OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/20389/10_Forces_Guiding_the_Future_of_Scripting Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:53:41 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Good read http://osnews.com/thread?333662 http://osnews.com/thread?333662 Just read this from Slashdot. They linked to a version that is all on one page....

http://weblog.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&...

The article took the words right out of my mouth.

Some good lines...

"Frameworks are becoming even more dominant. Some people identify themselves as Django developers even though they're writing Python code."

Applications are becoming their own worlds. There are 23 job listings for WordPress developers.

I completely agree with those two statements. With languages like this being so easy to learn, its not about the language any more, it is about the framework or the application's api. That is where you invest your time.

But will PHP be able to shake the casual structure that encourages beginners to whip up spaghetti code? Will it be able to continue to mix the presentation layer and the application layer without driving everyone insane? Will Zend's collection of server optimizations provide enough performance to overcome any limitations of the language?

That stuff really turned me off of PHP. I just learned Django and am pretty fond of it. Makes you do stuff the right way. You can't mix html and python. It makes you use it's own template language that is pretty dumb...just your basic for loops and stuff. This forces you to do anything complicated in a different file in a different language (Python).

In five years, there's a good chance you'll be able to imagine you're writing Python while the code is interpreted by something called JavaScript.

Did someone do something like that before using LLVM. Writing code in one language that gets translated into JavaScript? Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (FunkyELF) Comments PHP <> Spaghetti code http://osnews.com/thread?333669 http://osnews.com/thread?333669 But will PHP be able to shake the casual structure that encourages beginners to whip up spaghetti code? Will it be able to continue to mix the presentation layer and the application layer without driving everyone insane? Will Zend's collection of server optimizations provide enough performance to overcome any limitations of the language?

Any language can be made to produce spaghetti code and mix presentation and application layers together. Have a look at the Zend framework and you will see how well it enables MVC design. Views and layouts including being template language neutral. Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (andrewg) Comments RE: Good read http://osnews.com/thread?333670 http://osnews.com/thread?333670 But will PHP be able to shake the casual structure that encourages beginners to whip up spaghetti code? Will it be able to continue to mix the presentation layer and the application layer without driving everyone insane? Will Zend's collection of server optimizations provide enough performance to overcome any limitations of the language?

That stuff really turned me off of PHP.

How does PHP encourage this any more the Python. PHP just happened to get picked up by a lot of people with limited ability. PHP was just too easy. Fast forward to today and PHP5 is a proper object orientated language. The Zend Framework and countless others are what Django / Turbo Gears is to Python.

Now look at the documentation for the Zend Framework, look at the certification, look at the support and its clear if want to build a serious product and maintain it over many, many years PHP/Zend/Zend Framework are clearly superior even if Python is a better language.[i][/i] Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (andrewg) Comments RE[2]: Good read http://osnews.com/thread?333706 http://osnews.com/thread?333706
How does PHP encourage this any more the Python. PHP just happened to get picked up by a lot of people with limited ability. PHP was just too easy.


That's just it - PHP is too easy. It's easy to sit down and start using it - but the downside to that it can easily be used without the skills to do a good job of it. Both good code and bad code can be written in any language, but some encourage good practices more than others do. PHP isn't one of those. Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Delgarde) Comments RE[2]: Good read http://osnews.com/thread?333707 http://osnews.com/thread?333707 I'm afraid I find it hard to see the phrases "PHP" and "proper object oriented language" together in the same sentence without gagging.
It's like saying Visual Basic is a programming language...

PHP was great, up until about PHP3, where it was primarily an HTML Templating language, and it did this very well. After that, shoddy language design -- or perhaps uncontrolled feature-creep -- meant you ended up with a messy object orientation system and the biggest screw-up since Python disallowed Array.join as well as String.join: PHP's (in)equality testing...
That alone should get some people removed from the gene pool, three generations ago. Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mexisme) Comments RE[3]: Good read http://osnews.com/thread?333709 http://osnews.com/thread?333709 Thinking about it Python, Perl and PHP are all just as easy in terms of actual programming.

PHP is just easy because its everywhere, the cheapest hosting companies provide on their cheapest accounts. Its was also easy because of globals being on and many other conveniences that were insecure in design. Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (andrewg) Comments RE[3]: Good read http://osnews.com/thread?333712 http://osnews.com/thread?333712
After that, shoddy language design -- or perhaps uncontrolled feature-creep -- meant you ended up with a messy object orientation system


PHP 5 OO is hardly messy. It may not have the purity of OO that Ruby has but its fully featured and works well. Its also fast compared to the competition.

PHP's biggest problem was always insecure defaults i.e. convenience over security. PHP 6 should fully rectify this issue. Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (andrewg) Comments RE[2]: Good read http://osnews.com/thread?333719 http://osnews.com/thread?333719
How does PHP encourage this any more the Python.

How can you even ask that? Take a BASIC interpreter from the 80s and embed it in a web server. Dump several hundred functions into one global namespace. Bolt on an ill-conceived, half-assed object model. Hand it to a bunch of nonprogrammers... and you've got PHP.

You can't blame all of its many shortcomings on the clods who use it. They're too busy trading javascript snippets, cookbook fashion, on "web developer" sites to have made the mess that is PHP all by themselves.Edited 2008-10-14 21:22 UTC Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sbergman27) Comments RE[2]: Good read http://osnews.com/thread?333792 http://osnews.com/thread?333792
How does PHP encourage this any more the Python.


I don't see how you can compare the two. PHP is a templating language and Python is not, so in order to do a compare, you'd have to compare PHP against a Python based templating system like Mako, Cheetah, Kid, or Django templates.

In the case of Django templates (which is what I'm most familiar with) the business logic is not allowed to be included in the presentation. It simply can't happen. This is good. With PHP, it does happen and results in some crappy, hard to maintain code. Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Clinton) Comments RE: PHP <> Spaghetti code http://osnews.com/thread?333793 http://osnews.com/thread?333793 The problem is that it isn't enforced as it is in Django, for instance.

Sure, good coders can write good code in any language and beginners can write crap code in any language. The nice thing is that frameworks like Django make it harder to write bad code by encouraging good programming practices whereas languages like PHP offer no such encouragement. Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Clinton) Comments RE: PHP <> Spaghetti code http://osnews.com/thread?333799 http://osnews.com/thread?333799 There's also the CakePHP framework, which looks to be quite nice (http://cakephp.org/). Unless the cake is a lie, of course (sorry, requisite).Edited 2008-10-15 08:02 UTC Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (StephenBeDoper) Comments