Monday, November 29, 2004
Peter Yared's Musings: The Next Language: PHP and Python
Peter Yared's Musings: The Next Language
"So if Java does not meet these requirements, what does? Apparently what is needed is a language/environment that is loosely typed in order to encapsulate XML well and that can efficiently process text. It should be very well suited for specifying control flow. And it should be a thin veneer over the operating system.
Most Linux distribution in fact bundle three such languages, PHP, Python, and Perl. PHP is by far the most popular, Python is considered the most elegant (if not odd), and Perl the tried-and-true workhorse. All three languages are open source and free. As the following graphs show, PHP use has skyrocketed over the past few years according to Netcraft.
PHP is now three times as popular as Java JSP in terms of URL counts according to Google.
PHP, Python, and Perl are still somewhat immature in terms of their enterprise libraries, and their web services capabilities are still nascent. However, they have the necessary ingredients to meet the requirements of the next corporate computing phase of "text pump" applications. PHP, Python, and Perl are:
Well suited for loosely structured data like XML
Incredibly tuned at text processing
Very well suited for control flow programming
Very well tuned on Linux/x86 and Windows/x86
Very close to the metal, given their origins as Unix scripting languages
Tuned for 1-2 processor x86 machines "
"So if Java does not meet these requirements, what does? Apparently what is needed is a language/environment that is loosely typed in order to encapsulate XML well and that can efficiently process text. It should be very well suited for specifying control flow. And it should be a thin veneer over the operating system.
Most Linux distribution in fact bundle three such languages, PHP, Python, and Perl. PHP is by far the most popular, Python is considered the most elegant (if not odd), and Perl the tried-and-true workhorse. All three languages are open source and free. As the following graphs show, PHP use has skyrocketed over the past few years according to Netcraft.
PHP is now three times as popular as Java JSP in terms of URL counts according to Google.
PHP, Python, and Perl are still somewhat immature in terms of their enterprise libraries, and their web services capabilities are still nascent. However, they have the necessary ingredients to meet the requirements of the next corporate computing phase of "text pump" applications. PHP, Python, and Perl are:
Well suited for loosely structured data like XML
Incredibly tuned at text processing
Very well suited for control flow programming
Very well tuned on Linux/x86 and Windows/x86
Very close to the metal, given their origins as Unix scripting languages
Tuned for 1-2 processor x86 machines "
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