4-Year Blogiversary
Posted December 10th, 2006 @ 07:12pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Today is my four-year "blogiversary." The very first post I made back in 2002 was called "I Hate Perl." I did then, and I still do now (well, I don't really hate it, I just prefer not to use it).
That preference extends to my blogging tool as well. Back in 2002, I was using MovableType. Today, I'm one week away from moving my other site, The Sand Trap, from MovableType to WordPress, having done the same here a few months back. The move will coincide with my ditching of Interland, which is now Web.com and which was HostPro when I signed up with them nearly six years ago.
Donate Life
Posted 11 Dec 2006 at 2:34pm #
I rather like Perl. It's the best C/shell/awk/sed mashup there is. I'll be happy to see Perl 6, though, as the syntax has really gotten out of hand in Perl 5 and is long overdue for cleanup. (unfortunately Perl 6 is a huge project and will still take some time to be finished) I wonder how many people who jumped ship for python or ruby will return to perl after the great rewrite is done..
I like Ruby, although I haven't used it much. It's clearly designed by someone who had used Perl, but wanted a better object system. Rails is really cool. Ruby's biggest problem right now is that it's quite slow .. they need to work on that. Also Unicode is b0rken in Ruby, which is just dumb.
Python is also pretty decent language, but it bothers me for some reason. It seems like certain things which should be easy aren't. And it's also a bit slow, which is a problem for any real application.
PHP just plain sucks. It's syntax is just a mangled perl which doesn't work quite right, and the standard library for PHP is the strangest collection of ad-hoc incremental feature creep that I've ever seen in any language. they can't even decide on a standard naming convention for functions, different functions seem to be similar take very different arguments, etc.
oh, and mod_php is unusable on any multi-user environment as it has no security whatsoever. (all scripts run as the apache user, not as the user who owns them.. so any user can write to anyone's files.) But nearly all PHP scripts assume that they will run under mod_php, and don't work as CGIs. I'm a sysadmin at a college, and one of the most common questions I get from students is "Why don't you have mod_php installed? I want to run this really cool (photo manager/blogging software/wiki/etc)" and I have to explain that if we had mod_php installed we'd have to worry about every student being able to hack our homepage, etc. and that if the PHP program they're using is written well then they ought to be able to through a #!/usr/bin/php line at the top of the file and run it as a CGI, but of course most PHP packages just don't work as CGIs w/o lots of painful editing.
If people want to run movable type or any other perl package, then it's no problem because all of those run as CGIs just fine (not many people use mod_perl so nothing expects to run under it).
Now I have to admit, I've been extremely disappointed with MT since the 3.0 release .. they've been slow to address problems, and much of the work they've done on it has not been in directions that I really care about.