On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 04:38:12PM -0500, Chris Devers wrote: > On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, << everyone >> wrote: > > << PHP is crap >>
I don't think PHP is crap. I am also amused and puzzled at the people writing huge tracts on why PHP is crap while not at the same time acknowledging there are vastly more websites written in PHP doing useful things for lots of people than there are in perl -- witness the scrabbling to find even remotely interesting success story cases for Perl (what recent ones have there been?). I suspect more revenue is generated from PHP sites than Perl sites. As a corollary, there are less (by some metric) experienced people writing more web software in PHP than in Perl. PHP gets you sooo much more with the same amount of effort than with perl. PHP is fundamentally quite easy, the learning curve astonishingly flat. Hardly the case for perl. A very large application written in OO Perl with a decent MVC-supporting tech like TT would almost certainly be more extensible & maintainable than one in PHP and enable a split between designer and coder, and more agility were the site to be completely re-skinned. However, the number of those such applications is I intuit very small. And besides, it is possible to put code shared by many pages into a single place with PHP and its (admittedly quite hacky) OO capabilities help. Separating code from presentation is an awfully fascinating and lofty goal for some folk but the fact is, for most people and sites it is more work that is basically unnecessary because of the size of the project. About every web tech project I've seen in the last five years has been do-able by two or three people at most. For those projects it is actually *less* readable and understandable to separate since the parts of the code that do stuff and then present it are further apart for no practical immediate benefit. "Worse" is "better". It's a classic case of picking the tool for the job, and the person and the budgetary, political, development, social environment. Each has its merits in different circumstances. There is no solve-all solution (yet). Paul (who thinks that without Template Toolkit/Mason and mod_perl perl would be bordering on a waste of time for web applications, compared with technologies like PHP) -- Paul Makepeace ....................................... http://paulm.com/ "If my my mum likes cabbage, then mother wouldn't shave." -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/
