On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:43:31 -0800, Yeti wrote:

>Ok, ok I admit it. PHP is a programming language. I guess I drank too
>much assembly code today.
>By the way ... Motorola 68000! Those were to good old days.

680x0 was the nicest machine I ever met - especially nice when writing
for OS-9/68000. Yup, them was the daze...

My perspective: scripting can be "programming light" (or lite, if you're
illiterate and/or in marketing), but can just as easily be serious
programming. This is especially so, now that many scripting languages
support OO to some degree. Equally, I've seen some C code that I'd be
somewhat reticent to call "programming".

Programming isn't all about stacks of procedural code either; consider
declarative programming. (Yes, Ash, XHTML and CSS are effectively a form
of declarative programming!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming

The trick with languages is to:

* pick the one (or more) appropriate for the task
* pick the design approach appropriate to the language (and other tools)

To be a decent web developer, with database-driven pages, one often has
to manage a design that spans multiple languages and sometimes more than
one programming paradigm. Consider a simple HTML input form sending
information to a database:

* (X)HTML for the page, including the input form
* CSS for managing layout and styling, even active menus etc.
* maybe some JavaScript for smart validation or field management
* server-side programming for accepting the form post
* maybe some database programming (SQL) for updating the database

Compound that with some mostly-declarative XSLT, Flash, Java, .htaccess
etc. and you've got a relatively complicated toolset that traditional
programmers scratch their heads over when initially making the switch
from their one-language development environment. (Frameworks strive to
clean that up for developers)

So, is PHP programming? :)
-- 
Ross McKay, Toronto, NSW Australia
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" - Wizard of Oz

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