NYCPHP Meetup

[Alberto dos Santos]

<rant>I just wonder why he doesn't talk about the great many sites out there
that rely on MS products and are constantly down due to various database
problems, or some other really "brain-freezingly stupid" problems brought
about by some "shallow programmer" that cannot write 2 consecutive lines of
good code without using a wizard.</rant>

Sorry folks, I had to let it out... I hear it so many times... It's like
Portugal has sold it's collective IT soul to MS.
But I am fighting it, damn right I am!

Alberto.

On 06/06/06, 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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