Nicholas Knight wrote:
Months? It takes me a few *hours* to be able to create
useful code in a
new language. A few days and I can embark on significant projects. This
isn't about difficulty or time (though I'd not be happy about wasting
the time), it's about not wanting to subject myself to the horror that
is PHP just to be able to do a couple things with MediaWiki, probably
never to touch the code again.
Well, it only took *me* a few hours to learn how to create useful
code in PHP, and my programming skills are strictly hobbyist level. I
worked through a couple of online tutorials, and that was all I
needed. PHP is actually a lot like Perl, with somewhat more
conventional syntax and a little less emphasis on text processing. I
love the way you can use it to drop code right into the middle of
HTML. 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.
--Sheldon Rampton