Re: Philosophical question

Onsdag 14. desember 2011 22.21.04 skrev Chris Angelico :
> The biggest problem with PHP, imho, is actually that it's so easy to
> use. Anyone can get a WYSIWYG editor, save as HTML, and have a web
> page... and then all you need to do is rename it to ".php" and put
> some special tags in it, and look! You have a dynamic web page and
> it's so awesome! At least, it is until you try to go further, and you
> start adding mess on top of mess on top of mess.

In my opinion, that's a pretty elitistic view. Certainly, that's one way of
writing PHP, but it isn't the only one. Quite a few of us have started with
something like what you've outlined here, but have long ago moved on to more
maintainable coding practices.

The good thing about PHP is the low threshold, and you can start using it
doing exactly what you outlined in your first paragraph. But somebody coming to
PHP from any old procedural language, will soon find that PHP lends itself well
to building function upon function, until you can really write the code you
need to express anything you want.

> There are a few more fundamental issues with the language, but mainly,
> it gets the blame for myriad bad PHP programmers.

Yes there's a lot of bad programmers out there. Most of them code in Java or
Visual Basic.

> I prefer Pike. It's designed for writing servers, performance is
> pretty decent, it's a high level language, and it has great database
> support (including Postgres-specific features, some of which are quite
> handy).

I'd like to look at this Pike. I don't think that my Web host supports it, but
it might still be a fun experience.

regards, Leif

The Yggdrasil project:
http://code.google.com/p/yggdrasil-genealogy/