The KurtWerks Tinfoil Hat

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006, David Bandel wrote:
>On 1/16/06, Kurt Wall <kwall at kurtwerks.com> wrote:
>> ...has been bested. This article is from 19 November last year. I can't
>> imagine how I manage to miss it:
>>
>> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/149242
>>
>
>Following the links, I found myself at perens.sourcelabs.com looking
>over the forecasts for 2006.  The last item cuaght my eye (Trouble
>ahead for PHP) not because I don't like PHP for all the things Bruce
>mentions, but the fact that it's a perfect example of "if you have
>trouble predicting the future, predict the past".  I still vividly
>remember the horrors involved in the PHP 3-4 upgrade debacle until
>they could make versions 3 and 4 play nice together.  If this article
>is on track (I suspect it is), looks like yet another upgrade debacle
>is in the offing for 5-6 trying to fix the security problems.

One of my biggest gripes about Linux and many open source programs is that
the developers often ignore minor things like backwards compatibility.

If one is going to add fuctionallity or features, it is often possible to
incorporate these without breaking the older versions by proper coding and
use of fallback defaults.  If this isn't possible, then one can create new
routines with the extended features while leaving the old ones in place.

One of the worst offenders in this department Sleepycat with their Berkeley
database routines.  They tend to change the API internally even amongst
minor release changes.  If one looks at the code in the perl or python
Berkeley DB routines it's truly ugly because of the various ``#if...''
conditional tests.

>Guess Perl will start seeing more adherents (for me, it's more
>flexible and more secure anyway).

I've never liked PHP, primarily because I don't like mixing the html
presentation code with processing, and I find it very hard to read.

I prefer Zope page templates and python or perl using modules like
HTML::Template or Mason which allow one to separate out the HTML and
processing.

>Squirrelmail/HORDE folks, beware.

I suspect that the horde folks, having been through this before, may be
better off than Joe Average PHP developer.

Bill
--
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With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law; and every time
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