Re: anti-advocacy: Larry Seltzer, pcmag May'01 pub.

Tom: You've got a lot of good points through the whole message, so I won't quote the whole thing. First, I know that my "complaints" are probably going to be taken as an ungrateful "us vs. them" attitude. Let me state up front that I think that what all of the PHP developers/contributors have done is pretty awesome & I'm thankful for their efforts. I want to make it clear that I am appreciative of what they've done. That said, I would still respectfully point out that the issues that have been raised can't just be given a pass & should be given consideration. Actually, I think that the installer works just fine & given that the ISAPI module is not, in my opinion, ready for prime time, it is appropriate that it installs the CGI module. Now one plus of PHP is that it's cross platform. There is obviously a perceived advantage to developing API specific versions such as the ISAPI module, and it's not unreasonable for PCMag to test it - especially since one would expect better performance from it than running in CGI mode. While I realize that PHP's heritage is not Windows & the ISAPI module is unlikely to take priority, it's still perfectly fair for PCMag's to ding them/us for ISAPI not running properly. The problem of case sensitivity is not one of naming conventions and not necessarily one of programming discipline. It is one of whether the tool (PHP) helps the developer write clean code. I seriously doubt if there are many (any?) developers out there who change the case of their variables/functions from one instance to the next. If it does appear differently, it would almost always be a typo. Without any warning that the variable is undefined (the default way that PHP is installed), this can be a key source of difficult to track errors. The two obvious ways to help eliminate this kind of bug are a warning/error for undefined variables (which is available within PHP - set error_reporting to 15 for those who don't know about this yet), and switching to case insensitive variables/functions. To take advantage of case sensitivity to hack around something the language is missing seems like a poor reason to implement it. If there is a significant enough need to have multiple constructors, then that aspect of the language should be addressed. Case sensitivity is not a nicety for professional developers - it's just something that makes the compiler/interpreter language parsing code easier to write. Making it case-insensitive would help eliminate errors which I would think that all developers, both professional & hobby, would welcome. -- Greg "Tom Mathews" <tom.mathews@st.com> wrote in message news:3AFA6FBA.A33E901F@st.com... > Seeing as how we're having a full fledged 'discussion' about this, I'm going to > throw my boot in from a programmers perspective. > I know that historically php was Personal Home Page, implying that it was > designed for use on personal web sites, not very sophisticated, no security > necesary ... just something that was free and easy to use for anyone wanting to > make their site a wee bit flasher. > That was ten years ago (or therabouts) and like all things it has evolved > massively away from the original concept. This evolution is thanks entirely to > the efforts of the unpaid developers that see something missing and write a new > module, or read lists like this and see what everyone else is having problems - > and write a new module to address this. > The US and THEM attitude that is becoming prevalent in sectors of this list is > not really helpful for anyone - remember that PHP is Open Source - if you want > something changing, raise the issue on php.net, or better still do it yourself. > If you want a better installer for Windows 9x (if you must use that as a > development environment) then write one. > Of course there will be niggles, generally caused by different people wanting > different things. I guess that that is why the boys at Zend are starting to > produce more commercially oriented versions of it, and part of this is to provide > what the industry expect as well as home users. Things like case sensitivity in > variable names and function names have been prevalent since the early days of all > the UNIX variants for workstation or PC. If you have a problem with this sort of > thing, then you should probably take a wee step back from coding for a few hours > and start a naming convention that you are happy with, and while you're at it (by > the way Tim, this is not intended as a dig at you, so please don't take it > personally!) just spend a little more time thinking about your programming > discipline in general, keep everything consistent - if there's a team of you > working on the same app, then make sure that everyone knows the rules... > I personally think that case sensitivity in names is very important. I would use > it in the absence of overloading, and the same again for classes where I want > different constructors to be employed. Be careful when you put in complaints > against this sort of thing that you think about the bigger picture - Open Source > will only survive if it competes equally with the commercial tools out there. If > you remove niceties that 'professional' developers expect, then they will be > forced to do the dastardly and buy MS type tools, and the benefits that these > guys provide to the Open Source community (like exercising all the codebase a lot > harder than homies that just use the basic functionaliy) will instead go to MS! > > When I get time I'll put together a coherent article to defend php against Larry > Seltzer and his buddies,a nd I'll post it here first for review, but until then > that's more than enough waffle from me! > > Tom > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- > -- > PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-windows-unsubscribe@lists.php.net > For additional commands, e-mail: php-windows-help@lists.php.net > To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net