[Boulder.pm] Roll call?

[Chad Perrin]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 03:35:01PM -0600, Brennen Bearnes wrote:
> 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.

The idea of PHP providing a tolerable language for development is wholly
foreign to me, but I haven't used it in the last couple years at all, so
maybe I missed something.  Does it still buffer-overflow with GET
variables that are too long?  Doesn't it still have the problem with
thousands of core functions that are often redundant and named with no
sense of consistency at all?


> 
> 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.

The Ruby gems system has matured nicely, and while it does not contain as
much as CPAN, it certainly contains enough libraries and other tools for
my purposes.  What really bugs me about most other languages is the lack
of anything that works as smoothly as CPAN and the gems system.  Trying
to find decent libraries in C is often an exercise in frustration, for
instance.

PHP is a special case in that, back when I actually had to use it at
least, using libraries in PHP was simply something one didn't do because
of the general level of horror represented by PHP libraries.  The
shocking contrast with the generally high level of quality available in
Perl libraries certainly helped make PHP development miserable by
comparison.


> 
> 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.

Good to know some things never change, I guess.


> >
> > 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...

I wasn't saying that Perl/CGI would be my favored approach.  In fact, I'd
say that would probably only be my last resort for web development in
Perl.  I was just saying I'd prefer it over PHP development.

I'm not really sure what's available these days for Perl on the web.  I
haven't kept up, either.  What little Perl I've done in the last few
years has been command line utility development, extension development
for applications, and data munging stuff.  I'm sure there are quite a few
good options for web development available, though, and would investigate
them before starting a new project.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]