Scripting article

A good article overall, and very interesting reading. I'm sure you'll get the requisite number of emails from the PHP crowd, but us PHP'ers are using PHP for a variety of reasons. 1) Cheap. ie, free. 2) Fast. The fastest even in your tests. 3) The dev community is SCREAMING along, constantly upgrading new modules, fixing things, performance tweaks, and the PEAR database abstraction module has already been started. How long before this overtakes the other players in the field? 4) Low requirements. Run your tests against that same machine, but give it 64 or 128MB of RAM. Watch what happens to that expensive ColdFusion Server, or for that matter, the MS 2k OS. I've never been a fan of "throw money at the problem, and it'll go away" ideology. Did you put the MS 2000 "Internet and security package" on your test system? It'll eat up another huge chunk of RAM. That linux box running Apache? No performance hit at all. =) 5) It's not MS. Being an NT systems programmer I've developed quite a distain for MS, and their technologies. Sure, .NET's just around the corner, and they have some cool ideas for their BizTalk stuff, but in the end...it's still MS. .NET's just an initiative to tie together all of the bastard technologies that MS has come out with and is now trying to support. BizTalk's good, except that it's all interpreted and therefore slow. C# is just MS's Java. It'll be interesting to see how they do with it since they compile all the way down, but it's still just a Java inititive. MS is just NOT cutting edge. They're rehashing a ton of stuff and calling it new. Like clustering. Go buy a hardware load balancer and a couple machine and voila... a cluster! Sure, MS has a nice UI and some management tools, but will they be stable? At Microsoft's own "DevDays" I watched their demo lock up under Win2K and have to have a KillProcess run on it. And people are CHOOSING this stuff? We (the PHP community) all agree that you have some good points - ie, our lists are rather active, and we're working to fix some of the problems that you yourself have noticed. We run PHP for the above reasons, and because while linux is (as of yet) still a pain to run at times it's not all about the end result, but the journey to get there. I'm quitting my NT systems programming position because MS has ruined that journey for me. It's no longer -fun- to code in their environment, with their limitations and their technologies. Chalk up another developer moving over to Linux... -Szii/Mike