Um... haven't you read the PHP licence? It's very BSD-like. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can take that source and do what they want with it, fork it, wrap it up into another product, whatever. So there is absolutely no reason to castigate Zend for anything. And PHP is not hobbled at all in terms of functionality. The only thing Zend keeps proprietary is the high-performance stuff, which is *honestly* hardly a factor with most dynamic websites, unless they are busy enough to be able to afford Zends very reasonable prices.
Also, there is no reason to complain about "disincentive for the developers to incorporate useful features into PHP". Anyone can create a "release" of PHP that incorporates a zillion features that are not in the default PHP install. In fact, many people have.
And anyway, if your scenario were true, then Java users on non-Sun platforms would be even more out of luck. But in fact, Java seems to keep including all kinds of useful stuff, even to the point where Sun is now moving to include a standard method for Java to interoperate with several of these scripting languages, including PHP.
Furthermore (you didn't think I was done yet, did you?;-)), Zend's business model is *exactly* what many developers need to be able to get their bosses to consider open source solutions: yes it's open source, but you can get a paid support license from the creators, as well as all kinds of neat tools that make you feel better about your dev team using this crazy open source stuff.
> I don't have any kids, and probably never will (if I'm lucky, anyway), but I don't see the problem in them seeing these materials. Sure, spam annoys the hell out of me, and I'd be the first in line with a baseball bat to teach the spammer a little "cause and effect", but I'm not going to pretend it's because my kid saw a naked body.
And I too hope you remain "lucky" in this way.
Seeing a naked body is one thing (even then, naked can mean so many different things). Seeing scenes of brutality, rape, sado-masochism, bestiality, and every other possible psychological oddity is quite another. I don't think this stuff is good for adults, much less children, but I don't think my children should be forced to deal with these concepts. They have enough to worry about already.
Of course, I also think parents who give children unmonitored email accounts are just asking for _far worse_ than just spam for their children.
It's a tough world for parents these days... you always have to be judging and balancing these things carefully.
>I grew up in the "desktop printing" industry, beginning in 1998.
Hehe, by that time I was leaving the "desktop printing" industry, and getting back into programming. I already had a portfolio of very nice work, all output from Corel and (gasp...) DESIGNED ON A PC, and almost every time I showed this work to a typical Mac/Photoshop zealot, they were shocked. Some of them simply refused to believe you could do this wort of work on a PC, much less with Corel. (And I'm not talking about business cards. More like full-page, full-bleed brochures, ads, etc... usually output at a nice high line-screen). Not that I hated Adobe/Mac, but I was able to accomplish similar things at less than half the price with Corel/PC.
Me too. I have always thought that Corel's software was underrated. From version 6 onward, CorelDraw gave you far more for your money than anything from Adobe. Yes, Photoshop was better for... a *photo shop*, but if you were a web shop, the CorelDraw suite just made more sense.
Then they purchased another of my favorite graphics programs, Painter. I thought for sure they had something going. They even had the promising beginnings of a video editor with Lumiere, but they dropped that just as quickly as they picked it up.
Personally, I think everything else besides their graphics software was a waste of their resources. They got greedy, and wanted to stroke their pride by trying to do everything. There is only one computer company that can get away with that, and even they don't really do "everything".
Really, just think about the different areas Corel tried to take on:
1. Office Software (Wordperfect Office sutie) 2. Database software (Paradox) 3. Hardware (remember the Netwinder Linux stations?) 4. Linux distribution (apparently they did a pretty good job of their Linux distro, but how many companies were actually making money on Linux?) 5. Since I lost interest in Corel, around 2000 or so, they even tried to go in several more directions: XML content management, business process visualization, tablet PC software, you name it. Looks like a serious lack of focus.
And... just look at the promising areas--which tied right into their existing success--that thay failed to pursue: 1. Video editing - Lumiere was actually a decent little video editor for $79; much better than any other low-end editor. 2. 3D design, animation - yeah, I know they bought Bryce 3D, but that is only for a certain class 3D work, and not at all good for animation. 3. Web design software - remember Corel Web Designer? I designed my first website with that, back in '96. At the time, it was one of the best tools out there. Again, Corel dropped it within a year.
