Insulting PHP?

Merve

I was talking to a guy I know about computers...and we started talking about Perl, PHP, ASP, and Java. I told him PHP was very good and he told me it wasn't, and that he preferred Java. I know that Java is better for some things...so I didn't argue. He then said that Perl is way better...but I barely know any Perl...so I didn't argue...I just said that PHP would be better for some things, but he disagreed and said that Perl is always better. Then I told him that I didn't like ASP and he said that ASP was extremely powerful and could do a hell of a lot more than PHP could ever do and that I was one of those people who said: "Linux on XBox! Linux on XBox!" I told him I was completely unfamiliar with Linux. I know a few commands: cd, mkdir, rmdir...nothing much else...this is just PuTTy. Anyway, he told me that PHP was nothing! He said that PHP was useless and that he could make everything else that I said I made in another programming language! He said that he couldn't see why I'd want to learn PHP. I told that I was learning Perl, which is true, because I want to learn it. I told him that I tried to learn ASP, and gave up because it made absolutely no sense to me! There are no very good resources for it!

Can you see his side of the story?

talldarkmystere

Nope - I got into one of those arguements with a coworker a while back... He's an ASP guru - I'm a php fiend.

We argued over which was better -

let's just say that he's learning php now. 😛

LordShryku

LOL!

And just ask drawmack if you need a reason to stay away from Perl. Most languages have cross functionality, it's all just a matter of choice and opinion. I like PHP, so I use it. I don't like Bill Gates, so I slam on ASP as much as possible.

PyroX

Perl vs PHP?! ASP vs PHP!??

.NET, or Java vs PHP, ok maybe an even comparison, 50/50 either way, java may be more like 70/30 for high end applications.

Next time you see this M$ whore you tell him to come read this post.

( I bet he likes coldfusion too :rolleyes: )

planetsim

i cannot believe you took it all....

perl to php.. perl isnt any good really... its not really powerful and its said so all around the web.. (well when looking for perl and php tutorials anyway)

ASP - well that just comes down to.. Do you like making 100lines of code when php can do it in 10.. "ASP is extremely powerful".. this guy must be doing something for bill gates.. cos ive seen many php vs asp and php no matter where i have seen it has come out on top

LordShryku

I got a buddy here at work who loves Coldfusion. We argue about the differences constantly. Thanks for posting that Pyro, I just had to show him 🙂

Oh...and while I don't have an Xbox, I am going to put Gentoo on my PS2 this weekend 🙂

piersk

You have to remember that Perl was designed as a shell scripting language, and never for the web. People just found that it could be used for dealing with info from the web.

Also, remember that PHP was first started as a collection of Perl scripts. Ok, it's come on a long way since then, but some of us owe our jobs to Perl in this way.

And as for ASP, you might say that it takes 100 lines to do something in ASP that takes 10 in PHP. The company I work for uses ASP and I've found things that would have taken 100 lines to do in PHP and I managed it in about 10 in ASP.

Weedpacket

PHP vs. FoxPro! "FoxPro is really fast and simple and easy to learn! We do all our web programming in FoxPro and we always will!!"

Jeb_

Heh, just another uneducated, closed-minded person. Ignore them.

Perl is nice. Powerful, but oh so obscure. I don't believe it's as popular as it used to be.

.NET isn't even a programming language, that's moot.

ASP...well, ASP.NET is nice. I'll admit that. I tried it and threw it out. Got a few nice features, but too bloated overall. I'd use it if I had to.

Then I told him that I didn't like ASP and he said that ASP was extremely powerful and could do a hell of a lot more than PHP could ever do and that I was one of those people who said: "Linux on XBox! Linux on XBox!"

What a fool. It's not about the 'best and most powerful' language. It's about using the right tool for the right job, and keeping your mind open to new technologies and ideas. Any programmer worth their money knows this.

cosminb

Few links for you: http://php.weblogs.com/php_vs_asp
http://php.weblogs.com/php_vs_cold_fusion
http://php.weblogs.com/php_versus_perl
http://php.weblogs.com/php_asp_7_reasons
http://marty.anstey.ca/programming/php_asp.html
http://www.blazonry.com/devnotes/phpasp1.php
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/phpvsaspnet.asp
http://www.phpbuddy.com/sub_articles.php?other_articles=9

... and there are many more just do a "php vs asp" search on google.
I had to learn ASP to make a project at school and I hated it after that. The MSAccess sucks and the documentation is very poor, and on top iof that VBScript(which may be good for Excel Macros and other stuff like that) it's not for web development. I had to write in three lines what php could in one.

