I remember having a very hard time convincing PHBs that MySQL is a viable database simply because they thought the name sounded childish and not like a real database.
Then again, one can probably convince them that it's an MS product (a la, My Documents, My Computer, etc), that should put their fears to rest:)
Actually the Overrated mod was right, this comment is just not Insightful - they aren't rewriting their old stuff. And come to think of it, that was just a silly thing to say.
Re:Seems like a silly move...
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hm, I'll write off the "it's slow" comments to you not knowing what you are talking about - this is very obviously very false (especially for web apps)
I just wanted to comment on the write-once-run-anywhere thing. I develop code on Linux and Windows with Tomcat and JBoss, the code is deployed in production on Solaris and Tru64 with Weblogic (in addition to the former), and I don't have to change a line of code to go between them - that's good enough for me.
Anyway, if you claim Java's performance is abysmal (in any area except 3D graphics) you just haven't looked at the damn thing in a few years.
Re:Dangers of PHP? I think not!
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Yahoo Moving to PHP
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Perl has its uses but it is not designed for the web, PHP is.
That sentence is as much hogwash as what you are so upset about. Perl itself certainly wasn't "designed for the web", but mod_perl was, CGI.pm was, check out CPAN under HTML::, HTTP::, Apache::, etc - all of that was designed for the web.
Oh, and since PHP was designed for the web, that means it wasn't designed for (let's say) database access, does that mean DBI is better?
Anyway, this "designed" bit doesn't really mean much usually, it's what it actually "can do" that counts.
btw, I just can't agree on a few points in one of your sentences:
in my experience PHP is faster - your experience is different from that of many other people.
more secure - this is entirely up to the developer, any differences the languages themselves may have in this ragard are utterly isignificant in comparison to the idiotic things that people routinely do.
more feature rich - Perl has been around pretty much since the middle ages (give or take), the quantity, diversity and (sometimes more importantly) maturity and quality of modules and other various extensions that's available for it cannot be matched by any other language; not to mention the organization of said material.
way easier to compile and maintain - I am not sure if you are talking about the language itself or scripts written in it (as the former doesn't matter a lick, and the latter... well I don't see anyone having trouble compiling Perl or PHP scripts).
If you look at hotscripts.com you will notice PHP has more entries than Perl - I was intrigued and did look at that site. Perl has insiginifcantly more "Scripts and Programs" and PHP makes up for it by having roughly 4 times as many entries in "Tips and Tutorials", why is that one wonders? Quick search at www.oreilly.com - 15 books for PHP, 730 for Perl; sure most of those have nothing to do with web development, but still (for comparison sake, same thing at Amazon.com - 73 to 354).
I know I'm just propagating a stupid flamewar, but what are you going to do?
Furthermore if you don't code for PHP don't comment on it, you don't know what you are talking about. - Lastly, I just wanted to find out if you code in Perl?
I am one of those people who "despises" PHP. Personally I started out with web apps on Apache/PHP/MySQL (heh, the "Infernal Trio") way back when PHP 4 was only coming out. I've since moved on to mod_perl and J2EE.
So to explain, there are basically two things that contribute to this dislike. The first, and slightly more legitimate I think, is that PHP is very forgiving of sloppiness and just doesn't help instill good coding practices in those new to the field. It's sort of a side-effect of it being easy, but one tends to see a lot more bad code written in PHP than in some other languages. I realize that's not really PHP's "fault", but there you go.
The second part has more to do with snobbery - PHP is a "beginner's" language, real developers use blah blah blah... you get the idea.
In the end it's all that much posturing (and I'm as guilty of it as the next guy), but I do feel that it takes more discipline to write good PHP code than some other languages; and this is quite ironic given the whole "easy to use" aspect of it that's brought up so often.
We know *quite well* how to run enterprise sites, and the decision to go with PHP was not made by the clueless.
The problem is that most people on here are in fact clueless and they (oh hell, we) assume that everyone else must be as well;)
Besides, it's fun to bitch about shortcomings of languages (which all languages have) - it beats doing work, and makes us looks smart at the same time. I think.
Personally I usually go with Postgres for any app with a lot of concurrent writes, like most of the web stuff I do (seems to handle it better than MySQL). I do use MySQL quite a bit as well (it's not like I said that it shouldn't be used) and of course Oracle is often crammed down my throat (to overstate it a bit) at work.
Btw, it's not always true that Oracle > MySQL; I remember doing a rather simple app where I had to do simple manipulations on several dozen million of simple records - MySQL beat the pants off Oracle performance-wise.
I also often see MySQL being applied to situations where it seems to be overkill, where simple flat files would do just fine.
I don't know, my biggest pet peeve is just that a lot of people think "free database" == MySQL and the other guys get very little exposure.
Re:Perl was ruled out WHY???
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Yahoo Moving to PHP
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Bullshit, or at least bullshit that Perl makes it harder to maintain than any other language.
