Clojure 1, PHP 0
briancarper.net
briancarper.net
You can compare any code you write yourself to it and you'll find your code better.
Last year I gave a conference talk at our local PHP web developer conference analyzing technical details of WP, Joomla and Drupal. I found WP a piece of spaghetti, Joomla a bloatware and Drupal somewhat cleaner than the other two and with some interesting ideas.
However if you look at the UI, you have to admit that WordPress really shines there. I haven't yet used anything that easy to publish a blog.
Taking all this into consideration I think the article title is greatly misleading. It really should be "Compojure 1, Wordpress 0". And the value of reading that article for me was zero.
His concluding segment is literally called: A Brief Comparison: Clojure vs. Wordpress.
Clojure is a language (dialect) and Wordpress is an application. This is worse than the common mistake of comparing a language to a framework.
The more users of something like wordpress that you have the more edge cases you find. I can write a blog in 1200 lines of PHP but I don't think I could convince myself it has anywhere near the features, considerations or polish that something like wordpress will have.
As for the cloud plugin I haven't looked at it but it appears as though the boilerplate is just a way to add an easy method for customization something his lacks.
So we end up with less code but less features and more difficult to get up, keep up or customize. I fail to see how this is a point for Clojure.
FWIW, I am also writing a real replacement for Wordpress: http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Ernst,%20Angerwhale,%20the%20F... (that article also rambles on and on and on about unrelated things).
It could certainly be better but it's understandable as to why it's not pretty under the hood. Trying to be everything for everyone usually results in ugly systems.
And you're writing it in Perl? Sounds maintainable!
As to your other point, nice troll.
Can you cite specific examples of where it is broken?
Or why don't you say what you really mean: Because it's written in PHP it must be junk.
And, seriously, who is trolling who? You posted how broken it was, and that you're building something new and better, but don't provide any examples of how Wordpress is broken exactly.
I can have Wordpress installed and working in under 15 minutes. I'm not sure how that is broken.
I could go on and on, and the answer to most of these things is no. Most of the time, it doesn't matter because the plugin is "too simple" to break things. But simplicity has its limits -- there are a lot of features that Wordpress is missing that I trivially implemented in my Angerwhale prototype (cleanly).
As to the number of extensions, it's simple. Wordpress is the only blogging solution out there, and there are millions of PHP programmers. (OK, there is MT also. But MT killed itself with weird licensing, and lost all of its mindshare. Oops.)
Those two factors combine to create a huge ecosystem. But it doesn't say much about the design of Wordpress, other than "it works well enough for people with simple needs, and rewriting a whole blogging engine would take a little more time than hacking Wordpress for this one site."
Anyway, sometimes good enough is good enough. Sometimes it isn't.
We modified the shit out of wordpress to use it as a makeshit CMS to power a large portion of the marketing generated content on our site. We even added workflow to it.
It wasn't that hard. The codebase for wordpress isn't that messy. It's not ideal, but what OSS project is?
All that in addition to the actual functionality.
I would even go as far as to say that rebuilding all the Wordpress functionality in Clojure would not take significantly more or less lines of code than what WP already has.
Or in other words: If I only need a small defined subset of Wordpresses functionality and if I have the time to actually write a blogging engine from scratch, then it will always have significantly fewer lines of code than WP - regardless of language.
Once I add features, the line count will increase - regardless of language.
This article is comparing apples to oranges: It's comparing a small, custom-built solution to a configurable out-of-the-box solution designed to satisfy the needs of the whole blogging community.
Of course that's more complex.
But it spares you the procedure the author later describes as "When I find a bug, I SSH in, re-attach to screen, fix it in Emacs, hit C-c C-c to recompile just the functions I need to update, and then detach from screen again.".
Nice try...
(As for Java, I wrote an article about things I don't like about Java on my blog, and all of the comments were either "I agree" or literally, "U are the dumbest person in the world." Maybe, but at least I can spell "you".)