Sheldon Rampton wrote:
With just a few lines of code you can create an interactive form that queries a database and returns a result. To do the same thing in Perl, you'd typically need one static HTML page and a separate page for the CGI script that processes the form data and returns the result. It can be done, but it's more work. Once I discovered PHP, I stopped using Perl and haven't looked back.
I can imagine there are situations this is a reason to use PHP. I don't see how MediaWiki is one, though. Isn't MediaWiki trying to be a solid, well-designed, large and scalable application? It takes time to write such a thing. Probably more in PHP than in languages designed for (among other things) such tasks. A well-designed application seperates interface and implementation, which requires a good templating system. I believe Ruby on Rails is such a thing (www.rubyonrails.org), but being a Pythonista, I'm not sure. Development speed is a good thing. At the cost of scalability, however, it is not.
regards, Gerrit Holl.