Posted by Steve Chapel on 03/30/06 18:36

Treefrog wrote:
> Once upon a time, PHP was a scriting language, but it's more than that
> now. For example, I'm currently working with a 500,000 line 100% PHP
> application. Because 95% of it is built on poor coding, it's nearly
> impossible, certainly futile to try to impliment standards into it. I
> was just trying to think of/ask for ways in which situations like this
> can be stopped in the future. Which, I think needs to happen for PHP's
> future. I've worked in quite a few places, and with quite a few other
> developers, and they seem to agree; PHP code is nearly always messy
> crap.
>
> But it doesn't have to be.

I'm not so sure about that. Large Perl programs (and even many small
programs) are nearly always messy crap. I believe it's a natural
property of languages that have weak or loose typing, do not require you
to declare variables, and do not have a separate compilation step. These
kinds of languages are often called scripting languages
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_languages>.

Perhaps there is a way to make scripting languages more suited for large
applications. Discussion of how to do that may be beyond the scope of a
post in a PHP newsgroup, however.

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