You'r right. It's not fart jokes and slapstick. It's a celebration of insulting behavior and arrogance.
Well written? Maybe well written as in 'he knows how to ridicule someone who can't conjugate her verbs drunk'. But hardly well written as in actually having any insights into anything interesting, much less any clever ways of expressing same.
Also, I just loved the condescending references to South Florida as an intellectual backwater, as if Tucker Max and his friends are some sort of literate wunderkind who adore Joan Didion or attend philosophy discussions. No, they just get drunk and stare at fake boobs in spandex.
I happen to live just a few miles south of Boca, and while it has its dodos, I have met some of the most intelligent people I know since I moved to Florida. And they read Didion and attend philosophy discussions, among other things.
Maybe I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy, but I don't know what's scarier: the implications of this lawsuit to free speech, or the fact that this narcissistic blowhard of a guy is now being celebrated by wanna-be's all over slashdot.
The humor is definitely Beavis & Butthead quality, IMHO.
I have not yet had occasion to use MySQL or PostgreSQL in a really large database, but after moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL a couple years ago, the main thing that struck me was how much logical power it gives you. On that front, PostgreSQL wins over just about anything except maybe Oracle or DB2. I mean, you can create your own datatypes and operators if you want; how cool is that?
I think PostgreSQL is fairly robust for medium/large databases, though (depending on the kind of usage, of course), and they are focusing almost all of their development energy now on enterprise-level solutions.
The only major issues I see are such things as lack of fine-grained exception handling in transactions, nested transactions, clustering (replication is already available, though), etc... But MySQL doesn't come close to having any of these either.
Heh... it's not me I'm worried about, pal; it's all the other developers who will have to write code to access my database (and possibly from multiple environments, not just PHP). For any project that involves more than one person, I would rather define my constraints once than audit every single code change in hope of preventing major disaster.
Yes, I can see how MySQL, and a lack of constraints can work for one-person projects, but even then, when projects get more complex, those limitations can really bite. Last PHP/MySQL job I did ended up with a LOT of complex PHP code to do what a few views and stored procedures could do when I ported to a more relational system.
Thank you, yes. Bad constraints for the date types are just one example of disregard for serious data handling.
Not only does MySQL automatically do dangerous date conversions without complaint -- it shouldn't even allow a 0000-00-00 date in the first place. What year has a 0 month? What month has a 0 day? Also, note that MySQL allows _any_ month to have days numbering up to 31 -- even February. That means that in MySQL, every month has 32 days, and every year has 13 months. The constraints are left up to the developer.
There are plenty more gotchas, such as non-standard SQL, whatnot... Too many for my comfort.
Yes, I am aware of phpArch, but that is actually a good publication, not the trendy rag I expect a "phpMyMag" would quickly become;-). (Rule of thumb here: anything which assumes PHP and MySQL will automatically be bundled together automatically loses some credibility)
I'm posting this because I'm sure you will get a flood of posters arguing that in fact MySQL does support foreign keys and transactions with InnoDB... blah blah...
Foreign Keys and transactions are only the beginning of the logic that a true DBMS should be able to handle. Still lacking from MySQL are:
1. Views (and for views to be truly useful they need to be updateable) 2. Named constraints (such as table and column-level CHECK constraints, and other expressions which can build business logic into your database design) 3. Domains (essentially special named datatypes that can "carry" their constraints with them) 4. Triggers and stored procedures (so you can make the database handle other arbitrary logical needs that can't be met standard constraints and foreign keys)
These points I mention above are not "extras". They are critical to any DBMS if you are dealing with critical information.
