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Yahoo Moving to PHP
Erek Dyskant writes "Yahoo has decided to switch from a proprietary system written in C/C++ to PHP for their backend scripting. Here's the notes from a presentation by a Yahoo engineer at PHP Con 2002."
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mass hysteria!!!!!!!
A corporate presentation with this included on page 20:
"Why not ASP or Cold Fusion?
Pros
- lots of 3rd-party integration
- professional support
Cons
- CF has ugly syntax
- $$ for languages
- $$ for Microsoft Windows "
Bold added by me for emphasis
?sp
Hmm, I think perhaps his boss may have a better grasp of english. It's You're not Your.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
-Kevin
Well... I don't know if someone else has already pointed these things out, and I don't have time to go through and read all 6800 posts, so I'll just voice a few complaints about PHP.
I use PHP because that's all that's available on my web hosting service other than cgi. I could use the cgi-bin but then all my URLs would start with cgi-bin/, which would suck.
PHP is nice for doing database query stuff, and it's nice for simplifying your pages (for instance if there's a standard block of HTML you want in your pages and don't want to have to copy it all the time or re-compile a bunch of static HTML files), but as I've used it, I've come across a few problems.
1) This one is really annoying. Certain pre-defined variables (I'm not sure which, maybe only user-inputted data) are pre-slashed. So if a user inputs the string 'My name is "Jon"', you get it as 'My name is \"Jon\"'. WTF is up with that? That's not what he said! I can't find the reason for this or anything else about it in the documentation (maybe it's there somewhere, but I can't find it).
2) Every time a page is loaded, it has to be re-parsed, as well as any included scripts that it uses. This is very inefficient.
3) It's a real pain to include scripts that are in different directories which include other scripts, because they will try to open them relative to the location of the original page.
I (and it seems other people do, too, guessing from the user-submitted documentation on PHP.net)have to use nasty hacks to get around these problems all the time.
As far as alternatives go, right now I'm a big fan of Python. It has lots of useful libraries, and the language is very elegant (sp?). The one thing I don't like about it is that every time you access a variable, it has to look up the name in a dictionary (I think).
Unfortunately I couldn't get mod_python to work. I'm writing my own web server (in Python), instead, so that I don't have to deal with all of the Apache/PHP problems I've had. Looked at Medusa, but that seemed a little too complicated for what I was doing.
I actually don't care much about the syntax of the language I use (as long as it's not too unreasonable). What's important to me is that I can use an elegant, efficient runtime in which I don't pay for things I don't use, and that I get a useful standard library. I think I'll be happier when I can use mod_parrot :-D
I'm still stuck with PHP on my real site, though (as opposed to my personal box that I play with).
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
o Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes!
o The dead rising from the grave!
o Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
o
o PROFIT!!
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??