Programming langauge

[raymor]

Originally Posted by kenny

What do you guys use?

I am just wondering because I've been hearing a lot of hype about this Ruby on Rails thing and all the big companies seem to use ASP.NET for whatever reason.

Personally, I don't like to code anything but learned some Perl back in 2002 because I needed to and that is what I've always used. I think I'll do the next one with PHP though it seems almost the same but better in ways.

You mentioned a lot of big companies using ASP. ASP is of course not a
language itself, but a module that let's you use other MS languages such
as VBScript within Microsoft's web server. It seems that ASP was used
by a lot of big companies who already had Windows admins and Windows
programmers on staff because that was the only thing the existing
employees could do. To use a server operating system like Unix, Linux,
BSD, Solaris, etc. would mean hiring all new people to maintain and
program those systems. Lately I've seen some big companies abandoning
this all Microsoft model and using some PHP or Python. I haven't seen a
lot of ASP used for new projects. Tis may have something to do with the
sting of Microsoft routinely ceasing to support older version of their
programming systems, making maintenance of the first round of ASP systems enormously difficult and expensive.


PHP, as mentioned by others, was EASY. The latest release version and
the upcoming version are less easy. Prior versions have been easy like
Legos are easy - any ten year old can build something with Legos or PHP.
That's what everyone will say about PHP - how EASY it is. Professionals
don't build business equipment out of legos. It's just as silly to build
professional tools from PHP 3 or PHP 4. PHP is as easy to hack as it is
to use. In fact, it is IMPOSSIBLE under PHP 3 or PHP 4 to write a script
that doesn't have a HUGE security hole. Every PHP script let's the attacker
upload any files they want to the server, and every PHP script I've ever seen
has more similar big security holes. As an example, this board software,
VBulletin, is one of the best known PHP scripts. As I demonstrated on
Netpond, I can get full admin access to VBulletin simply by getting the
admin to read a message I posted. BY posting the right message, I get
access to the account of anyone who reads it, including the admin.
That's not because VBulletin sucks - it's one of the better PHP based
systems around, but the language itself is a hackers dream. They made
some improvements in PHP 5 and PHP 6 is supposed to be even better,
so PHP 6 may actually be worth using IF you can be assured that it's
configured properly at the server level (php.ini). Still the "easy" philosophy
of PHP isn't likely to change any time soon, so expect them to keep
choosing "easy" over "powerful", "fast", or "secure". Still in PHP 6,
someone who is pretty much clueless can write a script which seems to
work just fine - until it takes down the server two months later. Overall,
PHP, like Legos, is perfect for someone who doesn't know who to actually
build real things to build a model of something, or for extremely simple
tasks. I once built an automatic stirrer using Legos. It took five minutes
to snap toghether and I didn't have to stand there stirring the pot for 30
minutes. It wasn't solidly built and didn't need to be. It just needed to
be built quickly and easily. A perfect job for Legos or PHP.


Perl really does need to release Perl 6 someday, but there's a reason it
reigned supreme as THE language for web development until so may scripts
started being written by non-programmers using "super easy" PHP. Actually,
there are several reasons why it was king for so long, and is still used so
much. Perl's stated standard is to "make things as easy as possible, but
no easier!" This makes Perl simple, but powerful. You may have seen
those cell phones for seniors with just four buttons, so you can call four
people. Each button dials one of your four contacts. They are super easy -
kind of like PHP. Perl is like a phone with twelve buttons - ten numbers, a
contact list, and a select button. Yeah, twelve buttons are SLIGHTLY harder
than four, but the Perl phone let's you dial a phone number if you know the
number you want to call. Perl may just barely harder to learn, maybe not
any harder at all to learn the actual language. When it comes to specific
tasks, such as database access, Perl allows you to take five minutes to
learn what MySQL actually IS before using it, so you can use it more
effectively than you can from PHP and have a more powerful, faster running
piece of software.

Some Perl programmers who actually know something seem pretty
interested in Ruby on Rails, so it certainly may be worth looking at since
you have some Perl background. I've looked at it only briefly and didn't
see any reason to spend any more time with it, yet. It's not available on
all web servers, of course, so any software that you want other people to
be able to use pretty much needs to be done in Perl or PHP.