I think what we really need is a PHP/MySQL for Dummies book (or am I too late?). Then, we need the Video Professor to offer a full suite of PHP-MySQL lessons which are free if you are not fully satisfied, and we need a monthly magazine devoted to PHP/MySQL, perhaps we can call it phpMyMag, or something catchy like that. All of these wonderful resources will discuss various ways one can do such amazing things as
1. Jump-Start your Web Development Career!!! 2. Create Webpages which Display Data From Databases. 3. Take User Input From HTML Forms and Store in Databases. 4. Design and Build Web Shopping Carts Which Display Data from Databases, and Which Take user Input From HTML Forms and Store in Databases. 5. Learn Why MySQL Really is better than Oracle (in the Advanced section)
Eventually everyone will get the idea that of course PHP is nothing without MySQL, and the products are really just one single piece of software. Newbies the world over will shake their head in confusion when some of us mention that we use PHP with PostgreSQL, or Oracle, or without a DBMS at all!!!.
I think it's unfortunate that Javascript has mainly been restricted to client-side browser programming. A good implementation of server-side Javascript would have made PHP an unnecessary exercise (in fact, that is reason I ended up using PHP). I know that Netscape servers and ASP support Javascript, but there is no real cross-platform implementation that I know of. How about a nice Apache module, hey? (Hmm.../me checks Google... and whaddaya know! Check out Whitebeam.org)
But even better, Javascript as a generalized programming language would be very interesting, IMHO.
I think those things are more a question of personal passion, balanced against the number of other things intruding on one's life.
Yes, people in their 30s and 40s might have a lot more on their minds than a 21-year old math wiz. They are likely to have families, mortgages, social obligations, etc... (I know all this from experience, as I did learn a significant amount of my current profession under exactly those circumstances. But, even though I am now 37, with wife and family, I am still actively reading and learning more in the theoretical side of programming.
There is this myth that programming and mathematics are "burn-out" fields, mainly for the young, with a few professor-types scattered in there. But, In my personal experience, I was able to concentrate much more on learning math in my late 20s than in my early 20s. I learned much more about programming in my 30s than in my 20s.
Don't forget that there are plenty of people who don't fit that mythical "brash young mind" profile. E.F. Codd (an unsung hero in the computing world, IMHO, who died just a few days ago at 79) did his main life work in the late 60s through the 80s, meaning some of his best discoveries happened in his fifties, or even past 60. We're talking about the relational data model here, which took an amazing perception of computing and mathematical theory to achieve. And that was only one of his accomplishments.
So I don't think I'm going to retreat into middle management and lick my tired old wounds just yet;-).
I am also 37, and my first degree was in English. (Really, the English major was just an excuse to study anything that interested me so besides literary theory, creative writing, history and music, I also made it to Calc II, some other sciences and took a couple programming courses).
But I really didn't get back into computing until I was 26. Started re-learning programming by reading, and by developing databases and web-based applications. Later became lead developer at a couple different companies. Between free-lancing and full-time employment I have never been more than a month without work, even after the dot-com crunch.
One of those companies had two C.S. graduates, and two of us with no CS or IT degree, yet we were the ones doing the programming. Even though we tried to share our books and ideas with the others, it just didn't really happen, so they ended up doing other things, such as system administration, web design, etc... Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the point is programming is a passion, and no degree in the world will change that. Smart employers learn to look for those with the passion, not the degree.
As lead developer at my current job, I personally will be happy to hire and work with developers of any age, as long as they are the kind of people who bother to continue learning. And its not about whether they know Java or C# or PHP. Conceptual ability is much more important than rote knowledge of implementations.
Talk about witty... Jack Vance is one of those Sci-fi writers who would have been a good writer in any genre. A great combination of emotion, playful ideas, humor, and linguistic ability. In fact he is one of the few writers I've read who had me laughing out loud.
And I say this only after reading two of his stories: The Last Castle, and The DragonMasters. Got to get more.
This is such an important point! It's so easy to get tempted into playing feature-chase, especially when just about all IT-centric publications push this aspect in every publication, every ad, and every "news brief"^h^h^h^hpress release.
