Programming/Scripting Resource

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 08:42:44PM -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
>I notice that not a single person has suggested PHP, even though (from
>my minimal work to date) it appears to be reasonably flexible and is the
>foundation of many open source CMSs and other LAMP-based web apps.
>
>Are there objective reasons for not considering PHP as a place to invest
>one's time in entry-level programming, as opposed to Perl, Python, Ruby
>or shell?

My reason for not suggesting it is because it is, by design, a
web-centric tool, and I don't think that the web is a good place to
learn programming - it is a hostile environment.  It is easier to write
a bad app in PHP than any other language, because it has an outward
face.  

There are also a great many concerns about the language design of PHP,
and while many great projects are written in it, it also accounts for a
huge share of the security problems on the web.

If a new programmer is starting web development, I would recommend that
they start with a more general-purpose language and a mature framework
(Ruby/Rails, Python/Django|TurboGears, Perl/Mason|Catalyst).  They will
get a web app up in about the same amount of time, but you will also
learn a language that you can use elsewhere.
-- 

yours,

William

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