Ouch!!! [LWN.net]

Ouch!!!

Posted Jan 10, 2007 20:52 UTC (Wed) by moxfyre (guest, #13847)
Parent article: Optaros publishes an open source catalog

They gave Perl 2 stars and declining for enterprise-readiness. And they gave Python 2 stars and holding.

Yet they gave PHP 3 stars and rising?

That just seems funny to me. PHP is a basket case of a programming language in my opinion. I know a lot of ISPs support it, and people tell me it's good for quick-and-dirty stuff, but I think Perl is just as good for those kinds of tasks.

I can *sort of* see why Perl got 2 stars and falling, given that it's easy to write unmaintainable code and Perl 6 is taking forever, though it's used in so many enterprise-class projects and is a very useful language to know. I have a lot of respect for Perl.

What I can't believe is that Python got 2 stars and holding. Python is polished and stable and used by tons of enterprises... Zope, anyone? It's a lot less of a free-for-all programming language than Perl. I have no idea why Python is considered anything less than totally enterprise ready...

Perl gets a bad rap

Posted Jan 10, 2007 21:45 UTC (Wed) by dns (subscriber, #4239) [Link] (1 responses)

Perl is permissive by default, and hence *can* be used
for amateur programming. But it doesn't have to be
used that way.

In my company we have a very large and complex Perl
program in a mission-critical role. Every single
file in its code-base begins with:

use 5.006_000;
use warnings;
use strict;
use Carp;

And we use both object-oriented and functional styles
of programming in a highly-maintainable way.

Perl gets a bad rap

Posted Jan 10, 2007 22:13 UTC (Wed) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link]

I agree... I've used Perl to write maintainable code too. But I've used it to write a lot of spaghetti-like junk as well, and then tried to shoehorn that into my better code :-)

Ouch!!!

Posted Jan 11, 2007 19:38 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

The technical superiority of some language/software is actually not among the most important factors when deciding on tools for a project or your company. One of the most important things to consider is the supply of programmers who know the language. Measured with that, Python is not even close to PHP. While I'm sure among LWN readers Python might be seen as mainstream some five years ago, in my opinion in "the world out there" it is still not quite mainstream (although usable), while PHP certainly is one of the most commonly known languages today.

quantity vs quality

Posted Jan 12, 2007 1:00 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, it's true, there are a lot more PHP programmers than Python programmers.

But if you eliminate the PHP programmers whose code you wouldn't trust to put on your
server, the numbers are much closer.

I say this as someone who does a lot of programming in PHP and almost none in
Python. (But an increasing amount in Ruby.) And as someone who wants to hire more
programmers.

quantity vs quality

Posted Jan 12, 2007 6:08 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

True :-) Probably Optaron didn't consider this angle...

Actually, I have myself once considered this too: If you have access to Python programmers, at least until now they tended to be 95% gurus, whereas with PHP or Java or Visual Basic the competence range of programmers is much more different. So you can also (and many hard core hackers do this on purpose) choose tools on a basis that you want to select some particular community.