But advanced features are often worse than useless: not only do we have problems with bugs and leaky abstractions, but we have a whole army of professionsals to re-train, in the vain hope that THIS time, it will be different.
Notice that Microsoft's biggest problem these days is that it sold Windows NT/98 too well. Yes, that combination was technically inferior, but it was fairly simple, and once the bugs were worked out (3-4 years later...) IT departments finally got a hanlde on it. So, do they want to give up this comfort zone for a new slew of untested systems, and then aNOTHER new slew right after that? Heck no!!
This is exactly where FreeBSD has greater strength than any other OS, period. There are no sudden jumps in features, users don't have to re-learn everything 3 years later, and in fact FreeBSD 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x machines can easily be handled together, sharing almost identical configuration scripts, filesystem layout, etc...
(Notice that the parent comment in this thread looks like it was written by a Microsoft marketing executive? Hmm.... nah, it couldn't be.)
Actually, there have not been that many security holes in the core PHP code itself. I have been using PHP for 5 years, and there have only been a handful of security alerts requiring patches.
The real problem is the code written in PHP, by 13-year-olds, who haven't been introduced to all the dangers inherent in any scripting system that processes input from users. PHP is just so easy that it is easy to write insecure software. The flaw, if there is one, is mainly that.
Actually, there is one (overcomable) oddity with PHP that might cause these problems: PHP defaults to object spawning by copy rather than by reference. Thus when PHP developers do $myobj = new myclass;, they would usually be better off doing $myobj =& new myclass;, which will create objects much more efficiently, and behave more like Java in object creation.
In PHP5, objects will automatically be created by reference, so this won't be such a common problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... haven't you read the PHP licence? It's very BSD-like. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can take that source and do what they want with it, fork it, wrap it up into another product, whatever. So there is absolutely no reason to castigate Zend for anything. And PHP is not hobbled at all in terms of functionality. The only thing Zend keeps proprietary is the high-performance stuff, which is *honestly* hardly a factor with most dynamic websites, unless they are busy enough to be able to afford Zends very reasonable prices.
;-)), Zend's business model is *exactly* what many developers need to be able to get their bosses to consider open source solutions: yes it's open source, but you can get a paid support license from the creators, as well as all kinds of neat tools that make you feel better about your dev team using this crazy open source stuff.
Also, there is no reason to complain about "disincentive for the developers to incorporate useful features into PHP". Anyone can create a "release" of PHP that incorporates a zillion features that are not in the default PHP install. In fact, many people have.
And anyway, if your scenario were true, then Java users on non-Sun platforms would be even more out of luck. But in fact, Java seems to keep including all kinds of useful stuff, even to the point where Sun is now moving to include a standard method for Java to interoperate with several of these scripting languages, including PHP.
Furthermore (you didn't think I was done yet, did you?
> I don't have any kids, and probably never will (if I'm lucky, anyway), but I don't see the problem in them seeing these materials. Sure, spam annoys the hell out of me, and I'd be the first in line with a baseball bat to teach the spammer a little "cause and effect", but I'm not going to pretend it's because my kid saw a naked body.
And I too hope you remain "lucky" in this way.
Seeing a naked body is one thing (even then, naked can mean so many different things). Seeing scenes of brutality, rape, sado-masochism, bestiality, and every other possible psychological oddity is quite another. I don't think this stuff is good for adults, much less children, but I don't think my children should be forced to deal with these concepts. They have enough to worry about already.
Of course, I also think parents who give children unmonitored email accounts are just asking for _far worse_ than just spam for their children.
It's a tough world for parents these days... you always have to be judging and balancing these things carefully.
My experience doesn't bear this out at all.
>I grew up in the "desktop printing" industry, beginning in 1998.
Hehe, by that time I was leaving the "desktop printing" industry, and getting back into programming. I already had a portfolio of very nice work, all output from Corel and (gasp...) DESIGNED ON A PC, and almost every time I showed this work to a typical Mac/Photoshop zealot, they were shocked. Some of them simply refused to believe you could do this wort of work on a PC, much less with Corel. (And I'm not talking about business cards. More like full-page, full-bleed brochures, ads, etc... usually output at a nice high line-screen). Not that I hated Adobe/Mac, but I was able to accomplish similar things at less than half the price with Corel/PC.
