[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On 20/04/12 09:46, Simon Waters wrote:
I'm an experienced programmer and have used perl a lot. If I come back to it after a while if its not heavily comented I'm lost. I used to write asp and VB stuff - VB even went OO quietly when .NET was coming out but and experienced programmer could write some pretty good stuff in it but it wasn’t cross-platform.On 20/04/12 08:28, tom wrote:When php, the bastard abomination of code that it is, came out there was NO other free, open, cross system, interpretable, human readable 'CGI' language available for windows.There is a lesson here I'm sure. Perl was already at version 5 before PHP was released as a language, but Perl wasn't easily usable on Windows. Whilst Perl can look like line noise, it can be used to write decent looking and comprehensible code. Embperl was started 1997, Template Toolkit 1996, so some of the web tools were later but then some of those are quite sophisticated. Perl itself was widely used before web server programming took off, so it was available on pretty much all Unix systems back then. Probably why early PHP ideas were done as a set of tools in Perl. I'm curious what proportion of early web programming was done on Windows, I know my employers did a big ASP project a couple of years after PHP was released. By that time we at the Met Office had been doing CGI programming for a while, although most of mine was written in Korn shell (korn shell was sufficient since we'd built tools we could script to run on HP-UX, Solaris and UNICOS and were mostly stringing those tools together in a secure network environment to make them easily accessible to people without the desire or ability to string command lines together). I suspect a corporate, academic split here.
What I'd like to see happen now is:Make Javascript the language it could be if MS,Apple and Adobe weren’t part of the standardisation group. Create a proper standard SQL and laugh at Oracle when they lie about java being fractured by Android. Get a proper Javascript CLI for server side so everyones libraries can be used on the server side. Make it compulsory for everyone who wants a Computer Programming degree to learn Knuth off by heart so we dont spend the next 50 years arguing over who's cocked up version of something polished shiny in 1976 is best. And then go and read the GCC source code cos if it exists in computing it will be in there somewhere.
Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq