On Sat, Jul 26, 2003 at 05:50:13PM -0400, Lightning wrote:
I do not know PHP good enough to compare it to Python, but I am sure that Python would be an excellent choice since it is very easy to learn, has some support for OOP and is very intuitive.
I'm sorry, but as a _personal_ preference I think interpreted whitespace is a terrible idea. Sorry if you dont agree. As or a code switch, I have no doubts that python is a great language, it has many fans.. but I see no reason to switch.. sure its easy to learn, but the current developers already know php. Not too mention php is really easy to learn and understand. I mean really, you try and tell me php is hard or obfuscated or difficult to read or undocumented. You can't argue with that, the documentation available as well as the resources available for php are great, the built in functionality is great too. While it may not yet have as much available free code as PERL there is lots of availabe code to reuse, especially for the kind of thing we are currently doing. Besides.. really I want someone to post what exactly we would gain by switching languages, and why its worth the hundreds of manhours it would take to port the code. Why can't we just spend that time improving the current code?
Lightning
While I do think that Python is a cleaner language than PHP with much better OO syntax and namespaces, I do not believe that it should be the language of choice for Wikipedia for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, there is no way to get Python working as fast as PHP, and we need every ounce of performance that we can eek out based on our current infrastructure. If we had a huge Sun box with 16GB of RAM and 8 CPUs, I wouldn't worry so much, but we don't. Furthermore, it would seem to be a terrible waste to throw away all those manhours we have already put into the PHP code. I think we would be better off cleaning up the admittedly messy PHP code and possibly adding in my C parser (if I ever get around to getting the ugly list syntax working).