Me too. I have always thought that Corel's software was underrated. From version 6 onward, CorelDraw gave you far more for your money than anything from Adobe. Yes, Photoshop was better for... a *photo shop*, but if you were a web shop, the CorelDraw suite just made more sense.
Then they purchased another of my favorite graphics programs, Painter. I thought for sure they had something going. They even had the promising beginnings of a video editor with Lumiere, but they dropped that just as quickly as they picked it up.
Personally, I think everything else besides their graphics software was a waste of their resources. They got greedy, and wanted to stroke their pride by trying to do everything. There is only one computer company that can get away with that, and even they don't really do "everything".
Really, just think about the different areas Corel tried to take on:
1. Office Software (Wordperfect Office sutie)
2. Database software (Paradox)
3. Hardware (remember the Netwinder Linux stations?)
4. Linux distribution (apparently they did a pretty good job of their Linux distro, but how many companies were actually making money on Linux?)
5. Since I lost interest in Corel, around 2000 or so, they even tried to go in several more directions: XML content management, business process visualization, tablet PC software, you name it. Looks like a serious lack of focus.
And... just look at the promising areas--which tied right into their existing success--that thay failed to pursue:
1. Video editing - Lumiere was actually a decent little video editor for $79; much better than any other low-end editor.
2. 3D design, animation - yeah, I know they bought Bryce 3D, but that is only for a certain class 3D work, and not at all good for animation.
3. Web design software - remember Corel Web Designer? I designed my first website with that, back in '96. At the time, it was one of the best tools out there. Again, Corel dropped it within a year.
Oops, I meant www.lileks.com/bleats.
You'r right. It's not fart jokes and slapstick. It's a celebration of insulting behavior and arrogance.
Well written? Maybe well written as in 'he knows how to ridicule someone who can't conjugate her verbs drunk'. But hardly well written as in actually having any insights into anything interesting, much less any clever ways of expressing same.
For well-written, see www.lileks.com/bleat (Yes, I know it's not post-2000 brashness and insults, and the subject matter isn't frat-boy adolescence, sorry...)
Agreed.
Also, I just loved the condescending references to South Florida as an intellectual backwater, as if Tucker Max and his friends are some sort of literate wunderkind who adore Joan Didion or attend philosophy discussions. No, they just get drunk and stare at fake boobs in spandex.
I happen to live just a few miles south of Boca, and while it has its dodos, I have met some of the most intelligent people I know since I moved to Florida. And they read Didion and attend philosophy discussions, among other things.
Maybe I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy, but I don't know what's scarier: the implications of this lawsuit to free speech, or the fact that this narcissistic blowhard of a guy is now being celebrated by wanna-be's all over slashdot.
The humor is definitely Beavis & Butthead quality, IMHO.
I have not yet had occasion to use MySQL or PostgreSQL in a really large database, but after moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL a couple years ago, the main thing that struck me was how much logical power it gives you. On that front, PostgreSQL wins over just about anything except maybe Oracle or DB2. I mean, you can create your own datatypes and operators if you want; how cool is that?
I think PostgreSQL is fairly robust for medium/large databases, though (depending on the kind of usage, of course), and they are focusing almost all of their development energy now on enterprise-level solutions.
The only major issues I see are such things as lack of fine-grained exception handling in transactions, nested transactions, clustering (replication is already available, though), etc... But MySQL doesn't come close to having any of these either.
Hmm... actually it sounds to me like Prof. Steve Mann (http://wearcam.org/) would have the best chance at this contract.
And maybe he's ready to leave Canada, after being roughed up by Air Canada security last year.
Come over, Steve, the water's great. Just watch out for those security checkpoints.
Funniest /. post I have read in months... lol.
