Posted by Erik Funkenbusch on 10/08/02 11:19

On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:46:25 -0400, Larry Qualig wrote:

> "darwinist" <darwinist@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1119407989.997265.63910@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>> What PHP Represents
>> <snip>
>> Nothing else really comes close.
>
>
> I definitely took some liberty with my <snip> of your post so it may be
> somewhat out of context. I looked at PHP several years ago and didn't care
> for it much. It most likely evolved since then but I preferred Java/jsp then
> and still prefer Java now for web-pages. But given the popularity of PHP
> there must be something to it or everyone wouldn't be using it. ( Errr... I
> think I just made the Windows argument.)

PHP, while popwerful, does suffer from some serious and often cripling
flaws. It really takes some of the worst features of almost very lanugage
it steals ideas from.

For example, it's loose typing and declaration system as well as its almost
complete lack of scoping contexts make it much more difficult to write
bug-free code than other scripting languages that provide these features.
Hell, even old style VB had Option Explicit to require the declaration of
variables prior to their use.

While it does improve every version, it seems to take a significant amount
of time for the majority of distro's to upgrade, much less the users. The
latest version of SuSE still ships 4.x, for instance (and no way to easily
upgrade short of a tarball or seeking out a third party RPM, and given how
tightly SuSE has integrated apache and php etal into YaST that means some
significant surgery to decouple it).

There's no doubt that PHP is a powerful language, and the issues with it
are not insurmountable. It's much like the Star Wars universe though. Not
a single hand rail in sight, anywhere.

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