Should We be more Pro-active (PHP)

Hey all,

I have been away from the forum for quite some time, just been extremely busy etc, but I have come back and started posting around and I have started to notice how negative people are being, what I mean by this is there are a lot more responses of the nature 'You cannot do this, try some other language / program'

So my question is, dont you think we should be more pro-active.

I mean this is an open source language, who here can say they have tested something to the limits, not very many people, yes obviously some things have been tested to the limits over and over again, but I hate it when people with no experience just say no it cannot be done, it's open source, there should be no limits and if there are, break them!

That "Duh!" was tempting but....

Saying "that can't be done" usually means that you don't know how to do it and you're too lazy to figure out how.

It's a stupid response and deserves an immediate slap upside the head.

In Perl, we've come to believe that there's NOTHING the language can't do. Now, I highly doubt, as you said, that too many people (if any) have tested the PHP language to its limits. I'm sure the tools are probably there, someone with a little creativity and a fresh view of things needs to use them in a different way.

If enough people start tossing that lazy answer out all the time, the only thing it will help to accomplish is a stagnation of the language. The main purpose of this forum is to learn. That can be accomplished two ways:

1. Asking questions.
2. Trying to find answers to questions you don't already know.

A lot of people first come here because of the first one, but they stick around because of the second.

Really? What kinds of things are people saying? I guess I haven't been paying as much attention as I used to.


There is so much lunacy going on regarding PHP these days, mostly because the people who get involved don't know how to actually think outside of the box they were put in by ASP or even JSP. In their minds, if PHP doesn't have exactly the same feature/syntax as feature X in ASP or feature Y in JSP, then PHP can't accomplish the same thing.

Let me just state: PHP can accomplish any functional requirement of any of the other web scripting languages. This is because it is a Turing-complete language, just like any other serious scripting or compiled language. If a certain syntax doesn't exist (such as the legendary "Application" variable in ASP), you can simply whip up a PHP library which will provide that functionality. First, though, you would want to check the existing PHP code repositories to see if your feature hasn't already been made:

- PEAR (although, I'm not the biggest fan of PEAR)

- PHPClasses.org (Some very nice stuff in here, if you look long enough.)

- ECLIPSE (a very promising, tightly coded O-O base library for PHP applications)

- PHPBuilder

- Zend


The point is, most people confuse base functionality with specific features. Java as a base language does not provide any features for web scripting. All of that was built after the fact with specialized Java classes and libraries. Ditto with VBScript, which is what ASP was built on.

PHP arguably makes it easier to build web scripting libraries, since it was built from the ground up specifically to be a... web scripting language. Yes, in some ways PHP is a lower-level language than ASP/JSP, but that is only if you deal with "bare" PHP, without using any of the existing classes/libraries. The benefit of PHP's lower-level abilities is that it allows for a very interesting future, as more and more serious developers start building libraries on top of it. (raw socket programming, IPC, raw IO, etc...)

This whole topic reminds me of a discussion I had with a VB/ASP programmer once: I was explaining why I like Perl, and he responded "But, Perl is just an old, clunky scripting language". (Yeah, and VB is just a visual teaching language.)

I have seen a few of these in the past and have tried to intercept them and provide a more meaningfull approach to the situation. The last thing we want to do is give any kind of negative feedback to the new fruits or new comers to the langauge.

My thing is if you are not sure if it can be done, at least provide some insight or logic of how it can be accomplished using different techniques - and not a different language.....

Why is this in the lounge? Seems to land square in PHP land.

Because I chose to put it here

It is a discussion which does not only apply to PHP, the only reason I stated PHP is to emphasize the comments I made were based upon browsing the PHP forum because I very rarely visit any of the other parts of the forum, such as Perl or Postgre, I tend to stick to this forum, MySQL and PHP because they are my subjects with which I have knowledge to help others.

All i know is, when i first came to this forum, I hardly knew anything about PHP, and now i have written a whole forum program nearly up to the standard of vbulletin. All this thanks to practise, and help from people on this forum.
So definatly, we should try and help more

Duh! Of course we should.

I haven't seen many posts like that, but they should be discouraged.

---John Holmes...

Have you ever looked at vB's source code?? It's ugly as hell..

The product and what it does is great, but the code is just a mess.

well, i guess they changed the naming conventions and formatting of the code from their own in the distros to make it a bit harder to hack.

As a relatively young developer (i'm only 20, yet been in the web dev business since leaving school at 16), I have to admit that PHP is frowned upon by the rest of the languages because of its open source background.

I learned how to develop using PHP, then moved on to ASP and JSP because my employer needed these more than PHP, then onto Lotus Domino/Notes because "the engine is more sophisticated than PHP". Ha! You just try and do a do-while loop in Lotus formula language (or in LotusScript in less than 4 lines)!

I even went to college to learn Java, where they told me that "Java is probably the wrong language to learn for web developement" and that I should go on a visual basic course instead!

I've moved back to PHP as my major development code, mainly because most of the hard work is done for you, and is optimised to do it well. I remember sitting down to create an upload script in VB, coming out at something stupid like 250 lines of code - something that PHP does in 3(ish).

I see more and more jobs for "Visual Basic Developers with 3 years of web development experience needed for up-and-coming development house". Don't these people know that ASP was only created to give hundreds of jobless VB coders more work and to let Microsoft get their fingers into a new tech sector? As mentioned, VB is for visual teaching.

I can honestly say that after taking time to learn PHP, ASP, JSP and Lotus Domino/Notes, without any preconceptions or prejudices, in my opinion PHP wins hands down. JSP following a close second, and ASP lagging behind... way way behind. The only contender, in my opinion, will be the RNext release of Lotus Domino, which has JSP/Java/Servlets integrated into its database engine. Native servlets/JSP pages in such a strong database application? Wow! Shame about the licence costs though...

I am glad that I haven't seen any of these post, I would most likely have something negative to say towards that poster.

As a point of intrest towards the power of php: One of the IT management people knows MS Access (read: crapcess) really well so he writes alot of applications with it and sends them to people, but of course you run into problems with different versions/setups of windows and mdac types, etc, etc so I use to spend a lot of time fixing his programs to actually work, or converting them into a dreaded VB app. Once I got into php I started converting all of them into php applications for the company Intranet. He didn't know this about this for quite some time, but he eventually came up with the same idea and asked me if he created a program in access could I convert it into php for the site.
I had only one response:
"Anything you can do in access, I can do in php."

Another example:
My latest project involves an IPL based barcode label printing program. This thing kicks ***. Now, no more loftware application/licenses needed.