| Re: What *tasks* are hard for PHP? [message #172070 is a reply to message #172068] |
Sat, 29 January 2011 13:33   |
Leonardo Azpurua
Messages: 46
Registered: December 2010
Karma:
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"P E Schoen" <paul(at)pstech-inc(dot)com> wrote:
"Curtis Dyer" wrote in message
news:ii09q8$gi6$1(at)news(dot)eternal-september(dot)org...
> Well, to be honest, I don't feel comfortable with either Perl or
> PHP.
> There just seem to be too many arcane and obscure ways to do
> things, such as the undef of the line by line file read above. It
> took
> me a while to find the explanation, and to me it seemed like a hack.
> I have only recently (since September) even tried to do server side
> scripting, and I basically found an old Perl mailer script that did
> some
> of what I needed, and built from there.
> I suppose I've been spoiled by integrated development environments
> like Borland Delphi, where I have the convenience of an extensive
> help
> menu with examples and debugger built into the same application
> as the editor, and I've been able to build upon a rudimentary
> general
> knowledge of the programming language to add functionality as I need
> it.
Hi,
I have had three "epiphanies" in my life as a PC programmer. The first
was my discovery of Turbo C, mainly because of the highest qualty of
Borland's documentation. The second was Visual Basic 5 (all previous
versions did deserve the "toy language" characterization), and the
third was PHP & JavaScript.
Personally, I tend to dislike strictly typed and static languages. I
know all the advantages they bring by providing consistency checks on
compile time, but having been a C programmer for a couple of decades,
and a vicious user of void * and the like, I am pretty used to do all
those checks by myself and to test extensively.
I also find Perl to be obscure. But PHP has a perfectly consistent
syntax, a very rich set of libraries and so far it has been up to
whatever I have needed (producing server side code and retrieving text
data). It has its quircks (but every language does).
Don't try to "approach PHP from Perl". They are two completely
different beasts, even if they are more or less designed for the same
purpose. Just think of PHP as a sort of hybrid OO/procedural language,
and everything should be easier.
PHP online manual is a finest piece of work. It describes in detail
every "official" library function and every language construct, and
there are community provided examples for most of them.
And the lack of an IDE can easily be solved by having the local help
file open alongside your text editor and just commuting from one to
another, resorting to online help when you need an example.
I haven't tried the PHP plugins fo either NetBeans or Eclipse, but if
they are half as good as they are for Java, then they should be quite
confortable to work with.
Some people complains about the many redundant libraries available in
PHP. But one can test which one best fits one's needs and simply
ignore the rest. I did "C" for twenty years, and VB 5/6 for thirteen,
and I hardly used something like one half of C's libraries and perhaps
80% of VB.
--
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