for sure but come on, do you really think Google will give that kind of additional momentum to Amazon or any other competitors. The second thing is that most developers know that getting something out the door is more important that trying to get all possible features included before launch. Why should this be considered any different?

We know that Google has the Python expertise, why is it shocking that Python is the first language supported? Why would they want to offer a Rails environment and get slammed for it not being totally ready. Why not get the bugs shaken out with now before opening it up to other languages?

Of course, I could totally be wrong and this is an end-game play by Google but it seems way too early for that.