Happy to see PHP be taken more seriously around here. Trust me, we're not all moronic programmers using register globals, magic quotes, and other abominations originally available in PHP.
This is a pretty cool project.
This is a pretty cool project.
You can get around some of that by using a php accelerator but it would seem to me that something like that ought to be part of the basic distribution.
The LISP here is a neat project but I can't think of a practical niche. Sandboxed hosted scripting is praiseworthy, but most customers would want that in Javascript or PHP itself, not as a Lisp.
PHP already powers three of the top 10 websites. What was left to prove?
Where do you read that ? He's not making any suggestion of the kind, he's simply happy that PHP is not always scoffed on, and this piece of code is a really good example of what you can do when you use PHP properly. That comment could apply to plenty of other PHP projects. HN has a bit of a history of ridiculing PHP and the people who program in it.
> I don't agree.
With who ? Your strawman ?
The LISP here is a neat little stepping stone, just like almost any other 'language X implemented in Y' it is not currently meant as either a high performance solution or a production ready environment, just a neat little hack, easy to understand.
If you're in front of a river and someone builds you a rope bridge across you don't complain about the fact that it won't handle 6 lanes of highway traffic, you're just happy someone took the time and trouble to build it. If you don't want to use the bridge then fine, if you do then it's great.
What's left to prove is that there is a wrongness in the attitude towards certain classes of languages. I think PG is partly to blame for this with his 'blub' classification of programmers and languages. As though those that program in language X are somehow better than those that don't.
To tie LISP and PHP together in this way shows that that argument holds no water at all, and for some that may change their minds, which is good.
The naming of library functions alone can drive you bonkers. It's rare that I have to look up the names of functions in languages that I've used for a decade or more, with PHP it still happens with some regularity.
I know I could use an IDE to mitigate that but for some reason IDEs and me don't get along, with the exception of Borlands C Builder, which was really pretty good.