[GLLUG] PHP vs Python

[Nicholas Kwiatkowski]

Why do you say that vendor issues prevent the use of .NET or ColdFusion?  I
realize that .NET will lock you into a single operating system, but
ColdFusion and Java are both cross platform.  Java runs on virtually every
platform under the sun (no pun intended).  ColdFusion has multiple vendors
(Adobe, New Atlanta, Smith, etc), so boxing it in because a single vendor is
not fair.  ColdFusion runs on any platform that Java runs on (because in
essence, 2 of the vendors package it as a EAR/WAR file that runs on a J2EE
server).  

While OOP is not a requirement of /any/ project, if you are working on
larger projects, it greatly helps simplify some of the 'golden nuggets' of
large programming projects.  Things like code-reuse and code modularity are
huge time savers when working with larger projects.  These 'nuggets' simply
can't be realized to their full potential in procedural projects.

When working with web projects, while scripting based languages (interpreter
languages) work, the don't scale well.  When every line of code needs to be
evaluated for each hit on your site, you obviously loose lots of horsepower.
This is the same reason why (at the time) languages such as BASIC (think
back to q-basic) were SLOW and languages such as C/C++ ran much faster.
They could both generate the same result.  This is a much larger deal when
you have lots of heavy lifting that occurs, or when you have lots of hits
that need to be processed.   With byte-code, the compilation is already
done, and therefore the code doesn't need to be interpreted for each
instance.

I have worked on many websites that do some heavy lifting -- in the real
world PHP is still seen as a toy, and .NET and Java are seen as the way.  If
you look at the top ten websites out there, I can think only one that runs
PHP, and even that uses PHP only for its presentation layer.

-Nick Kwiatkowski


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Houser [mailto:rick at divinesymphony.net] 
Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2007 11:03 AM
To: Nicholas Kwiatkowski
Cc: 'Marshal Newrock'; linux-user at egr.msu.edu
Subject: Re: [GLLUG] PHP vs Python


I personally think .NET (even with the existence of Mono) or ColdFusion
would be very poor choices for the project due to the vendor issues.

None of the languages require OOP principals as they are quite easy to
circumvent, but Python and Java certainly do encourage OOP use and it is
considered the right way.

As for the compilation issue, all the Python I've worked with ran from
pre-compiled byte-code, so I don't think that factors in much.  Since
this was supposed to be a web application, compiling to native machine
code (Java - with gcc) wouldn't be all that useful of a feature.