On Sat, 6 Jan 2001, Blue Lang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> espoused:
> Eh, I'm prepared to take my lynching, but I'd just like to remind
> everyone that there's nothing at all wrong with using PHP for things
> like this. You'll never be a worse person for learning something new,
> and the overheard required to manage a php+perl enabled apache is only
> minimally more than managing one or the other.
>
> IMHO, it's just lame to rewrite something for which there exists
> dozens of good apps just because of the language im which it is
> written. You might as well be arguing about GPL/BSD/Artistic at that
> point.
I'm not going to get sucked into a language advocacy debate. But at least
in my case, your comments are quite off base.
A) I don't need to learn PHP. I learned PHP four or five years ago. The
experience wasn't pleasant. My most recent experience with PHP was to
port a PHP3 app from PostgreSQL to MySQL. It was very tedious and still
unpleasant. (Yes PHP4 supposed finally has a real database interface like
DBI, but most of the apps out there aren't written for PHP4.)
B) Simplicity is good. The fewer things running inside my web server to
meet my needs the better. This is a security issue as well as an ease of
maintenance issue.
C) We are organizationally committed to perl. Our employees and
contractors are not expected to know PHP and most are quite happy that I
don't make them write in PHP. A long term strategy of keeping my
programmers (including myself) happy seems like a good thing.
D) (And I think this is the most important point of all.) There are good
reasons for deciding on a language and sticking with it if your hope is to
build something large. (Trying to build a garden with three different
climates and have it work as one big garden is a huge challenge and
certainly not worth pursuing if you're trying to maximize production.)
My hope is to take the calendar portion of things and build upon it.
Ultimately I'd like to have something that has the functionality of
Outlook plus bugzilla.
I've gotten several emails privately with offers of source for various "in
progress" projects that people say they're willing to make open source. I
will keep the list informed.
--
</chris>
Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to buy Microsoft products.
