Bizarre Name Resolution/Routing Problem

[David A. Bandel]

Regurgitating the prose of Collins Richey Collins Richey
<crichey at gmail.com> on Wed, 8 Dec 2004 06:51:55 -0700:

|On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 07:45:20 -0500, David A. Bandel <david at pananix.com>
|wrote:
|
|> 
|> Well, if you don't mind that every time PHP is upgraded (hang on,
|here> comes version 5) everything stops working and has to be
|rewritten.  If> you don't want that headache, use Perl.  Perl has so
|many modules, even> I can program in it (because it doesn't take any
|real programming, just> give the module what it wants and accept its
|output).> 
|
|Personally, I find this to be a weak argument. Every software product
|that I can think of has new versions that invalidate certain (usually
|edge condition) older code usages. Just consider all the people who
|remain on Apache 1 now that Apache 2 has been available for a long
|time. Or consider how the latest version of gimp differs from the
|older version.
|
|"every time PHP is upgraded" and "everything has to be rewritten" is
|certainly overkill. I've seen a few (almost uniformly extremely large,
|poorly (IMHO) written, and cumbersome code) packages that have a
|problem in PHP5, but nothing that I have written has stopped working.
|PHP doesn't have the number of modules that Perl does, but it's coming
|along nicely. I like the fact that the code looks very much like C and
|that it integrates well with an x/html environment.

Maybe overkill, but I had _NOTHING_ that worked between v3 and v4.  I
anticipate nothing less going to v5.  I must have had a dozen different
apps.  The v4 upgrade fiasco made me rethink PHP real hard.  I wasted
weeks, had lots of mad customers (had to downgrade everyone then rework
the apps or wait for the original authors to do so, some still don't
work and have been replaced), and had my own system not working way too
long (more than an hour's downtime is way too long for me).  I now have
_NO_ PHP apps and will never go back.  Fsck me once, shame on you, fsck
me twice, shame on me.  I don't run M$ for this reason and now I don't
run PHP.  I certainly hope the v5 upgrade isn't as bad, but only time
will tell.  And I can't believe _every_ PHP app I had had bad code or
that everyone was writing bad code.  Perhaps it was just my luck and the
apps I chose, but still.  The bad taste remains in my mouth.

I just convinced a client to go from PHP to Perl.  They have a M$ SQL
Server app they can't move over to Postgres because the app that feeds
it only runs in Windoze.   No one could get PHP to connect.  I ended up
writing a quick Perl script to get the stuff onto a web page.  I have no
idea why PHP couldn't do it, the code looked OK to me (non-PHP
programmer that I am), but nothing ever came up on the page.  tcpdump
showed the info coming from the SQL server to the system, just nothing
ever showed up on the page.  I have no idea why.  Perl displayed it, so
...

|
|Oh well, that's what makes horse trading great. 
|

Yep.

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
-- 
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
		Nemesis Racing Team motto
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