Undisputed. But there are languages that go out of their way to make it easier and perl doesn't. Not a criticizm of perl necessarily, just another point in the decision making process.
I personally love perl - I use it every day and it's usually one of the first technology choices for new projects. But coding in a team environment is often still a very hard thing (not every one out there is that great at doing the wonderful things you listed, and firing people left and right is often not an option), and I'll take all the help I can get there.
Fair enough. They really did make this whole thread thing seem like a bigger con against J2EE than it seems to have been in their decision. It seems like it just was more of a paradigm shift than they wanted.
Re:Maintence must be easier
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Yahoo Moving to PHP
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm not trying to get anyone to convert, and you don't even have to beg me in capital letters to spare you anything.
I'm simply curious - for most jobs that MySQL is used for, there are better free databases (sometimes not by much, but that's not the point), yet MySQL seems to be the only free RDBMS anyone's ever heard of. I am trying to picture why, and asking people involved (it seems like) with the decision process in a company actually using it, seems like a good way to find out, no?
That's true, but I very rarely take my Apache server out for a drive, or serve web-pages with my fridge...
Meatspace analogies are fun, but usually serve no purpose whatsoever.
As for my original point - a steering wheel may be easier to use in some cases than a CLI, but it's still not simpler.:)
Oh, and unless you believe in a deity of some sort (as I realize many people do), nothing in life exists for a "reason".
Re:Seems like a silly move...
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Yahoo Moving to PHP
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Hm, if they are rewriting their entire app, wouldn't a move from FreeBSD to some other UNIX(-like thing) be small in comparison?
I mean seriously, I'd love to hear the pros and cons of the "Moving our stuff off of FreeBSD" vs. "Having to maintain everything in PHP instead of J2EE" discussion.
Re:Maintence must be easier
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Yahoo Moving to PHP
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Question (not a troll, though sounds like one) - how was the decision made to use MySQL? I can't for the life of me figure out why so many people pick it for web apps.
to trigger happy mods - again, not a troll, I'm curious.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but one small point - your learning Linux would not be cost effective for your current employer, it is most definitely cost effective for you as an admin (assuming that is in fact your line of work):)
No one to this day has been able to convince me that there is something more "simple" than a shell. Seriously, you just type text in on one line - what can possibly be "simpler"?
Hm, so then any news that includes a product of some sort should not be on/.? That would exclude computer hardware, software, electronics, movies, tv shows, books, etc. and would pretty much leave us only with boring as hell US legislation news... I am not excited by the prospect of this "pure" slashdot.
btw, my only problem with these mice is that they look like crap; I mean, seriously! It's hard to find something uglier.
Uhhh, blocking sites (even porn sites) is a form a censorship (my sleazieness notwithstanding). Porn is heavily censored in this country, internet or no internet, minors or no minors.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, one can probably convince them that it's an MS product (a la, My Documents, My Computer, etc), that should put their fears to rest :)
Not like I know anything about hexapod locomotion, but can you point me somewhere where this optimality is demonstrated?
Actually the Overrated mod was right, this comment is just not Insightful - they aren't rewriting their old stuff. And come to think of it, that was just a silly thing to say.
I just wanted to comment on the write-once-run-anywhere thing. I develop code on Linux and Windows with Tomcat and JBoss, the code is deployed in production on Solaris and Tru64 with Weblogic (in addition to the former), and I don't have to change a line of code to go between them - that's good enough for me.
Anyway, if you claim Java's performance is abysmal (in any area except 3D graphics) you just haven't looked at the damn thing in a few years.
That sentence is as much hogwash as what you are so upset about. Perl itself certainly wasn't "designed for the web", but mod_perl was, CGI.pm was, check out CPAN under HTML::, HTTP::, Apache::, etc - all of that was designed for the web.
Oh, and since PHP was designed for the web, that means it wasn't designed for (let's say) database access, does that mean DBI is better?
Anyway, this "designed" bit doesn't really mean much usually, it's what it actually "can do" that counts.
btw, I just can't agree on a few points in one of your sentences:
in my experience PHP is faster - your experience is different from that of many other people.
more secure - this is entirely up to the developer, any differences the languages themselves may have in this ragard are utterly isignificant in comparison to the idiotic things that people routinely do.
more feature rich - Perl has been around pretty much since the middle ages (give or take), the quantity, diversity and (sometimes more importantly) maturity and quality of modules and other various extensions that's available for it cannot be matched by any other language; not to mention the organization of said material.
way easier to compile and maintain - I am not sure if you are talking about the language itself or scripts written in it (as the former doesn't matter a lick, and the latter... well I don't see anyone having trouble compiling Perl or PHP scripts).
