MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-07-22 |
| FROM | Sunny Dubey
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] School Technology
|
On Tuesday 22 July 2003 03:38 am, you wrote:
> On 2003.07.21 22:57 Sunny Dubey wrote:
> > On Monday 21 July 2003 08:40 pm, Ruben Safir Secretary NYLXS wrote:
> > > Perl allows, as most people who took my classes know, a broad
> > > background in general programming skills, and computer science that is
> > > not possible with many other programming platforms. One of those
> > > platforms is PHP.
> >
> > I think it is safe for me to say that PHP/MySQL is the most popular
> > language/database combination on the internet.
>
> That is STRONGLY doubtful, as JSP is probibly more deployed on the
> internet. I strongly doubt PHP/MySQL is even larger than mod_perl
> deployments and would challenge you to show the data and the studies to
> back up this statement.
I said LANGUAGE/DATABASE combination, not a stand-alone language.
Additionally read ... the december 2002 netcraft news letter:
http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/index-200212.html
And also, if you go to bookpool.com (GREAT techie book store) You'll notice
there are far more books about PHP/MySQL than Perl/MySQL. Where are the
books about Perl/MySQL ?!?!?!
> The inadequacies of PHP to reach our goals is not an issue of dogma, and I
> will not be drawn into a PHP versus Perl Flame war, you can do that on your
> own time.
You are the single only person I have ever met with such a distaste for PHP.
Even Yahoo (which hosts about 150k internal sites) has mass switched to PHP
to enpower its website. Large sites like Freshmeat and SOURCEFORGE (the king
of 'em all) run on PHP.
> Now who is Dogmatics. Your 100% free version of GNU/Linux in Debian is
> functionally far less pollished than SuSe. Hell - they distributed GNOME
> without a logoff button.
Mandrake is 100% free software. So is slackware, and I believe gentoo as
well. And maybe even newer and up coming linux distributions like ArchLinux
and CustomLinux.
> STOP
>
> Have you READ the educational goals of NYLXS yet? First read it, and then
> we can pick up on this conversation again with the same base reference.
You mean section 3 of goals.html ?? Yes I have, it says nothing about what we
are talking about.
> Show me where I bashed it? The hysteria around PHP is nearly laughable. I
> for one, couldn't care less about PHP one way or the other. But unless you
> can claim 4 years of educational experience
No, but I can claim this. For the two years that I have worked for my high
school, I've noticed that our school's website is always run by a bunch of
students. The site uses nothing but apache, mysql and PHP. Guess what?
Their learning has not been stunted by PHP in any manner. In one of them has
progressed from learning PHP to C/C++ (either one, I don't remember) pretty
damn well. He has coded a half C/C++ and PHP application to be used by 2500
kids simultaneosly against an LDAP backend (this is verging on "enterprise"
level stuff.)
All of these kids are doing fine with PHP, they are learning both about UNIX
and some (two of them) are even learning all about a newer language: Python.
So when is PHP supposed to be harmful to these kids?
> We do things for our own reasons and to
> achive the goals we've set out to accomplish.
In such an event I believe we need policy on how to "suggest different
software". I say this because the last thing we need it to show up at
whatever meeting, and start advocating perl and PHP.
> That's not true. The basic lack of built in programming tools for the
> enforcement and documentation of standardized programing interfaces made
> the Beekman project a giant eagles nest of clugged coding which was
> impossible to impliment within other institutions outside of providing web
> services to other institutions.
The above holds true for ANY LANGUAGE, ... even *gasp* *shock* ... PERL!
> Furthermore, the use of PHP as the introudction langugue for children will
> not contribute to an integrated kind of cross-pollonation which is needed
> to break the stranglehold of propreitary systems in which our current
> educational system is gripped by.
PHP is used in rather large sites (as listed above) ... so where does the
children part of it come in? It seems to the hate for PHP is more childish ?
> No it doesn't. It is NOTHING like C or C++. There is no means, for
> example, to make a pointer, or a reference to a union or a stuct to be
> objectified, or to even be passed between name spaces or scopes.
>
> And in fact, in many regards, PHP is more complex than C, especially ANSI
> C. It has an endless stream of built in functions with long names, limited
> database connectivitiy, and non-standardized function interfaces.
>
> In fact, PHP makes the C string library look nearly rational. This is not
> how you want to teach people to program.
>
> In fact, C and C++ are entirely differnet from each other. And who said
> that teaching C and C++ is an end goal in of itself. In fact, the
> principles of C and C++ are very difficult to teach with PHP because of
> it's lack of real references, it's lack of a true runtime enviornment, it's
> non-existant namespace implication, and so on.
Yes, but some of the concepts learned in PHP can easily be applied to other
languages, however perl's style of programming is so unique, and therefore it
simply is not universally applicable to or from other programming languages
> Perl IS faster to code up than PHP.
>
> As for your comments on Perl, I'm not in the least bit interested in such
> a useless flamewar.
I stand by the few points that I made on perl. Maybe NYLXS should have a
"CPAN browsing nite" too see what I mean.
> Your entitled to your opinion. But you have not given a single shread of
> evidence to substantiate any of the points. Please substantiate your
> opinion with actually data, genuine example, or provable hypothesis.
>
> In fact, PHP has some very useful features, but you haven't mentioned ANY
> of them.
Ease of database interoperability, far easier to stick right into HTML code
(as opposed to buggy emb_perl), built in facilities (such as doing mail()
instead of doing open(), print(), close() in perl). And its just a whole lot
easier to upgrade PHP than to muck around with perl and mod_perl.
Sunny Dubey
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