RE: Yahoo is moving to PHP ??

Hi John --

> Quasi-seriously, as someone who has had to maintain mountains of bad
> perl code, I know TMTOWTDI can have a downside; but the openness of the
> language is what has lead to its greatness ...

This doesn't have to be as big a problem as it often is.  Having coding
standards makes a big difference no matter WHICH language you use.  Have you
ever seen bad Java code?  Java has reached parity with Perl in that area,
for sure!  This is a problem in ANY language.  You just can't "hire smart
people" and send them out there without direction.

At my company we base all our work on CGI::Application and HTML::Template to
solve exactly this problem.  CGI-App and HTML-Tmpl (or Template Toolkit --
TT is compatible with C::A) "strongly suggest" a standard way of writing the
uninteresting bits of a web application -- namely, state management and HTML
separation.  They go beyond what is provided by simply making a decision to
use a particular API, such as CGI, mod_perl, PHP, Mason, etc.

No software library will factor this problem out entirely.   This is really
a human problem -- not a software problem.  However, choosing a specific
tactic is a good start.

TTYL,

-Jesse-


--

  Jesse Erlbaum
  The Erlbaum Group
  jesse@xxxxxxxxxxx
  Phone: 212-684-6161
  Fax: 212-684-6226