[ILUG] extra - PotD Wed, 25th June?

[Ken Guest]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 June 2008 05:23:14 pm Rory Browne wrote:
>
>> > the PHP User Group is having it's monthly meeting on Wednesday at the
>> > Longstone Pub on Townsend street - it ordinarily starts at 8pm though
>> > some
>> > of the guys show up a bit sooner than that.
>
> I'm really puzzled by this devotion to PHP.
> I don't want to sound mean, but it's only a tiny little language
> used in connection with the web, isn't it?
> How come it attracts these passionate devotees?
> I mean, I would have thought everything you could say about PHP
> could be said over half a pint of real ale.

being serious for a moment, php is very good 'glue' language that can
interact with ldap, snmp, lotus notes (yes, I cringed too), java, sap
and can
'speak with' many types of databases such as oracle, postgresql etc
etc. You can even use it for generating Flash files - if you'd believe
it!
and yes it can also be used for developing websites with. just like
that perl language.

It can be used for generating documents of most common formats odf &
excel for example. need to write an extension for asterix? you can do
that in
php too.

So there are lots of things to say about it - namespaces and late
static binding in  php5.3, training people to write more secure code
(you can write insecure code in pretty much any language - it's all
about best practices) and why horrible settings/facilities such as
register_globals, safe_mode and magic_quotes  are fully removed from
php6.

here's something for you to think about: next time you use daft or
property.ie you're utilitisng php. same thing goes with facebook and
yahoo for example.

not bad for a tiny insignificant language, eh?

kind regards

ken