NYCPHP Meetup

[Anthony Papillion]

You know, I've never understood the "real programmers" "real
languages" "real databases" debate thing. If a technology meets your
needs, does what you want, and makes you more marketable because you
acquire skills that are in demand, *who cares* what idiots like this
think?

*Real* programmers adapt and learn whatever languages they need to
stay competitive in their field. They learn whatever is popular. When
VB was popular, we all leanred VB, when C++ was all the rage we
learned C++. Now that so much is moving to the web, PHP and MySQL are
in high demand. It would be career suicide for a programmer to ignore
those technologies because a few people feel they aren't *real*
somehow. The checks I get in the mail for programming in PHP sure feel
real to me.

Anthony

On 6/6/06, leeeyerman at aol.com <leeeyerman at aol.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> Check out this article.  It is a huge slam on the LAMP framework.  It
> may be worth our collective response.
>
> The article is titled:
>
> Why the light has gone out on LAMP
>
> Written by:
>
> http://blog.develix.com/frog/user/cliff/article/2006-06-04/9
>
>
>
> Bits and pieces from the article:
>
> I'm quite opposed to using MySQL and PHP, and I'm none too fond of
> Apache. Anyone who knows me or happens into a conversation with me
> about development quickly learns of my distaste for these particular
> projects. To be fair, Apache is the least problematic of the three and
> if there were no alternatives, I'd use it without a lot of complaint.
>
> MySQL and PHP, on the other hand, really raise my ire. Both of them
> have two major problems:
>
> 1. Bug ridden (by this I am including both misfeatures as well as
> actual bugs).
> 2. They encourage bad habits.
>
> PHP is another sore spot for me. I've gotten to the point that not only
> will I not write PHP code, I won't even run applications written in PHP
> (my long search for decent blogging software was due to the restriction
> that it not be written in PHP). At some level PHP is a great language
> because the entry cost is so low. Not so much because the language is
> so particularly friendly, but because it was designed to work in an
> extremely simple environment (the web) and because it's quite possible
> to learn PHP incrementally by intermixing it with HTML. So what's the
> problem? Well, first of all, as anyone who's done much web programming
> will tell you, mixing code with markup is *not* a good thing if you
> care about maintenance or extensibility. The very thing that makes PHP
> a great language for beginners is the very thing that makes it a bad
> language for beginners. At some point they will have to unlearn those
> habits, except that usually they don't. Also, because it's so easy to
> whip out a quick PHP webapp, many, if not most, PHP programmers fail to
> delve very deep into the realm of programming, preferring to sit at the
> edge and reap the benefits without the work (I'm not talking about
> coding work, rather the work of understanding your field). PHP
> programmers practically popularized the most common attack in the
> world, the SQL-injection attack. Not only is it the most common, it's
> the most easily avoided. That's how shallow most PHP-programmer's
> knowledge is. "Professional" programmers are still assembling SQL
> queries by concatenating strings.
>
> PHP and MySQL are this generation's BASIC, the language that was
> described thusly by the Free Online Dictionary of Computing
>
> BASIC has become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers.
> This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that
> happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy
> gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on
> the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a)
> very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to
> use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical
> accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it
> ruins thousands of potential wizards a year.
>
> Replace BASIC with PHP or MySQL and you've got today's most common
> programmer. Worse, the most common programs in existence today mix the
> two in a brain-freezing mixture of stupidity.
>
> __________________________________________________
>
> Lee
>
>
>
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>


-- 
Anthony Papillion
Phone: (918) 926-0139
ICQ: 96-698-595

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