On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 14:49 -0700, Andrew Jorgensen wrote: > On 2/15/07, Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Just curious but why was PHP not brought up in the debate? > > It's widely used, relatively respectable language, and there seems to > > be a hot market right now for PHP programmers, add that to the Java > > skills and your talking a pretty good paying job. > > 'cause it's a web language. Anyone who wants to make it more than > that is silly.
Nay, not so. PHP is a good general-domain language. In fact, if you wanted to, you could write full-blown GUI apps with it. I don't know of anyone doing it, but a full GTK app would be no more difficult or less powerful in PHP than it would be in python or perl. Before I got heavily into Python, I used php for more things than web programming. In fact, php makes a great general-purpose scripting language. The plethora of built-in libraries make doing things like hacking a quick script to add a field to every ldap record on my server very easy. It seemed to me to be a good mix of perl and C, but was able to do many things bash does also. Up until recently most of my main system administration scripts were written in php, mainly because of the ease of use of the ldap routines. On the subject of full-blown apps, I think the age of the dynamic language has truly come in this area. I think it is silly to do UI stuff in the static, compiled languages like Java or C++. For me, I plan to do almost all GTK gui work in python from now on. The simplicity and power of embedding python into a C or C++ app means it just doesn't make a lot of sense to do the more mind-numbing GUI coding in C or C++. In fact, one of the great advantages of python is that there is no difference between embedding python in a C program or extending python with C. It's the same stuff. Therefore it makes sense to code in python generally, calling out to C or C++ (or Java with jython or what have you) for some things that have to be done there. This makes python a better choice for general programming than php (which has a not so wonderful C API). Michael > > Java is too but more that's more debatable. > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