Heh... it's not me I'm worried about, pal; it's all the other developers who will have to write code to access my database (and possibly from multiple environments, not just PHP). For any project that involves more than one person, I would rather define my constraints once than audit every single code change in hope of preventing major disaster.
Yes, I can see how MySQL, and a lack of constraints can work for one-person projects, but even then, when projects get more complex, those limitations can really bite. Last PHP/MySQL job I did ended up with a LOT of complex PHP code to do what a few views and stored procedures could do when I ported to a more relational system.
Bah.
g .php
You don't need quotes and brackets if you actually learn PHP's full string handling syntax: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.strin
Notice that there are actually several methods of variable escaping and quoting available, even complex variable parsing in heredocs format.
Thank you, yes. Bad constraints for the date types are just one example of disregard for serious data handling.
Not only does MySQL automatically do dangerous date conversions without complaint -- it shouldn't even allow a 0000-00-00 date in the first place. What year has a 0 month? What month has a 0 day? Also, note that MySQL allows _any_ month to have days numbering up to 31 -- even February. That means that in MySQL, every month has 32 days, and every year has 13 months. The constraints are left up to the developer.
There are plenty more gotchas, such as non-standard SQL, whatnot... Too many for my comfort.
Yes, I am aware of phpArch, but that is actually a good publication, not the trendy rag I expect a "phpMyMag" would quickly become ;-). (Rule of thumb here: anything which assumes PHP and MySQL will automatically be bundled together automatically loses some credibility)
Constraints are much more than that; please see here.
I'm posting this because I'm sure you will get a flood of posters arguing that in fact MySQL does support foreign keys and transactions with InnoDB... blah blah...
Foreign Keys and transactions are only the beginning of the logic that a true DBMS should be able to handle. Still lacking from MySQL are:
1. Views (and for views to be truly useful they need to be updateable)
2. Named constraints (such as table and column-level CHECK constraints, and other expressions which can build business logic into your database design)
3. Domains (essentially special named datatypes that can "carry" their constraints with them)
4. Triggers and stored procedures (so you can make the database handle other arbitrary logical needs that can't be met standard constraints and foreign keys)
These points I mention above are not "extras". They are critical to any DBMS if you are dealing with critical information.
I think what we really need is a PHP/MySQL for Dummies book (or am I too late?). Then, we need the Video Professor to offer a full suite of PHP-MySQL lessons which are free if you are not fully satisfied, and we need a monthly magazine devoted to PHP/MySQL, perhaps we can call it phpMyMag, or something catchy like that. All of these wonderful resources will discuss various ways one can do such amazing things as
1. Jump-Start your Web Development Career!!!
2. Create Webpages which Display Data From Databases.
3. Take User Input From HTML Forms and Store in Databases.
4. Design and Build Web Shopping Carts Which Display Data from Databases, and Which Take user Input From HTML Forms and Store in Databases.
5. Learn Why MySQL Really is better than Oracle (in the Advanced section)
Eventually everyone will get the idea that of course PHP is nothing without MySQL, and the products are really just one single piece of software. Newbies the world over will shake their head in confusion when some of us mention that we use PHP with PostgreSQL, or Oracle, or without a DBMS at all!!!.
Completely agreed.
/me checks Google... and whaddaya know! Check out Whitebeam.org)
I think it's unfortunate that Javascript has mainly been restricted to client-side browser programming. A good implementation of server-side Javascript would have made PHP an unnecessary exercise (in fact, that is reason I ended up using PHP). I know that Netscape servers and ASP support Javascript, but there is no real cross-platform implementation that I know of. How about a nice Apache module, hey? (Hmm...
But even better, Javascript as a generalized programming language would be very interesting, IMHO.
I think those things are more a question of personal passion, balanced against the number of other things intruding on one's life.
;-).
Yes, people in their 30s and 40s might have a lot more on their minds than a 21-year old math wiz. They are likely to have families, mortgages, social obligations, etc... (I know all this from experience, as I did learn a significant amount of my current profession under exactly those circumstances. But, even though I am now 37, with wife and family, I am still actively reading and learning more in the theoretical side of programming.