If you look at hotscripts.com you will notice PHP has more entries than Perl - I was intrigued and did look at that site. Perl has insiginifcantly more "Scripts and Programs" and PHP makes up for it by having roughly 4 times as many entries in "Tips and Tutorials", why is that one wonders? Quick search at www.oreilly.com - 15 books for PHP, 730 for Perl; sure most of those have nothing to do with web development, but still (for comparison sake, same thing at Amazon.com - 73 to 354).
I know I'm just propagating a stupid flamewar, but what are you going to do?
Furthermore if you don't code for PHP don't comment on it, you don't know what you are talking about. - Lastly, I just wanted to find out if you code in Perl?
So to explain, there are basically two things that contribute to this dislike. The first, and slightly more legitimate I think, is that PHP is very forgiving of sloppiness and just doesn't help instill good coding practices in those new to the field. It's sort of a side-effect of it being easy, but one tends to see a lot more bad code written in PHP than in some other languages. I realize that's not really PHP's "fault", but there you go.
The second part has more to do with snobbery - PHP is a "beginner's" language, real developers use blah blah blah... you get the idea.
In the end it's all that much posturing (and I'm as guilty of it as the next guy), but I do feel that it takes more discipline to write good PHP code than some other languages; and this is quite ironic given the whole "easy to use" aspect of it that's brought up so often.
The problem is that most people on here are in fact clueless and they (oh hell, we) assume that everyone else must be as well ;)
Besides, it's fun to bitch about shortcomings of languages (which all languages have) - it beats doing work, and makes us looks smart at the same time. I think.
Yeah, when I was typing that, I wasn't too sure someone around here doesn't actually do that :)
Unless you believe in cause and effect.
Things exist "because of" something, following cause and effect, not "for a reason" - one of the most loaded terms in the English language.
Heh, I often find myself saying "but for write-heavy databases (like most web databases), guess it's just the kind of stuff I tend to do :)
Btw, it's not always true that Oracle > MySQL; I remember doing a rather simple app where I had to do simple manipulations on several dozen million of simple records - MySQL beat the pants off Oracle performance-wise.
I also often see MySQL being applied to situations where it seems to be overkill, where simple flat files would do just fine.
I don't know, my biggest pet peeve is just that a lot of people think "free database" == MySQL and the other guys get very little exposure.
Undisputed. But there are languages that go out of their way to make it easier and perl doesn't. Not a criticizm of perl necessarily, just another point in the decision making process.
I personally love perl - I use it every day and it's usually one of the first technology choices for new projects. But coding in a team environment is often still a very hard thing (not every one out there is that great at doing the wonderful things you listed, and firing people left and right is often not an option), and I'll take all the help I can get there.
Mostly what I was going for, yes. What, did you think I had some groundbreaking input for the whole CLI vs. GUI flamewar?
And in any case, in a single paragraph you summed up pretty much all the important points to a functional shell - I'd call that pretty darn "simple" :)
Fair enough. They really did make this whole thread thing seem like a bigger con against J2EE than it seems to have been in their decision. It seems like it just was more of a paradigm shift than they wanted.
I'm simply curious - for most jobs that MySQL is used for, there are better free databases (sometimes not by much, but that's not the point), yet MySQL seems to be the only free RDBMS anyone's ever heard of. I am trying to picture why, and asking people involved (it seems like) with the decision process in a company actually using it, seems like a good way to find out, no?
Meatspace analogies are fun, but usually serve no purpose whatsoever.
As for my original point - a steering wheel may be easier to use in some cases than a CLI, but it's still not simpler. :)
Oh, and unless you believe in a deity of some sort (as I realize many people do), nothing in life exists for a "reason".
I mean seriously, I'd love to hear the pros and cons of the "Moving our stuff off of FreeBSD" vs. "Having to maintain everything in PHP instead of J2EE" discussion.
to trigger happy mods - again, not a troll, I'm curious.
I agree, I just thought I'd point out that this doesn't change the fact that perl is HELL to maintain for larger projects :)
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but one small point - your learning Linux would not be cost effective for your current employer, it is most definitely cost effective for you as an admin (assuming that is in fact your line of work) :)
No one to this day has been able to convince me that there is something more "simple" than a shell. Seriously, you just type text in on one line - what can possibly be "simpler"?
Hm, so then any news that includes a product of some sort should not be on /.? That would exclude computer hardware, software, electronics, movies, tv shows, books, etc. and would pretty much leave us only with boring as hell US legislation news... I am not excited by the prospect of this "pure" slashdot.
btw, my only problem with these mice is that they look like crap; I mean, seriously! It's hard to find something uglier.
Who cares? Isn't this the sort of thing that keeps you awake at night when you're like 12? No wait, I don't want to know.
I even thought, "Hope Bruce Campbell comes up on /. tomorrow so I can mention this..."
Uhhh, blocking sites (even porn sites) is a form a censorship (my sleazieness notwithstanding). Porn is heavily censored in this country, internet or no internet, minors or no minors.