[Boulder.pm] Roll call?

Brennen Bearnes bbearnes at gmail.com
Wed Aug 1 14:35:01 PDT 2012


On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:

> You have my sympathies.  PHP really is a horrific world for people
> who've experienced better languages (which include . . . most
> languages).

Truth be told, it's not so bad these days for the sort of basic web
app things we're doing. The language has grown up quite a bit in its
last couple of major releases, and if you stick to a well-defined subset
of features and use the object system sanely you can keep things pretty
clean.

What I really miss, aside from syntactical niceties, is access to a
large set of quality, actively maintained third-party libraries. The PHP
ecosystem is just a vale of tears in this regard, compared to other
languages in the space, and I've never seen anything that can touch the
CPAN.

Well, that and hiring people who primarily identify as PHP programmers
is just begging for pain, even in 2012. But of course the flipside is
that you won't really find a competent hacker who's not up to learning
idiomatic PHP real quick like.

> I'd much rather use a Perl/CGI script and Server-Side Includes than
> PHP if I can get away with it, though that's not exactly a perfect
> working environment, either.

Once upon a time, I would've said the same thing, but the world has
shifted around quite a bit in the last couple of years.  If I were
deploying Perl code in a production web app these days, it definitely
wouldn't be running as plain old CGI. I haven't kept up with the options
much, but I'm guessing there's a rough equivalent to the nginx + php-fpm
stack we've been running, and I know there are some pretty sophisticated
MVC application frameworks floating around in the Perl world.  Based on
what I've got access to right now, I'd hate to give up either of those
things...

-- Brennen


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