Chris Devers wrote: > When is it nice to be a "quick hack language" that's > "simple and easy", & when does that lead to "the biggest no-no there is"?
Simple and easy quick hack languages are great. I've got nothing against PHP or Perl in that respect. But for larger projects that you want to be scalable, adaptable, easy to customise and maintain, the first rule, or one of the first rules is to separate application code from presentation code. In Perl, Ruby, Python or Java, you can choose to be lax and hacky or strict and structured. You can apply the best technique as the situation demands it. In PHP you don't get that choice. It's like you're always stuck in lax and hacky mode. For that reason, I wouldn't recommend it for larger projects any more than I would receomment Perl 4. That's not to say that people haven't written large and high quality systems in Perl 4 or PHP, but I would suggest that they're the exceptions rather than the norms. A
