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Blender Conference Closes, Version 2.3 Released
Qbertino continues: "The cool stuff and cool people I've met are so numerous I get dizzy even trying to sum them up. Notable for all should be the conference release of Blender, Version 2.3. A major release with, among other improvements and updates, a serious redo on essential parts of the interface. At last: No more cliff-wall learning 'curve.' Blender n00bs rejoice! An interesting piece of conference buzz was the entire development team of Newtek/Lightwave defecting and founding their own company with a flagship 3D Subsurf modeler called 'modo'. It sports an interface arguably influenced by Blender and advertised as the hottest GUI-thing since sliced bread. Talk about ripping of the OSS community and not giving credit where credit due ... We were ranting about this, but Ton Roosendahl of Blender fame himself was pleased to see his baby inspiring the industry. We'll beat them all with 3.0 anyway. :-) Get the new original here. And go easy on those servers ... err ... forget it."
Recently I've had a chance to do some web design with PHP. Previously I'd used Perl because I'd heard from many people that Perl was the end all and be all of scripting languages for the web. Imagine my suprise to discover that PHP was vastly superior! I know this is a bold statement, but I have solid arguements to support it.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use
for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of the shortcomings I've had with Perl. Here are a few of the things I've
noticed about PHP. Finally, I'm not the most talented Perl programmer out there. I generally prefer to use the vastly superior Python, but
can use Perl if I have to.
* Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
* The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk. We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all
that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
* Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl
though.
* Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in
almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP,
but I can't think of any at the moment.
* Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires
that much rewriting.
* Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice)
its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library
of any kind.
* Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse
Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you
can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks
pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data
structures.
Again this is just my experience. I don't mean to offend any Perl coders because Perl was an excellent language. However, in certain
cases it may behoove one to write the back end in PHP instead of Perl.
What are your thoughts?
Join the jihad
Hey, I just saved you 8 bucks.
Warning. Parent is a troll. It's part of the bait&switch used in the Jihad. Mod it down. Even if it looks to be a mirror, it will be switched in 15 minutes or so. Mod down.
dont read parent subject line!
http://www.joecartoon.com/pages/home/
Check out the frog in the blender
Be nicer if it was Bill in a blender.. but frog works for now. *wink*
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I just saw the movie and parent is a lie. What is the point of spoiler trolling if its not true? You're not spoiling anything if its not true, you're just making it more of a surprise. A proper troll would be something like "trinity dies near the end, she gets impaled by some spikes when they crash into the machine city". Now you see? I may have ruined the fun for somebody whereas you are just retarded.
don't do it!
President George W. Bush
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