Tim Bray on PHP
hear, hear!
all the PHP code I’ve seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places. Everyone agrees on PHP’s upsides: it’s written for the web, it’s easy to deploy and get running, and it’s pretty fast. Those are important advantages. And I’m sure that it’s possible to write clean, comprehensible, maintainable, PHP; only apparently it’s real easy not to.
In 1999, I came to the same conclusion with Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP). How does anyone maintain the mix of ASP, HTML, CSS, etc. in one ASP file; it’s a total mess. The solution then and now is Java.
On the other hand, this week I was explaining J2EE deployment in WebSphere Application Server to my co-workers. Mid-explanation I was hit by the hammer of too much abstraction and flexibility. I haven’t experimented with Rails, but I like many of the principles. In the comments on Tim Bray’s post, someone mentions that “it should be easy to do the right thing.” Hear, hear!
