From: Paul DuBois <paul@...>
Date: 2003-05-06T10:59:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is PHP so popular?  What can we learn from the PHP camp?

At 6:01 +0900 5/6/03, Andreas Schwarz wrote:
>Aredridel wrote:
>>  On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 12:42:04AM +0900, Lothar Scholz wrote:
>>>  4) PHP was designed to do one job and is great with this.  Ruby is a
>>>  general purpose language, that is good in a lot of places and
>>>  unperfect in all.
>>
>>  PHP is also buggier than a swamp in the midwest US.
>
>Oh yes, that's true. I once tried to use non-blocking sockets... they
>should be called non-working sockets, because they didn't work in both
>the windows and the linux version.
>
>>  PHP was less designed than just kludged together.
>
>The language itself is VERY ugly, this doesn't need a discussion, and
>you could fill a book with the history of security problems in PHP.

That's an easy bandwagon to jump on, and (though you may be an exception),
I'd guess that the majority of people who would be willing to throw out
a remark like that couldn't name more than a couple of such exploits
without looking them up.

I'll also hazard a guess that should Ruby come to achieve a presence on
the Web even *close* to what PHP has achieved, we'll see quite a few
Ruby-related security problems as well.  As web-related modules are
developed and used, people will find flaws in them.

I'm not arguing for PHP or against Ruby, by the way.  I just think
the perceived web-security difference between PHP and Ruby is likely
largely a reflection of how much each language is *used* on the web.