On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 08:40:35PM -0400, Edward Z. Yang wrote: He said it was "unsuitable for a quick hack", not that people don't use it for anything more than a quick hack. I (mostly) agree. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "A script is what you give the actors. A program is what you give the audience." - Larry Wall

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 07:26:15PM -0400, Edward Z. Yang wrote: I mostly agree that PHP is unsuitable for anything larger than a quick hack. That doesn't mean it doesn't get used for things larger than a quick hack. That's the point I was trying to make. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward this to 20 others and erase your system partition.

On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 05:04:15PM -0700, Jeff Carr wrote: Your argument is compelling. I yield the field to your superior debate acumen. . . . months later. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "There comes a time in the history of any project when it becomes necessary to shoot the engineers and begin production." - MacUser, November 1990

On Sat, Aug 26, 2006 at 11:15:15PM -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote: Well let us all give thanks for meltdown, then. :-) Not the person I expected a reply from, but welcome back, I guess. Cheers, -- jr "if you were, y'know, gone" a -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Greg Sabino Mullane wrote: Down for me too, but the mirrors are working fine. Personally speaking, I think that PHP's manual is /a lot/ better than Perl's.

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 08:03:00PM -0700, mboverload wrote: Frankly, if it was written end-to-end in Javascript, I (and millions of others) would probably use something else. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do." - McCloctnick the Lucid

You haven't heard about bittorrent? There will be no need for the database!!! (BTW, server side javascript, and various mutations, exists too). -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]

Chad Perrin wrote: Modern JavaScript (okay, ECMAScript) is actually a pretty nice language. It's just the browser implementations that generally suck. But it's certainly no worse than PHP. -- Ilmari Karonen

"Domas Mituzas"wrote: Well, this was thought as a joke, but it exists! It's a mix of wiki & peer2peer. You pass to your contacts those articles you think are good and block those bad. A complete anarchy, impractical for wikipedia, we would lose our benevolent dictator ;-)

On 7/28/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Really? Where can I download it?

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 01:34:31AM -0000, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote: That's actually pretty much my answer. Those are pretty much my reasons. Are you preplagiarizing me? (ahem) Ditto that first sentence. Cheers and applause for the second. I wasn't planning to, with regard to the third. As for original content, rather than just metoos . . . Another option, besides Perl, that appeals to me is Ruby -- and for many of the same reasons as Perl (though it lags in some areas, such as number of available developers and volume of existing code that could be used). It also has some benefits that distinguish it from Perl, such as a far better syntax for its object model and a tendency to encourage readable code more readily (that doesn't mean you can't write equally readable Perl, just that the language's syntax tends to "encourage" it more than Perl's). Both languages have thoroughly excellent regex engines, with Perl's having perhaps a slight advantage, easily made up by Ruby's facility with iteration. On the other hand, there's the simple fact that Perl execution performance kicks butt all over Ruby, and perhaps every other high-level, reasonably dynamic, comparable language, for most purposes. If I knew enough of some Lisp to be functional (ha ha, 'scuse the pun), I might lean in that direction as well. I like the proposed idea of writing one or two core, high-load components in C, or even (if we're really adventurous) something better performing like Ada, though that's probably really pushing it. Since I don't much enjoy looking at C code, though, I might just ask someone else to write the C, so I guess *I* in particular might not implement any of it in C. Eh. Perl really strikes me as the clear winner, overall, with Ruby a close second about a hair's-breadth behind it. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." - W. Somerset Maugham

On 7/28/06, Ivan Krstic <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote: I googled this and found references to a seven stages by Tom Christiansen... http://prometheus.frii.com/~gnat/yapc/2000-stages/slide1.html According to that, you have not yet rewritten major parts of the compiler, or become on first-name terms with Larry's wife. Steve

english Ivan Krstic <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> a écrit : Steve Bennett wrote: Gnat gave the (relatively famous) YAPC talk, though the original 'seven stages' observation was by Tom, yes. -- Ivan Krstic | GPG: 0x147C722D _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l --------------------------------- Découvrez un nouveau moyen de poser toutes vos questions quelque soit le sujet ! Yahoo! Questions/Réponses pour partager vos connaissances, vos opinions et vos expériences. Cliquez ici.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Moin, On Friday 28 July 2006 08:44, Chad Perrin wrote: [snipauiteabit] <offtopic> I don't know much about Ruby, except that I heard Unicode support is really lacking. Which pretty much rules it out for anything serious text processing in this age :-D However, the entire Ruby project always stuck me as a me-too-lets-reinvent-the-wheel-and-this-time-make-it-rounder project, like so many others (*cough*Perl6*cough). Yes, Perl5 has some problems, like carrying baggage from a decade or two that nobody really needs anymore, but I am not sure that yet-another-interpreted-language (that is only 60..90% complete, undertested etc) is the real answer. It just fragments the coder base even more. We have way too many programming languages already. Best wishes, Tels - -- Signed on Fri Jul 28 12:35:59 2006 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "Wo die Schoschonen schön wohnen."

On 7/28/06, Carlos &lt;angus(a)quovadis.com.ar&gt; wrote: In case you didn't know, mediawiki works with several non-english language, which are more or less impossible to support unless your programming language understands Unicode. henna -- "Maybe you knew early on that your track went from point A to B, but unlike you I wasn't given a map at birth!" Alyssa, "Chasing Amy"

"Carlos" wrote: MediaWiki uses the php binary strings, where you can store anything. Unicode or not.

