Hunter Peress wrote:
all responses so far are pure reactions, and show that no one acknowledged much of what i brought forth:
That python has an optimizing JIT (that we used on f.scarywater.net which is a BitTorrent server that handles 12,000 users, and saw a 40% decrease in CPU load). That i have personally written things in C and that this JIT has met its performance. That it has a profiler.
That it is a language with focus http://www.python.org/dev/culture.html and professional acceptance specifically over all languages (see the oreilly link).
Whitespace as a cause of errors? jeez... ever heard of unit testing ?
Simply moronic.
Hey you know, different folks different strokes. Yeah sure python may be real good. and hey you know ruby might be even better.. and endles list. everyone has a reason to use the language they like. Simple point is that php was designed to make web interfaces, it was designed to do exactly what its doing right now, do it well, and do it easily. And you know what... its doing fine i believe. I really don't thing that the language the wiki is written in will affect the ammount of features available, because prretty much anything we want can be done in any language, some are easier in some, some are easier in others. For example PERL seems well suited for the task of the module that parses the wiki syntax. PHP and mysql might as well be joined at the hip. php's mysql is supperb and no matter what people say about postgres or oracle or what not, the FACT is that we are using mySQL and we probably will be for a while seeing as there is as of yet no real reason to switch databases another fact is that we have php software that is running fine. Php has great support for everything we currently need and has a lot of nice features built in like sessions, and the fact that it integrates into mySQL and apache so well. Sure there is features we all would want.. but its not a matter of language. Those features have to be written in any language. The hundres of man hours it would take to port would be better spent fixing the current code base. Oh, and if you don't like the current code base, go write your own.. theres nothing stopping you.
and bout the whitespace thing.. learn to handle som picking.. its like if timwi was to get offended over me calling perl code obfuscated.
Lightning