Warning, I'm ranting here.
It's been a day for it. Ask the designers in my firm.
> <snip simon taking blame for something that wasn't all his fault, but
> is more due to the nature of the hectic life-cycle
Ah. That explains a lot. Maybe you should have put a public health
warning at the top of the source file.
> 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.
Unfortunately, that's the whole world. This is real life, and there's
never enough time to do anything. Despite what we might have been taught
in lectures :-(
I do really think that it'd have been better if done in perl. If only
for the fact that we could have made gradual changes away from problems to
better systems. But as it's written in PHP, and hence all the code is
stuck in the middle of the HTML file and to move away from that we have to
throw everything away. Poo.
More importantly, as sites get bigger there tends to be more and more
stuff that needs to be done by batch jobs etc. Currently we're
duplicating a lot of functionality in Perl shell scripts that we could
have stolen if they were originally written in PHP.
> 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.
No, it's got a lot better. But eggs is eggs.
> Perl is more powerful, Perl is more flexible, Perl is just more.
> Including more difficult to learn.
I disagree with the last bit. I just think we all try and learn the wrong
bit first. Maybe we should always teach everyone Template Toolkit[1] first
as that offers a really nice and simple subset[2] of perl. For most
people, that's almost enough for what they want to do.
The key thing about learning a new language in today's world is
1. It has to be easy to be pick up
2. The bits you pick up have instant real world value.
We must not forget that.
> 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.
Yep. Indeed. I've often thought that what we really need is a 'core
around the core' of modules that are always useful and we should all know
about. And you should be able to do something like
use EverythingForTheWeb;
and it automatically use a whole set of modules. Again, not tricky to
code, but it'd be nice if it were there for everyone.
Someone's bound to answer this with 'but you can go get this from xyz'
here. Well, that's not the point. PHP doesn't have to roll their own.
This was one of the major issues I was trying to get across with setting
up things like the Template Toolkit. I don't want to have to set up
anything! I just want it to work[2]. As a stupid learner I can't be
doing with fiddling around with my httpd.conf - that doesn't give me
instant value! When my boss comes and asks if I got that simple code
working or not, and if we've lost the contract, telling him that I've set
up most of perl is not going to make him feel better.
The unix (and somewhat perl) community has a great culture of 'rolling
your own.' Well, this is all well and good when the predominant people
that need to use the software are hot shit, but as computer use expands,
we need to reduce the initial learning curve. This stuff used to be done
by people who the code was their life. They didn't care spending hours
and hours learning new stuff...it was fun. Now people do it as a
job. Results count.
> 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.
Yeah, I agree. And can I expand this to ASP and other embedded
languages while we're at it.
> 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.
Agreed. I spent a long time learning that I was stupid if left to my own
designs and that I really should learn to program properly. Not everyone
has that time.
Hence should we look at subsets of perl?
[1] <quote style="BBC advertising Radio Times">Other templating systems
are avaliable</quote>
[2] Not strictly a subset, but close enough.
[3] This may not be truly possible. But as long as we do a good enough
job that people belive that it is, then it might as well be.
--
print "\n",map{my$a="\n"if(length$_>6);' 'x(36-length($_)/2)."$_\n$a"} (
Name => 'Mark Fowler', Title => 'Technology Developer' ,
Firm => 'Profero Ltd', Web => 'http://www.profero.com/' ,
Email => '[EMAIL PROTECTED]', Phone => '+44 (0) 20 7700 9960' )