There is this myth that programming and mathematics are "burn-out" fields, mainly for the young, with a few professor-types scattered in there. But, In my personal experience, I was able to concentrate much more on learning math in my late 20s than in my early 20s. I learned much more about programming in my 30s than in my 20s.
Don't forget that there are plenty of people who don't fit that mythical "brash young mind" profile. E.F. Codd (an unsung hero in the computing world, IMHO, who died just a few days ago at 79) did his main life work in the late 60s through the 80s, meaning some of his best discoveries happened in his fifties, or even past 60. We're talking about the relational data model here, which took an amazing perception of computing and mathematical theory to achieve. And that was only one of his accomplishments.
So I don't think I'm going to retreat into middle management and lick my tired old wounds just yet
Amen to that.
I am also 37, and my first degree was in English. (Really, the English major was just an excuse to study anything that interested me so besides literary theory, creative writing, history and music, I also made it to Calc II, some other sciences and took a couple programming courses).
But I really didn't get back into computing until I was 26. Started re-learning programming by reading, and by developing databases and web-based applications. Later became lead developer at a couple different companies. Between free-lancing and full-time employment I have never been more than a month without work, even after the dot-com crunch.
One of those companies had two C.S. graduates, and two of us with no CS or IT degree, yet we were the ones doing the programming. Even though we tried to share our books and ideas with the others, it just didn't really happen, so they ended up doing other things, such as system administration, web design, etc... Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the point is programming is a passion, and no degree in the world will change that. Smart employers learn to look for those with the passion, not the degree.
As lead developer at my current job, I personally will be happy to hire and work with developers of any age, as long as they are the kind of people who bother to continue learning. And its not about whether they know Java or C# or PHP. Conceptual ability is much more important than rote knowledge of implementations.
Talk about witty... Jack Vance is one of those Sci-fi writers who would have been a good writer in any genre. A great combination of emotion, playful ideas, humor, and linguistic ability. In fact he is one of the few writers I've read who had me laughing out loud.
And I say this only after reading two of his stories: The Last Castle, and The DragonMasters. Got to get more.
This is such an important point! It's so easy to get tempted into playing feature-chase, especially when just about all IT-centric publications push this aspect in every publication, every ad, and every "news brief"^h^h^h^hpress release.
But advanced features are often worse than useless: not only do we have problems with bugs and leaky abstractions, but we have a whole army of professionsals to re-train, in the vain hope that THIS time, it will be different.
Notice that Microsoft's biggest problem these days is that it sold Windows NT/98 too well. Yes, that combination was technically inferior, but it was fairly simple, and once the bugs were worked out (3-4 years later...) IT departments finally got a hanlde on it. So, do they want to give up this comfort zone for a new slew of untested systems, and then aNOTHER new slew right after that? Heck no!!
This is exactly where FreeBSD has greater strength than any other OS, period. There are no sudden jumps in features, users don't have to re-learn everything 3 years later, and in fact FreeBSD 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x machines can easily be handled together, sharing almost identical configuration scripts, filesystem layout, etc...
(Notice that the parent comment in this thread looks like it was written by a Microsoft marketing executive? Hmm.... nah, it couldn't be.)
Actually, there have not been that many security holes in the core PHP code itself. I have been using PHP for 5 years, and there have only been a handful of security alerts requiring patches.
The real problem is the code written in PHP, by 13-year-olds, who haven't been introduced to all the dangers inherent in any scripting system that processes input from users. PHP is just so easy that it is easy to write insecure software. The flaw, if there is one, is mainly that.
Actually, there is one (overcomable) oddity with PHP that might cause these problems: PHP defaults to object spawning by copy rather than by reference. Thus when PHP developers do $myobj = new myclass;, they would usually be better off doing $myobj =& new myclass;, which will create objects much more efficiently, and behave more like Java in object creation.
In PHP5, objects will automatically be created by reference, so this won't be such a common problem.