I have some expirience with all (PHP,JSP,Perl and ASP)here is my opinion: PHP rules!!! JSP is good but it's way slower and the hosting is very expensive. Perl was designed for scripting now for web. It's nice, it's pretty fast but it hasn't the functionality of PHP. ASP the worst: no portability, slow, poor support.

drawmack

When I run into people like that I usually ask them how much asp they know.

I personally have written over 100,000 lines of ASP, about 500,000 lines of php and well over a million lines of PERL. From a programming stand point here is my opinion on the issue.

1) ASP.NET is the methodology you should be using if you're using a windows based server. As a programming solution it integrates much better with windows and will run faster then any other language on the windows environment -however you should be using javascript to write the asp and not vbscript. Which bings up an important point, ASP is not a language in and off itself. On the other hand if you plan on moving to a *nix machine later then you should write your stuff in PHP so it will port more easily.

2) PERL is not good for an internet solution for a couple of reasons. First of all it uses the outdated cgi protocols. Secondly development time with PERL is much higher then with other languages. What it boils down to really is that Larry Wall developed PERL for system level automation and text processing not for web development. Now if you're writing a program to crawl your network looking for security flaws it's all about the PERL baby but when you're writting web apps look for the diamond.

3) PHP is an excelent internet solution. If you're on a nix platform or plan on moving to a nix platform in the future you should be using PHP to develop your web-sites. PHP was specificalyl designed for use as an internet programming language. Therefor it is the best solution.

What it boils down to is this - read a book on programing languages and you'll learn one thing. No language is better then any other language - they all have their strong points and their weak points.

drawmack

Originally posted by cosminb
It's nice, it's pretty fast but it hasn't the functionality of PHP.

you are wrong here.
1) mod_perl is fast, regular perl is dog ass slow.
2) It has more functionality then php because of http://www.cpan.org.

ASP the worst: no portability, slow, poor support. [/B]

slow? run a speed test with databases on the following two systems

1) same hardware
2)linux on one and xp server on the other
3)one program in .net and one in php

asp.net is actually faster then php. It's the portability where it looses out. If you're writting for a windows environment and your company has no plans on moving to a *nix environment then leave it be and work in asp.

cosminb

Originally posted by drawmack
slow? run a speed test with databases on the following two systems

I've done that with PHP + MySQL + RedHat 7.3 + Apache 1.3.27 and ASP(not ASP.NET) + MySQL + Windows 2000 Server + IIS 5.0. The score: PHP 20% faster. It's true I didn't tried XP. But I have my doubts about XP and ASP going faster. Why XP it's for home users, it wasn't built to be a platform for a web server. Maybe with MSSQL ASP is alittle faster but I doubt that it's faster than PHP. Why? COM - if you want to connect to a database you have to use a COM object in another process. Also ASP runs in it's own process. With PHP you don't have to comunicate with another process to access a database.

If you're talking about ASP.NET it's a different story. I didn't try so I can say much.

Anyway ASP or ASP.NET there still is a very big problem: security on Microsoft platforms.

Merve

We didn't agree about a single thing in that conversation...except for the fact that Linux is more powerful than Windows...I told him basic Perl is very similar to basic PHP and that I couldn't see where the huge differences that made Perl better were...and he told me I was an idiot.

jstarkey

Originally posted by Merve

Can you see his side of the story?

I spent last year converting a site from Perl to PHP, becuase Perl couldn't handle the load. It was WAY too slow and bulky.

The site puts out 1 to 1.5 million pages per day and approx 6 terabytes per month. It was on 3 dual 800 meg servers (a DB server, image server and the main server) and the load was at 40 consistantly the first month I took over. When a harvestor hit, there was no hope -- the load would average 100-200. By any reasonable standard, the site was unusable.

After a LOT of work, done by me and your sys admin here and quite a bit by the rest of the team, the site is now running on a dual 2.4 gig Xeon and a dual 800 MHz for the DB. The 2.4 dually is serving the images (6 terabytes) and php pages. And the load averages around 2 now on that machine.

