PHP and filepro - login lesson

[Fairlight]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 06:00:32PM -0400, Jose Lerebours via Filepro-list thus spoke:
> If I did not know better I would think you just called two of us
> "idiots" ...

No.  I'm saying that the language's user pool is populated with far too
many of them, though.  I'm sure there were 15-25 smart AOL users scattered
to the far corners of the globe, as well.  That doesn't really redeem the
platform.

> Not exactly lack of consistency in the writing of code but rather
> evolving methods/classes or simply experimenting with UI/UX - Say
> jQuery or NodeJS or Angular JS or pure JS ... bootstrap or good old
> CSS/CSS3 ... I constantly ask "what if" when writing code and enjoy
> the chase.

To an extent, that works.  There's definitely a pair of large seats at the
head of the table for stability and known quantities, though.

> All that said, I am sure that all of these flaws can be accredited
> to WordPress, Zend 2, CakePHP etc. In other words, the so called
> "frameworks" that are just out of control and some poorly
> implemented.

Nope.  I mean, WP has had its share of issues (besides being a -horribly-
dog-slow design which will only barely function without a massive amount of
caching, which in my opinion defeats half the purpose of dynamic content in
the first place).  There were just -so- many shopping carts, community
forums, control panels, etc., which were written by someone out there who
obviously didn't even bother picking up a leaflet relating to security.

There are decent modules written for WP and Joomla, but they're only as
good as the parent product allows them to be.

WP really wants a complete redesign from the ground up, preferably in
another language.  It's only gotten worse over the years.

> No programming/scripting language is without flaws, some more than
> others.  PHP may rank worst than Perl in many areas but that is the
> price it paid for growing so fast and so openly (too many hands in
> the pot).

Perl's main flaws are an OO layer which is, well...unconventional.  It's
OO in presentation, but from what I gather it's a bit of a hack job under
the hood.  That said, it -works-, and the -only- time I've ever seen Perl
crash was due to a Red Hat patch they rolled themselves.  And you know it's
bad when someone screws up either int(), sort(), or return().  I'm guessing
it was somewhere in sort(), but could never narrow it down further than
the three.  They never fixed it.  It suffered that to the EOL date of the
OS.  I rolled parallel installs of the same exact official Perl version,
compiled by me, on the same OS, and my binaries were fine.

> I still love PHP and I know can pickup Perl and write code in Perl
> with the same ease I do PHP or filePro, I mean, it is not like Perl
> is for Geniuses only.  ;-)   Is it?

Depends how far you take it.  I have seen some really whacked one-liners.
I'm not talking just writing a script in a single line.  I'm talking
writing what seems to be modem line noise which actually does something
functionally useful.

I'm not personally fond of abusing a language that badly.  It's funny,
because when I was a kid, I couldn't be bribed to comment my code, no
matter how obscure.  It was actually a point of pride with me that I didn't
need to.  Nowadays, I can't live without comments.  

The code should mostly document itself, but should also have clear comments
for key points and tricky bits, and even just for flow in some cases.
Otherwise, you go away for six months or six years, need to come back to
it when someone wants a change, and you have no clue where to even start
without doing three days' worth of analysis.  Nobody can memorise more than
a certain percentage of a bunch of different codebases.

m->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.