Re: veracity of whitepaper, please help stomp this misinformation

Hi all, while the mentioned whitepaper surely has a problematic approach, it shouldn't be denounced as 'quite a bunch of shit' as others have done on the php-dev mailing list. Unbased arrogance won't bring PHP any further. I haven't had the time to go through the whitepaper thoroughly, but i have recorded enough to say something specific. First, the whole document uses some rhetorical tactics from the textbook: Persuade readers to accept some reasonable sounding assumptions and lead them to unreasonable conclusions. If you buy that the existence of a function name like explode() in PHP will confuse developers, then, of course, lasso is better than PHP. If you buy that one must have an code obfuscating compiler to stop people from looking at your code, the same applies. I could go on for pages here...we all know these tactics from Microsoft. I could argue that it is a feature and not a defiency of PHP to have a lot of extensions not compiled in beforehand. I could say that the existence of tons of readable scripts for PHP is a bonanza for every serious developer. I could ask myself whether the prebuilt security system of lasso is of any use in other than very special cases. I could doubt the ability of the authors to do basic math in calculating the TCO of PHP... But there is a valid point in this whitepaper -- the lack of a working, robust application server for PHP. The discussion within the PHP community about the need for such a beast goes into the second year now...and nothing real substantial has happened. I can imagine that most of the better benchmarks for Lasso are due to object caching on the internal app server. Just my 2 cents Michael