PHP Is My Web Language of Choice

As much as I like, I've come to realize that there are 6 forces that will always be in computer programming:

• THE SCIENTISTS. Computer "scientists" and professors who will espouse the productivity of Scheme and LISP and who end up making big-selling web products from it, oddly enough, such as the fact that most of Yahoo's ecommerce catalog is running on LISP. .....Morons.


• THE OOP PURISTS. Folks who like to sit in meetings all day, never getting anything done, trying to put a square peg into a round hole by trying to make everything fit into the MVC programming model with OOP minutia. These are the Java and C# guys. The VB6 guys moved to VS.NET, realized that everyone was going away from "BASIC" to C#, and C# was like an easier C++ but sort of like Java, and so all the VB6 guys are now C# guys. .....Morons.


• THE TIGHTWAD OLDIES. Companies still using COBOL and RPG because their tightwad asses can't get up and realize the huge expense this has, and they're having to look high and low for existing programmers either willing to retool in this ancient stuff, or old programmers who realized that retirement isn't as cracked up as it was made out to be. ....Morons.


• THE NEXT-BIG-THINGERS. Nutjobs who jump on the next big thing every time, leaping from language to language without caring about their craft -- only about methodologies and science. These are the guys espousing the wonders of Ruby, Haskell, Lua, etc. ....Morons.


• THE CONFUSED. People still using Delphi and VB6 because they are confused and the world is moving too fast. ....Morons.


• THE PRODUCTIVE. People who actually want to get some work done and grabbed the "VB6" of the Linux platform either because Microsoft backstabbed them too many times or because they were fed up with constant reboots, glaring security holes, etc. That "VB6" of Linux is PHP. And usually when you learn PHP, you also learn Perl and Python too so that you can do command-line stuff (Perl) and richclient GUI stuff (Python). This last group is the group I'm in. We're the ones that get sh*t done.

About the only thing I can say for J2EE is that it is a complete stack with all the bells and whistles, so they say. In reality, however, it lacks good reporting and charting. Try and see if there's something already in J2EE that allows you to do easy piechart PNG creation and you'll find there isn't anything. But beyond that, it's got a lot of stuff in it. Only recently has Zend, makers of PHP, gotten on board with this and developed the new Zend Framework. Zend is trying to make their own J2EE-like stack, taking elements of PEAR which they had been using for years.