Pure truthiness; the appearance of factual information without the substance. (10+ years of PHP and 5+ years of Python experience here, so...)
Attract more developers? Several times more Websites are developed in PHP than Python, and PHP is growing faster in relative (and therefore also in absolute) terms. Check out any of the web-trends/analytics sites for details. Look at how many development communities are built around PHP projects than Python, and how many new ones start every day. SourceForge and PHPClasses.org are your friends here. PHP is not a good language for building large, maintainable applications? Tell that to Facebook, NASA, Google (lots of Python code, but way, way more PHP) and dozens of thousands of other shops serving billions of pages every day. The largest PHP project I¹ve personally been associated with was a secure government site that had extremely bursty usage up to several dozen thousand hits per minute for an hour at a time.... and if the site broke or the server crashed, Very Bad Things happened, quickly. Yeah, that means ³mission critical.² That site is still in production and it¹s now fully OO and legacy-free (fully tested and audited, with solid CI practices). OO in PHP took ages to get here, but with 5.3 it¹s finally as good as your ability to use it. I develop using a very nice HMVC framework (there¹s your separation of presentation and code); there are dozens of other HMVC and MVC frameworks for PHP out there, with a solid half-dozen having a combined 90%+ share. There are mature, rich frameworks for PHP that support whatever architecture or workflow you prefer... the most widely-used framework, Zend, encourages an MVC application architecture but its components can be used effectively in non-MVC apps as well. The standard PHP toolchain (PHPUnit, PHPDocumentor, PHPUnderControl, etc.) encourage if not downright require clean OO design, particularly for large projects. Python is ³fully OO,² including in places where the subtleties of that are opaque to less-than-expert developers. PHP has its share of those, too, but the ease of finding relevant information makes what would be opaque in PHP transparent: whatever potential issue you run into has been hit, identified, solved and documented by those who came before you. Python is still in such a state of transition that everybody¹s on a learning curve if not a cliff. (I¹ve got three different versions of Python on the machine I¹m typing this email on... and a couple dozen Python apps from the Net that care very much which version they¹re running against.) Python¹s a lot of fun, yes. ³Everything¹s an object² gives you the flexibility to write in a lot of different styles... Including several that closely resemble APL. It¹s a very intelligently-designed language, and it¹s very aware of that. It¹s my firm professional opinion that there will be plenty of opportunity for both PHP and Python for the foreseeable future. Which one is ³better?² That depends, as it always has, on the project and on the strengths and weaknesses of the team tasked with accomplishing it. Clean, scalable, OO code can be written in either language, as can hopelessly-obfuscated effectively procedural code. We¹ve just got a much wider experience base in PHP than Python. I don¹t see that changing in the next five years which is a good working definition of ³medium- to long-term² in this industry. Just my two rupiah worth. Jeff -- Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Email: [email protected] Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Website: http://www.seven-sigma.com/ More contact info: http://card.ly/jdickey From: CL Chow <[email protected]> Reply-To: "A general discussion list on Free/Open Source Software in Malaysia." <[email protected]> Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 10:59:34 +0800 To: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, "A general discussion list on Free/Open Source Software in Malaysia." <[email protected]> Subject: [general] [Sahana Eden] Why replace PHP with Python? Sahana, a FOSS disaster Management System, Project homepage: sahanafoundation.org/ <http://sahanafoundation.org/> Wikil: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahana_FOSS_Disaster_Management_System <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahana_FOSS_Disaster_Management_System> Originally written in PHP(which is now call Agasti) has recently branch a Python version called Sahana Eden. Here are some interesting reasons from the Eden developers according to the wiki. As quoted from the project's wiki eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestionsPython <http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestionsPython> == Why replace PHP with Python? == We believe we can attract more developers if we change from PHP to Python. PHP is not a good language for building large, maintainable applications: http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/index.html * especially when using it to write out complex Javascript (the syntaxes are always tripping you up) * doesn't enforce Object Orientation * poor separation of Presentation & Code Python is fully Object Oriented ('everything is an Object') Python is an interpreted language, similar to PHP & relatively easy for developers to adapt to. Java would be a reasonable choice, but the barrier to entry with Java is much harder - setting up the compiler environment, etc * this doesn't fit the RAD needs of the project. * we can still access any useful Java libs via Jython: http://www.jython.org/ Ruby-on-Rails might be a good choice, but that's primarily for Web2.0 apps still & Sahana is more than just that.[[BR]] Performance is also worse than for Python: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=python&lan g2=ruby Python also supports a wide range of libraries for adding extra functionality, including in the GIS space:[[BR]] (There are no PHP libraries for GIS) * http://trac.gispython.org/lab/wiki * http://featureserver.org * http://tilecache.org * http://mapfish.org Python is also the language in which the support infrastructure is written: Bzr, Trac * ESR's take on Python: http://pythonology.org/success&story=esr * Python as an Agile language: http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/02/python-as-agile-language.html * Python is fun!: http://xkcd.com/353/ ---- Enjoy ;) Regards, CL Chow _______________________________________________ general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.foss.org.my/mailman/listinfo/general
_______________________________________________ general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.foss.org.my/mailman/listinfo/general