We have 2-3 minute intervals a couple times a day now where it takes about that long to get a page, due to harvestors, but that's because of MySQL choking (on the dual 800) when they hit the vB side of the site.

PHP saved us quite a bit of money on hardware in that scenerio.

ASP: I won't touch it simply because a friend of mine's job is to test it for exploits and I'm supposed to have my clients best interests in mind. ASP is swiss cheese.

Java: started learning it a few years ago and just ended up going 100% php. So I can't comment there other than my opinion is that PHP is 10 times better for web work.

All in all though. It sounds like your friends interest was in you being wrong, not in which language was better. I just walk away from those convos.

drawmack

Originally posted by cosminb
Why XP it's for home users, it wasn't built to be a platform for a web server.

what the hell are you talking about, XP uses the NT kernel not the 95 kernel that's why it's so much more stable. XP was built to consolidate windows into a single OS instead of having seperate home and office OS's.

Maybe with MSSQL ASP is alittle faster but I doubt that it's faster than PHP. Why? COM - if you want to connect to a database you have to use a COM object in another process. Also ASP runs in it's own process. With PHP you don't have to comunicate with another process to access a database.

Speed tests done at cambridge university reveal that the fastests database revtievals and writes happen with ASP.NET on XP running IIS and connecting to an MSSQL database. Why? Because all of that technology is built specifically to work together.

Anyway ASP or ASP.NET there still is a very big problem: security on Microsoft platforms.

no more of an issue then it is with PHP on Linux. If your system is set up right it's secure and if it is not then it's not it doesn't matter what OS or Programming Language you're using.

drawmack

Originally posted by Merve
We didn't agree about a single thing in that conversation...except for the fact that Linux is more powerful than Windows...I told him basic Perl is very similar to basic PHP and that I couldn't see where the huge differences that made Perl better were...and he told me I was an idiot.

The major differences between perl and PHP are the original intent of the language.

PERL is designed to automate system level network tasks and handle text processing.

PHP is designed for the web.

Ask him what works better on nails a hammer or a screw driver. When he says it's a screw driver then ask him why he is insisting that a programming language designed for network automation and text processing is better at web dev then a language designed for web dev.

drawmack

Originally posted by jstarkey
Java: started learning it a few years ago and just ended up going 100% php. So I can't comment there other than my opinion is that PHP is 10 times better for web work.

the only time I use java is when it's important for the code not to be in plain text on the server.

The best examples I have these:

1) storing files in the database and do not want someone who cracks the database to be able to rebuild the files so you write a routine that takes the key field in the file information table and spits out a hundred or so unique numbers that can then be used to index the table which contains the data. If you write this function in php it's useless because it's on the server in plain text.

2) encrypting the information before it goes into the database. Same idea as above you don't want the key on the server in plaintext so you use java to do the encryption and decryption.

Sure you could use c++ for this and it would be faster but it would take a hit on portability so java is the better solution, unless speed is the most important thing.

BuzzLY

Which is better... a pickup, a high performance sports car, or a NASCAR race car?

Well, it might be tempting to say the sports car -- the race car is too specialized, and the pickup doesn't look nearly as cool.

However, the question is too broad. There is no such thing as "better" unless you clarify the situation. If I were a construction worker and needed to haul a load of cement, which do you think I'd want? If I were 20 years old and only wanted to impress my friends, then which one? How about if I were Dale Jarrett and had to race on Sunday? Duh.

ASP vs. PHP is just silly. Neither one is "better" than the other. They are just tools designed to help you create a website.

In evaluating software, there are many, many things to consider. What technology does the company already have in place? How much are they willing to spend? How big is the application? What sort of application is it? How many users will there be? What do they want their users to do? What sort of security is needed?

These are the questions a professional asks. And, assuming he/she is qualified to make the decision, that person will determine what the best technology is. I guarantee they will not care that "echo" is easier to type than "Response.Write." All that matters is the end result. What makes the customer happy.

This guy you know is not very professional. Any person that would turn their back on technology because of personal reasons ("I hate Bill Gates" -- why? don't get me started on this one) is selling themselves short. Always keep your options open.

There are times when Lotus Notes will be the better choice than ASP or PHP. It just depends on the requirements.

drawmack

Buzz,
Exactly what I was trying to say.