Re: Web application: Programming language/Framework

Just a little on the history of the tools might be helpful. I think
that these environments are easy to criticize by people who are not
really aware of what the tools are really good for.

PHP:

This is worth noting in the context of this thread though fairly
off-topic for the list.

PHP was designed initially to be a sort of preprocessor for arbitrary
document types. I don't really use it for much system scripting (Perl
is better for that) but for web applications, it works extremely well.
After all, most of your content may be static, and you are really
interested in modifying the static content by preprocessing it.

I prefer PHP because it can easily be embedded in arbitrary document
types and used to modify them. I am starting to use it more and more
for LaTeX documents as well (though I have some automated tools which
can do more simple manupulations using Perl). This is what the tool is
designed for.

Complaining about PHP's namespaces seems to me to be complaining about
the fact that a crescent wrench doesn't pound nails very well.... Not
that you can't pound nails with a crescent wrench but there are more
efficient ways to do it.

Perl:

Perl was originally designed as a tool for processing text files on a
UNIX system. Bear in mind that this is an incredibly useful concept as
everything is a file :-). It is also designed to take the information
and generate reports. So early on, people discovered that Perl made a
pretty useful CGI programming environment because these tools make it
easy to generate HTML. Like PHP, it has an extensive community and a
lot of add-on modules. However, it is fundamentally different.

For an extremely complex web app I might consider using Perl if I needed
some sort of exotic functionality, like Kerberos integration. Such is
usuallly cleaner than PHP extensions.

Perl also makes a wonderful language for automates system administration
tasks because of its text parsing capabilities and the fact that these
are integrated into the language as operators rather than functions.

Python:

Python is a generic programming environment. I really like it where I
am not doing automated document preparation, or where I need something
far more general than automated document generation (PHP or Perl). In
general, I prefer Python for interactive (non-web) applications.

Each of these environments has good PostgreSQL support.

Pierre-Frédéric Caillaud wrote:

>
> By "weak", I meant "lack of expressive power", not "weakly
> supported". That PHP has a huge community is obvious. It's
> everywhere. The list of broken things in PHP is too long to mention,
> just think about namespaces for instance. I have no bad feelings
> towards people who use PHP, rather I wonder why so many people waste
> their time with such a badly designed tool. I did not intend to be
> discourteous, my excuses if I was, rather, I wanted to help the OP
> out of the PHP mess.
> I have had to code in PHP and always hated it.
>
> I know this is off-topic so... snip.
>
> On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 11:15:18 -0300, Gustavo Franklin Nóbrega - PLANAE
> <gfnobrega(at)planae(dot)com(dot)br> wrote:
>
>> Off course PHP is a very weak language... Is than weak that SF.net
>> have 9144 PHP projects and 3292 Python projects. Python is a very
>> good language, but is discourteous (or that is a signal of knowledge
>> lack) to speak that 'php is a very weak language', when knows that
>> exist so many PHP programmers in this list. Futhermore, this
>> subject is not part of this list.
>
>
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