Re: Good open source mailing list system PHP / Postgresql

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 15:42, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> But PHP is where Perl was five years ago, and continually plays
> catchup. If you want real work done, use the right tool. PHP is fine
> for nifty web pages for smallish sites, but Perl takes over when the
> real heavy lifting is needed.
>
> scott> Just because it (probably) hasn't been used to write such a
> scott> system doesn't mean you couldn't do it in PHP.
>
> You could do it in assembler too. But why?
>
> To keep from wasting precious human cycles, you need something with
> the code density and flexibility of Perl or better. Python, Ruby,
> that league. Not C, not Java, not PHP.

Sorry, but this doesn't match my experiences (well, I agree with C and
Java). I built and manage the CMS for www.mcgill.ca. It currenlty has
over 10k pages in the system, and has distributed content management to
over 1000 people on campus. Previous versions of it were written
entirely in Perl, and I was pretty happy with it at the time. However,
about two years ago, we re-wrote it in PHP and haven't regretted it one
bit. Some of the advantages we noticed:

1) Development time was much faster.

2) It is much easier to find/hire PHP programmers than Perl
programmers.

3) Building templates with embedded code is much easier/more intuitive
in PHP than Perl.

4) Despite using rigid coding standards, our old PHP code is much
easier to read than our old Perl code.

5) When a programmer gets stuck trying to find a solution to a
particular problem, often a simple google search finds a hint/solution.
This wasn't always the case with Perl.

6) Even now, after using Perl for a number of years longer than PHP, I
still find myself opening the camel and/or lama books for reminders.
While these books are well written :-), I don't have to do so nearly as
often in PHP, and when I do need info on a function ->
http://ca.php.net/functionname.

Having said that, there are still lots of things in Perl that I love
and wish were in PHP. The Perl community seems much better at organizing
the language development. PHP has all sorts of really stupid
inconsistencies, like string replacement functions that take parameters
in different orders (needle, haystack, subject), (haystack, needle,
subject), etc.. I suspect that this will improve as the language matures
and the community gets better organized.

Also, things seem less likely to break when a new version of Perl comes
out, whereas often minor versions of PHP break all sorts of tiny things
that one wouldn't expect. This is a *BIG* PITA.

So, while I still do all of my batch processing and system stuff in
Perl, I have no plans on going back to doing web work with it.

Cheers,

Chris

--
Christopher Murtagh
Enterprise Systems Administrator
ISR / Web Communications Group
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Canada

Tel.: (514) 398-3122
Fax: (514) 398-2017