Programming/Scripting Resource

[John Macdonald]

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?

(Disclaimer: I have never used PHP.)

I recently read an article (but I didn't keep track of where
it was, I'm afraid) about PHP security problems.  It said that
the prime developers of PHP considered security to be far less
important than simplicity of use - to the extent of not fixing
insecure-as-installed issues (that's rejecting offered bug
fixes, not just refusing to spend the effort to find a problem)
but instead assuming that people who care about security will
intuit the issues and work to avoid them while keeping the
language "easy" for others.

Hence, I would expect any PHP script, or any PHP programmer,
to be likely to be providing security problems, and would
expect that learning PHP to not be providing a sufficient
grounding in safe programming..

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