Sorry I am giving in to raju's troll.
Perl is great
or
Hair Dryer Sucks
If you are a Perl programmer the world will hate you. That was not a very
motivational comment I got from a Perl Programmer upon confrontation of
"Interest in Perl".
To demonstrate Perl's power I'll speak of a true incident that happened,
a "user" friend of mine was using a Visual Basic based Quiz system (It
showed One word and four answers one of which would be a synonym) To
score points you have to give the right answers. Problem was it used to crash
every few seconds. my friend was obviously not happy with it and wanted a solution
and asked his "techie" friends for a fix. everyone had his idea of "the fix" so the
debate quickly turned into a programming competition. I started out by writing my
first
5 lines of C code and then spotted my new investment on the desk "Programming Perl".
Why
not? I said to myself. In 20 minutes flat the new console based application was ready
and
working. I was as blown by it as everybody else. That was my maiden script.
PHP Sucks! This comes from a guy who codes PHP. me that is, and have written
full blown applications {http://www.opuscommons.net} in PHP. PHP Sucks not
because shortcommings in the language but that HTTP is not ment for user interfaces.
and not because of the reasons raju pointed out.
On Sat, Aug 24, 2002 at 10:03:57AM +0530, Raju Mathur wrote:
<snip>
> 1. PHP is not a general-purpose programming language. No matter how
> hard the creators of PHP try to make it one, it started out as an
> embedded web-programming language and continues to offer the richest
> set of features for that specific purpose. Attempts to make it
> general purpose so far are not useful enough to be taken seriously.
>
> How does this affect you? If you write a major app in PHP you cannot
> use it in any paradigm except a web-based one. You may argue, `the
> web is where it's at, and I don't envisage any changes to my app' but
> that's narrow-minded and limited thinking. Good apps evolve over time
> into things that their creators did not and could not have imagined.
> Do you want to send your baby out into the world with the millstone of
> this limitation hanging about its neck from day one?
>
PHP is not a general purpous programming language. TRUE. But the hair-dryer
is also not a general purpous equipment either. How is PHP not being a general
purpous language a shortcomming? I dont see the point. Before you get exited and
flame "read further".
This debate is invariably heading towards Emacs vs vi.
All things dont have to be kitchen sink plus more.
> 2. (Corollary to Point 1) PHP doesn't support any mode of programming
> except embedded into HTML. This makes it impossible to, for example,
Wrong. You can use any one of the many templating systems avaliable
the one i use is tyhe official one Smarty{http://smarty.php.net} with
which you can write pure PHP and pass variables to template files that
web-designers can create using dreamweaver and stuff.
> adapt a PHP app to models such as SOAP, thin client, etc. Embedded
> into HTML is fine for low-end stuff.
Wrong.
There is PHP-SOAP avaliable {ttp://phpsoaptoolkit.sourceforge.net/phpsoap/}
PHP is 100% XML compliant and work very beautifully with it.
>When you're dealing with larger
> or more complex apps, the distribution of logic in your PHP apps makes
> it impossible to administer, maintain and enhance them. If I have to
> scan the source of 200 HTML pages to figure out exactly which fields
> in a database get updated when the user fills out a form, I lose, the
> user loses, the developer of the app loses.
Wrong.
using Smarty you can exclude HTML completely from source code
and ther is full OOPS implementation on its way {PHP5.0} the variable scope
has already been improved in PHP4.2 from every variable in global scope
to $_GET and $_POST becoming shy variables.
> 3. Unlike Perl, PHP doesn't have vast repositories of library modules
> available for easy download. PHP developers are more or less stuck
> with the modules and functionality that the makers of PHP build into
> the language. While there's no denying that this functionality is
> very impressive, it is by definition limited.
I think apart from "exploites" PHP does its job very well in what it is
designed to do. Rapid web portal development nothing more nothing less
plus there is no learning curv at all you can learn to code in php in a
week.
> 4. PHP isn't an object-oriented programming language. OOP is a
> much-misused paradigm nowadays -- every programmer with 6 months of
> programming in Java calls him/herself an OO programmer. However,
> there's no denying that appropriate and sane use of OO can make
> programs that are much easier to maintain and enhance and share code
> from than programs using a purely functional interface. While PHP
> does have classes, it doesn't support some critical features of OO
> like multiple inheritance.
look above. Plus I dont see how Perl is a better language to so OOPS
rather then Ruby or Python. If i have to "show off" my oops skills
id use Ruby.
> 5. PHP promotes insecure programming. I would not say that PHP is an
> insecure language; however PHP encourages people with little or no
> programming experience to get in and start writing without
> understanding the ramifications of their actions. Giving power
> indiscriminately can be dangerous and the huge number of PHP exploits
> that are revealed each day in the security community prove the adage.
> Further, PHP doesn't support secure programming features like taint
> checking in Perl.
Thats true, but PHP is a under development. give them time they will learn.
>
> 6. PHP is not as efficient as Perl. This doesn't matter for smaller
> projects, but where there's large amounts of data to be processed the
> speed factor can become a significant criterion for determining the
> choice of a programming language.
>
> 7. Perl supports the same paradigm (embedded into HTML) as PHP does
> if you really need it, along with many enhancements like
> tamplate-based web page creation.
Well it does. look above.
Get your self REAL FACTS before writing.
I am not saying the PHP is a very good programming language but its not as
bad as raj tried to potray it. I wont recommend any one doing a full blown
application to use HTTP as frontend it dsnt matter if you are using perl
or PHP or C-CGI or JSP.
Cheers
Pankaj
--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl);
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