Mark Fowler spaketh thus :
> Yes. You have. And now I have to come along and pick up the pieces and
> deal with the unmaintable cruft that we now have.
IIRC I never worked on any major sites for Profero/New Media
Targeting/Bazz/Plum/New Hyphen Media Com Dot Com in PHP. Ok I wrote the
basis for the Ad Planner in PHP but I *wanted* to do it in Perl. And I
wrote it in obfuscated code (it generated code dynamically and then
eval-ed it which was pointless, slow and stupid) because I was bored,
didn't want to do it, was sulking, was feeling petty and was looking
forward to going to Cuba. Oh and I 'rm -rf' -ed it by accident and
rewrote it from scratch in a day and a half. I think that was also about
the time that I knocked out Colt's mail server so basically it wasn't a
good week.
The reasons why our PHP web sites are shite is because they were badly
implemented rush jobs coded up with no time for longterm planning
because the deadline had been squandered making promises that were
difficult to keep and doing designs that were difficult to implement. If
we'd done them in Perl I don't think they'd magically be any better. In
fact I think they'd be worse.
I agree with you, PHP is *not* suited for large scale, industrial
strength web sites. I've said it before and I'm sure that I'll say it
again before too long (although it seems to be working on Sourceforge).
But it's not as bad as soempeople on London.pm keeps making out - or at
least I never had the same problems that they've encountered. I've found
a couple of bug but then I've found a few odditys in Perl aswell.
Perl is more powerful, Perl is more flexible, Perl is just more.
Including more difficult to learn.
PHP has a shallow learning curve and is quick and has a fairly good set
of inbuilt functions. Sure it has its faults - like I said before I'll
be the first to admit that.
The question I asked on London.pm was 'Has everybody here who slags off
PHP actually used it for a medium/big project?'. I was actually trying
to find out whther people had or whether they were they were slagging it
off just because it wasn't Perl. The thing is Perl people will find PHP
limiting because it's not Perl and everything they can do in PHP they
can also do in Perl just as easily but probably better. But other people
can't. Other people aren't as good at programming as the people on
London.pm and I think they forget that sometimes.
I'm not trying to start a flame war by any account. I *know* Perl is
better than PHP. I *love* Perl. I advocate Perl everywhere. It's just
that, IMHO, PHP is not crap. It's like comparing a BMW M5 to a Ford
Mondeo. An M5 is a far superior car but that doesn't make the Mondeo a
bad car.
Simon
