Re: Experience (was: while-question)

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:43:31 -0800, Yeti wrote: >Ok, ok I admit it. PHP is a programming language. I guess I drank too >much assembly code today. >By the way ... Motorola 68000! Those were to good old days. 680x0 was the nicest machine I ever met - especially nice when writing for OS-9/68000. Yup, them was the daze... My perspective: scripting can be "programming light" (or lite, if you're illiterate and/or in marketing), but can just as easily be serious programming. This is especially so, now that many scripting languages support OO to some degree. Equally, I've seen some C code that I'd be somewhat reticent to call "programming". Programming isn't all about stacks of procedural code either; consider declarative programming. (Yes, Ash, XHTML and CSS are effectively a form of declarative programming!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming The trick with languages is to: * pick the one (or more) appropriate for the task * pick the design approach appropriate to the language (and other tools) To be a decent web developer, with database-driven pages, one often has to manage a design that spans multiple languages and sometimes more than one programming paradigm. Consider a simple HTML input form sending information to a database: * (X)HTML for the page, including the input form * CSS for managing layout and styling, even active menus etc. * maybe some JavaScript for smart validation or field management * server-side programming for accepting the form post * maybe some database programming (SQL) for updating the database Compound that with some mostly-declarative XSLT, Flash, Java, .htaccess etc. and you've got a relatively complicated toolset that traditional programmers scratch their heads over when initially making the switch from their one-language development environment. (Frameworks strive to clean that up for developers) So, is PHP programming? :) -- Ross McKay, Toronto, NSW Australia "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" - Wizard of Oz