Yahoo! Chooses PHP

Am gratified at Yahoo!’s decision to move their systems gradually to PHP. I’m sick of hearing perl die-hards trying to fabricate reasons why Perl is for true hairy chests while PHP is only for slightly hairy chests. For purposes of server-side web scripting and database integration, both are equally capable, but PHP is far easier to learn, write, and maintain. I think the cabal of wizards want to keep their hats pointy by convincing the world that Perl is arcane because it’s more powerful.


Music: Sun Ra :: Sun Thoughts

9 Replies to “Yahoo! Chooses PHP”

  1. When I first picked up PHP, it had just gone 3.0, and I found it to be very usable, especially since I was translating a few Lasso pages into a PHP-driven bug database.

    Since then, they’ve gone a long ways towards making things more consistent (although the different database APIs are still annoying) and stable. It is good.

    I do find it, like all other non-typed languages, very unsafe and hard to deal with unless the development group is highly disceplened and good with communication/documentation. This is one of the reasons that MAP (Be’s backend project) turned into a big ball of snot: too many original thinkers. My current company fights this with eXtreme Programing (we use perl).

    In any case, while I would prefer a language with at least some compile-time checking for anything major, PHP is pretty damn useful.

  2. I agree. I try and try and try, but I just don’t grok perl. even short scripts like the Rael’s blosxom blog script took me a while to completely understand.

    But with PHP, it’s a different story. I was up and running in no time with PHP. I guess it’s because the PHP syntax is very “C like”. I even use a local PHP script to periodically dig thru my MP3 collection and generate playlists for albums, artists, genre, etc.

    I really wish someone would port MoveableType to PHP. I have a wishlist of simple mods I’d like to see for MT, but I’m afraid to touch that perl code!!

  3. I doubt there will be a version of MovableType in PHP (I’d love that too), but there are complete blogging systems done in PHP. Don’t recall the names off hand, but check google sometime… that stuff is definitely out there. In the end, I chose MovableType because its excellent and has a lot of momentum, even if it is written in perl.

  4. ludo – I don’t mean to suggest that Yahoo! was previously written in perl – I was referring to the slide in the presentation labeled “Why not perl?”

  5. I definately think perl and PHP have their place. It will be a great day when we have enough processing power and we can just sent out XML with XSLT seperately to the browser, so it can do the rendering.

    As long as you have the right abstraction layers, both perl and PHP work great.

  6. Sander! Great to see you hanging here… I see you’re at Yahoo! now… probably a solid move. Love the pic of your and Tara dancing – tres hip.

  7. Javahead, Do I know you?
    Have you ever been to St Louis?
    If yes, hit me up on ICQ: 136547585.
    If not – sorry you just remind me of someone.
    regards,
    Chris

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