[AccessD] Learning .Net -- PHP Instead?

Kenneth Ismert kismert at gmail.com
Tue Jun 23 10:17:35 CDT 2009


Interesting Link:

TIOBE Programming Community Index for June 2009
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

PHP beats both C# and Visual Basic. Since all flavors of VB get lumped
together (VB6, VBA, etc.), it is likely that PHP has around the same share
as all .NET languages.

This hasn't been lost on Microsoft, which has decided to work on improving
their PHP support:

SQL Server Driver for PHP
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/PHP-Driver.aspx

That's the source of PHP's native SQL Server driver. Also, feel free to
download the PHP on Windows Training Kit.

The point is, PHP's support and usability on Windows has improved
dramatically. It at least deserves serious consideration as a valid option
for a web project.


I'll address some comments made by others:

(Shamil Salakhetdinov)
>...I personally tried to study PHP (and I have had rather
>good C/C++ programming experience) but I must say I didn't
>get that far nor with PHP nor with mySQL - something always
>did get stopped me....

The choice of language is a personal thing. Certainly, some people will feel
more at home with VB.NET than PHP. Go with what makes you most productive.

But if you're thinking of going with C#, you're stuck in curly braces land
anyway -- give PHP a careful look.


(Eric Barro)
>...PHP is similar to classic ASP where code is often
>interspersed with html tags which also makes it quite
>easy to create spaghetti code...

Choice of language doesn't guarantee clean code. The one large
ASP.NETproject I got an 'over the shoulders' view of was a train
wreck. The
complexities of ASP.NET overwhelmed the young developers, who at points were
barely breaking even in solving more problems than they were creating.

The programmers on this list would avoid most of these problems. Discipline
gained through experience counts for a lot.

>...Quite frankly I don't see the addition of a GOTO
>feature to be something to look forward to in any
>programming language...

Goto was a screamingly controversial move for the PHP team. I attended a
talk by Rasmus Lerdorf, the originator of PHP, and he said it was included
because certain situations, it made the code much cleaner. Pure pragmatism.
Caveats acknowledged, use at your own risk.


(Jim Lawrence)
>...I personally believe that web based programming is
>the way of the present and future but it takes extensive
>knowledge of a number of disciplines...

Jim's comments about the multi-disciplinary nature of web programming are on
target. The back-end language is only a small part of what you will need to
learn. However, lots of sophisticated web sites get built for a lot less
than the $100k -- efficient frameworks on the front and back end can play a
big role in making things cheaper.

-Ken



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