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 04:46:58PM +0200, Warhog (aja Julian Fleischer) wrote: PHP is supposedly planning to incorporate Python's ICU, which has some reasonable Unicode support for regexen, at some point in the future. Ruby is reportedly integrating Oniguruma (a regular expression engine) by the end of the year, which will apparently provide substantial Unicode support -- though Oniguruma can be used now as an external library, of course, and someone started supporting ICU support for Ruby a while ago too (as an external library -- though of course it's an external library in Python too). Perl, of course, probably has several dozen ways to support Unicode in CPAN. . . . but as far as I'm aware, there's no such thing as a language that provides full native Unicode support. The best we could do is use an external library, which is something you can do with Ruby anyway. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward this to 20 others and erase your system partition.

Chad Perrin wrote: PHP already has unicode regex support, because PCRE has had it for some time and PHP just bundles that. In fact, the simplest way to split a UTF-8 string by character in PHP 4-5 with no mbstring is to do preg_match_all('/./u',...). MediaWiki uses this on occasion. In PHP 6, they are moving to a 16-bit character type (not sure if it's UTF-16 or UCS-2), with a distinct binary string type. If "unicode semantics" are enabled, string literals will be unicode by default, and all the usual string operations would be character-wise. I dare say this would cause some backwards compatibility problems for applications such as MediaWiki. PHP 6 requires ICU for its internal unicode support, but I'm not sure to what extent they will be providing interfaces to ICU's more complex functions. Note that ICU is not "Python's ICU", it's a library written by IBM which is natively C, C++ and Java. There is a set of swig wrappers to bind the C++ API to Python. -- Tim Starling

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 12:44:33AM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote: We actually do this. The diff engine exists as a PHP plugin written in C (or C++, which is nearly the same). Tim is working on another plugin that will do much faster translations of UTF-8 strings from e.g. traditional to simplified Chinese. Regards, jens

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 10:59:40AM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote: It's not pointless when you're putting out >100Mbps continuously. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 Fanfic: read enough, and you'll loose your mind. --me

On the subject of diff efficiency, which button is more expensive, Show Preview or Show Changes? I have an ultraparanoid bot which "presses" one or both before actually submitting, and it occurs to me that it would be marginally easier on the servers if the bot used the cheaper one first. (Though of course only if substantial numbers of its doublechecks failed, which they typically don't.)

Steve Summit wrote: For whole pages, generating a diff takes about 2ms plus 40ms to load the text to diff against, rendering a page takes about 800ms. So it's cheaper to use "show changes" by a factor of 20. In fact, we've been considering suppressing the "current version" display from diff pages by default, especially for large pages, since rendering the current version constitutes the vast majority of the time it takes to generate those pages. These figures are averages based on latest profiling, some pages take significantly longer than 800ms. -- Tim Starling

On 7/31/06, Tim Starling &lt;t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au&gt; wrote: Now, if only the rendering all took place in JavaScript...! :) Steve

On 7/31/06, Steve Summit &lt;scs(a)eskimo.com&gt; wrote: Nope, because "show changes" doesn't render the page. It just shows you the diff.

How 'bout we get Cray to donate a supercomputer and we just have that do the diffs. =D On 7/31/06, Steve Summit &lt;scs(a)eskimo.com&gt; wrote:

Hi! Do I have still time to suggest ObjectPerlthonasskelisp++#.net? Anyway, languages/environments used by bigger web shops: PHP (Yahoo, Wikipedia!!!) Python (parts of Google?) Java (um, around) ColdFusion (MySpace :-) Amazon has SOA with stuff around implemented in nearly all languages... Quite nice approach is Mono with different languages inside (like.. Python engine by Microsoft ;-) As for personal preferences, I'd run away from Perl (did drop it 5 years ago), and use Python (with psyco \o/ ) BR, Domas -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]

On 7/28/06, Domas Mituzas &lt;midom.lists(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: google does indeed use python for stuff, as well as C if I'm not mistaken henna -- "Maybe you knew early on that your track went from point A to B, but unlike you I wasn't given a map at birth!" Alyssa, "Chasing Amy"

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 10:46:36AM +0300, Domas Mituzas wrote: That's sorta like the language name version of Chriskwaanzukkah, right? And this is the dog that didn't bark; I was a bit surprised that we didn't hear any more comments about Python as a possibility. Ok, second question: how much leverage would we *lose* if we weren't in PHP? (Isn't some of our caching PHP-specific?) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 Fanfic: read enough, and you'll loose your mind. --me

On 7/28/06, Domas Mituzas &lt;midom.lists(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The open source ones are fairly untested in _huge_-scale environments AFAICT (then again, so was PHP until recently). But for "enterprise level" scalability, see http://www.zope.com/customers/case_studies.html http://www.jboss.com/customers/index eBay is "powered by WebSphere" and probably a good comparison as a dynamic web application. They're still getting more traffic than we do. ;-) What I do know is that they're making a bloody mess out of all those aggregated web services. A little tagging here, a little wiki there, here's some recommendations, and a wishlist and a puppy, too ... Erik

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 05:36:38PM -0400, Delirium wrote: . . . and that is just awesome. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do." - McCloctnick the Lucid