Friday, March 14. 2008
My feelings on PHP, exactly.
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Geeks get obsessed with perfection and computer geeks get obsessed with language perfection. There many other prettier and objectively "better" languages, but the proof comes in the real working environment. Python? Great language, you know I like it-- but it isn't everywhere like PHP is. Ruby? Even worse. Perl? Expressive, but a bear to maintain. Lisp and SmallTalk have some amazing ideas built into their DNA, but they are only going to fit
You comment got truncated, so I am assuming you were going to say, "...only going to fit certain ways of thinking."
You're absolutely right. Different languages will appeal to different people. However, there are features, or rather, design decisions in PHP that make it a somewhat "interesting" language. Python, because it supported name spaces early on, avoided a lot of the namespace pollution and "function prefixing" (e.g. mysql_this, mysql_that) that was required in PHP. Also, Python was designed; PHP grew out of an HTML preprocessor.
One of the reasons for wide adoption of PHP is that mod_php has been around, and stable, for a long time. mod_python, from what I gather in my reading, has really only been easily usable and installable somewhat recently. Hosting providers found it easy to provide PHP, and new programmers didn't really see PHP as a "scripting language" because they didn't have to do anything server-side to get their pages to run: upload a file with a .php extension, they were good to go.
I like Python for the consistency it provides, and dislike PHP for its horrendous inconsistency. Googling for "php function name inconsistency" (without the quotes) will give you this as its first link: http://www.tnx.nl/php
I like the simplicity, "smallness" (I think I read there are only 31 reserved words in Python), and readability Python provides.
You're absolutely right. Different languages will appeal to different people. However, there are features, or rather, design decisions in PHP that make it a somewhat "interesting" language. Python, because it supported name spaces early on, avoided a lot of the namespace pollution and "function prefixing" (e.g. mysql_this, mysql_that) that was required in PHP. Also, Python was designed; PHP grew out of an HTML preprocessor.
One of the reasons for wide adoption of PHP is that mod_php has been around, and stable, for a long time. mod_python, from what I gather in my reading, has really only been easily usable and installable somewhat recently. Hosting providers found it easy to provide PHP, and new programmers didn't really see PHP as a "scripting language" because they didn't have to do anything server-side to get their pages to run: upload a file with a .php extension, they were good to go.
I like Python for the consistency it provides, and dislike PHP for its horrendous inconsistency. Googling for "php function name inconsistency" (without the quotes) will give you this as its first link: http://www.tnx.nl/php
I like the simplicity, "smallness" (I think I read there are only 31 reserved words in Python), and readability Python provides.
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