Mailing List Archive

Timwi wrote:
> The problem there is that you need someone to reuse the code; this
> someone would have to be able to tell what is "really good code".

The part that works. ;-)

> I know no PHP apart from the obvious, so this someone won't be me
> ;-) Judging from the proportion of what I know about PHP to what I
> know about Perl, I think as long as Wikipedia will be on PHP, I
> won't be able to submit anything beyond bugfixes and minor cosmetic
> changes.

Well, if you know perl, you pretty much know PHP. That's what I tell
myself everytime I look at the code, at least.

I sympathize with you. And if you want to write the whole site over
from scratch in perl, that's a bold undertaking. I suspect it'd be
hard to get the people who have invested a lot of time in the current
code to see the wisdom in doing that, esp. if the only real reason is
yours and my knowledge deficit with respect to PHP.

--Jimbo

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>I know no PHP apart from the obvious, so this someone won't be me
>>;-) Judging from the proportion of what I know about PHP to what I
>>know about Perl, I think as long as Wikipedia will be on PHP, I
>>won't be able to submit anything beyond bugfixes and minor cosmetic
>>changes.
>
> Well, if you know perl, you pretty much know PHP. That's what I tell
> myself everytime I look at the code, at least.

Superficially, yes, but ... for example, I was trying to program the
"redirect /w/wiki.phtml?title=(.*?) URLs to /wiki/$1 when they don't
contain an ampersand" feature yesterday, and I realised I had absolutely
not the faintest idea how to do that. It's nice that PHP puts query
string variables into PHP variables automatically, but it's not useful
in this case ...

> And if you want to write the whole site over
> from scratch in perl, that's a bold undertaking.

Well, yeah. I know.

> esp. if the only real reason is
> yours and my knowledge deficit with respect to PHP.

That's not really the only reason. My major reason is that the currect
code-base will be extremely difficult to enhance to support things like
"single-signon" and inter-wiki co-ordination.

Greetings,
Timwi

Timwi wrote:
> Superficially, yes, but ... for example, I was trying to program the
> "redirect /w/wiki.phtml?title=(.*?) URLs to /wiki/$1 when they don't
> contain an ampersand" feature yesterday, and I realised I had absolutely
> not the faintest idea how to do that.

Hmm, yeah. Well, of course my mind immediately wanders to some deep
voodoo of mod_rewrite, which could conceivably do that for us,
although I'm sure I'll have nightmares tonight from even thinking the
thought.

> That's not really the only reason. My major reason is that the currect
> code-base will be extremely difficult to enhance to support things like
> "single-signon" and inter-wiki co-ordination.

Right, but what I'm saying is, there's a lot of perfectly good code
that doesn't have anything to do with signing on, and it seems a shame
(not to mention being error-prone for sure) to rewrite all that code
in perl.

There's a lot of tricky code for handling individual language quirks,
and a lot of code in the wiki parsing engine area, and so on. That
stuff works pretty well, and rewriting it in perl, well, it'd be
tedious.

Probably, I'm guessing, it'd be easier to go pick up a PHP book and
spend an afternoon learning how to do the most basic stuff. That's
my thinking, anyway.

Now, as for me, I *have* this PHP book over here, which I've been
admiring the cover of for some *months*. :-)

--Jimbo

> The problem there is that you need someone to reuse the code; this
> someone would have to be able to tell what is "really good code". I know
> no PHP apart from the obvious, so this someone won't be me ;-) Judging
> from the proportion of what I know about PHP to what I know about Perl,
> I think as long as Wikipedia will be on PHP, I won't be able to submit
> anything beyond bugfixes and minor cosmetic changes.
>

You know more than you think you know. Good code is not dependent on
language, but on logic. Thts the one thing I learned in comp sci. I would
routinely write pseudo code programs or php programs, for my c++ projects
and then just port them over, it made it sooooo much easier that way. plus
php is so easy.. and the manual so good. There is a whole lot of built-in
functionality, and php is designed from the ground up to work with web
interfaces. Another thing is that Perl code is a little harder to understand
than php since "TIMTOWTDI" . Perl tends to look a lot different depending on
who programs it, while php doesnt so much because, frankly there is not
allways that many ways to do it... Plus i might be biased cause i dislike
perl cause I tried to learn it as my first programming langueage and i was
rather confused and never got anything done... so I learned C, which I did
ok with, but had a lot of trouble with stupid crap, then i discovered php..
which I loved because it reminded me of C while removing most of the tedious
and confusing parts of it (dynamic memory allocation)....

Lightning