Posted by BearItAll on 11/11/51 11:19

On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:39:50 -0700, darwinist wrote:

> That said, most descriptions of what is good about php, fail to do it
> justice. Although they are generally enthusiastic and sometimes fanatical,
> no amount of religious zeal about its coolness or easiness can make up for
> missing the main point. Out of the theoretical realm of language design
> and into the economic reality, php is the most powerful (programming)
> language so far created.

I may not be popular saying this, but I don't think php is the best tool
for the job that it is used for.

I would agree that it is easy and fits in well with the html/xslt side of
things. It also seems to be the best available at the moment, which is
likely to be why it's popular.

But I would say that ruby-rails is much closer to how things should be,
even if your not keen on the language itself, the principle is much
closer to being right. The html page or 'view' of an application should be
an object of that application, not a filter page that needs to pass
through a 'find & replace' function. How many filters (or transcribers?)
can be active per html page now? php, java script, css, w3c ....

Ruby-rails nearly goes that way of taking the view away from the main
code, but I feel as if it got nervous of taking it to the final
conclusion, plus of cause they are at the mercy of html itself.

When we have a language for web that truly separates data - application -
view, so separate in fact that the view could even live on the client PC
if we wanted it to, then we can rave about it. At the moment we're still
on the journey.

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