From: Rimantas Liubertas <rimantas@...>
Date: 2009-12-08T18:33:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Wordpress Port

> First of all, PHP had object-orientedness tacked on after the fact. Now, this
> can be done well, and it can be done poorly. In PHP's case, it was done poorly
> -- I'd almost rather not use them at all.

Are you talking about PHP4 or PHP5 there?

> By contrast, Perl implemented OO rather well,

Now that's funny.

> And there's the inconsistency, and layers of cruft from Really Bad decisions.
> Stuff like mysql_escape_quotes. Or is it escape_quotes_mysql? Or maybe
> mysql_really_escape_quotes? I always forget, and using the wrong one will
> either corrupt my data or leave me open to SQL injection -- nevertheless, I
> must use it on every single database operation.

No, you must not.

>
> Even Rails supports the idea of placeholder values (when you need to touch SQL
> at all), and this is commonplace at the database API in Perl -- the idea of
> prepared statements comes to mind. This is a much easier habit to maintain --
> and more efficient, too.

PHP has that support too, what's the problem?

>
> So the language itself doesn't lend itself to particularly high quality in the
> first place.

You can write Fortran in any language.


> Add to that, one of the problems PHP shares with Ruby is its low barrier of
> entry, being perceived as an "easy" language -- only PHP seems to have this to
> a greater degree. People who learn Ruby and Rails are at least trying to learn
> to program. People who learn PHP usually start as designers, who learn a bit
> of HTML and CSS, and need a tiny bit of server-side logic in their HTML page,
> so they learn a bit of PHP or paste a bit of code in...

That's BS. I can argue there are plenty designers starting with RoR as the
first server side code that cannot tell Ruby from Rails.

> Now, this is all circumstantial evidence. It's possible there's a large, well-
> organized community of quality PHP software. Maybe things have changed since I
> last used it.

They sure did.

> But I've also been on two language rants in the past two days, and I should
> stop.

Definitely.

Regards,
Rimantas
--
http://rimantas.com/