NYCPHP Meetup

[Max Gribov]

> MySQL and PHP, on the other hand, really raise my ire. Both of them 
> have two major problems:
>
> 1. Bug ridden (by this I am including both misfeatures as well as 
> actual bugs).
>   
Unlike Microsoft/Sun/IBM software? Should we dive into Java's internal 
memory management? Microsoft's excellent security record?...

> 2. They encourage bad habits.
>   

Most languages support GOTO and do not require you to comment, and your 
code will still compile/run.
Any OO language can be used as a glorified wrapper for a bunch of functions.

> and because it's quite possible 
> to learn PHP incrementally by intermixing it with HTML. 
Its also possible to learn ASP by doing that same thing.
In the matter of fact, its possible to be stupid with any programming 
language/environment.


> So what's the 
> problem? Well, first of all, as anyone who's done much web programming 
> will tell you, mixing code with markup is *not* a good thing if you 
> care about maintenance or extensibility. The very thing that makes PHP 
> a great language for beginners is the very thing that makes it a bad 
> language for beginners. At some point they will have to unlearn those 
> habits, except that usually they don't. Also, because it's so easy to 
> whip out a quick PHP webapp, many, if not most, PHP programmers fail to 
> delve very deep into the realm of programming, preferring to sit at the 
> edge and reap the benefits without the work (I'm not talking about 
> coding work, rather the work of understanding your field). 
Im sorry, WTF?... Looked at MediaWiki source much? Joomla?..
Hell, I can paste some code too which doesnt look like BASIC...




> PHP 
> programmers practically popularized the most common attack in the 
> world, the SQL-injection attack. Not only is it the most common, it's 
> the most easily avoided. That's how shallow most PHP-programmer's 
> knowledge is. "Professional" programmers are still assembling SQL 
> queries by concatenating strings.
>   

I love the "most php programmers" part.
I got another great one, "most people are born with sub-standard 
intelligence level".
That one is also hard to argue for/against...

> PHP and MySQL are this generation's BASIC, the language that was 
> described thusly by the Free Online Dictionary of Computing
>
> BASIC has become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. 
> This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that 
> happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy 
> gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on 
> the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) 
> very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to 
> use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical 
> accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it 
> ruins thousands of potential wizards a year.
>
> Replace BASIC with PHP or MySQL and you've got today's most common 
> programmer. Worse, the most common programs in existence today mix the 
> two in a brain-freezing mixture of stupidity.
>
>   




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> Lee
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