Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose -- Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr That article was from 5 years back and the situation has hardly changed, just more frameworks.
Back in the early 80s so called 4GLs were all the rage (among managers) and although they were very different beasts to frameworks, the pitch was nearly the same. The vendor would demonstrate how their 4GL could be used to very quickly write a simple application. Of course, when you came to write a real application you had to go to great lengths to work around their inbuilt program loop and undersized standard library and ended up spending more time than a mature 3GL (procedural language) would have taken. These days we use our chosen procedural scripting language (php, ruby, c#, whatever) to generate web based systems. The raw language doesn't supply much support in a vital area (varies by language) which makes these tasks hard going so we wrap our programs in a framework ... which, exactly as for the 4GLs of the 1980s makes some tasks easy until the day we wish to go beyond the facilities offered by the framework ... Don't get me wrong, simple programming languages with built in loops are a fantastic productivity boost, within the problem domain they were designed to address, I use awk several times a week basis for simple text file processing, reformatting, selection / etc, and I write my "programs" directly into the command line ... as but when I'm trying to solve a problem that doesn't fit that signature I reach for a different tool. Yes, awk fanatics can demonstrate that they can solve any computable problem in awk (Just as you can solve any computable problem in INTERCAL, COBOL, PHP) but you end up fighting the language or framework, not playing to its strengths. -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
