RE: PHP on .NET DLR

>  It becomes more convoluted, and now definitely it is looking 
> like a conspiracy. MS is promoting on PHP on windows but 
> purposefully scuttling its development on .NET. Why? Again, 
> give me some reason for that. I am now intrigued. Why is 
> there such a antipodal reactions from MS regarding the 
> same thing?

Antipodal reaction?  LOL!  You kill me!  Different managers with different
view of priorities, that's all! 
 
>  To be frank, Web programming with css, table, div etc is a 
> terrible thing. It is a completely structureless madhouse. As 
> a developer, I prefer creating the entire gui by calling 
> functions rather than by printing strings. The latter is what 
> makes web development so difficult. 

That statement tells me you don't even realize why the web technology is so
resilient and has scaled so well. I only understand it because I recently
spend six month diving deep into old mailing list discussions and reading
specs, and I came out a believer.  Loose coupling that can accomdate failure
is key to the web, and strings provide that. For more local apps, structure
is okay. But even for local apps the lack of the equivalent of a UNIVERSAL
resource locator for stateless resources is a serious downside to that which
you hold in high regard.  

But certainly it would take me years of repeating other people's arguments
to get the point across. May I suggest you read RESTful Web Services [1] and
then we could have this discussion?

> silverlight will succeed or not is irrelevant; it can't hurt 
> anyone to have PHP on .NET nevertheless.

It can distract attention from where it might be better utilized.  FYI, I'm
not against this I just have a natural tendancy to provide a counterbalance
when I see other people being more zealous than pragmatic.

>  OK, silverlight fails miserably. So what? PHP on .NET will 
> still empower millions of PHP developers to explore new 
> avenues, and come into contact with the new programming ideas 
> that .NET library has. It can only be good.

Maybe. Or maybe they just code in PHP classic and go about their business.

Listen, I'm not against this. I'm just saying "put your money where your
mouth is" and get coding.

> RSS is not a language. 

Hmm. According to XML.COM, RSS is "a portal content language."   The reality
is a computer language is an abstraction layer that allows the user to
encode information for processing and/or representation.  Your point is
quibbling a nits.  RSS is a declaritive as opposed to procedural language
and the simplicity analogy still applies.

> The idea of programmer is to write 
> extraordinarily complex programs whose very purpose is to 
> hide the complexity from the end user. My day job involves 
> building graphical interfaces--even though I personally do 
> not use them--to hide the complexity of the system from 
> the end user.

And to a blind men, an elephant is wall.  And to another, a snake. And to
another, a treee.  And so on.  

Your perspectives are but one of many, as are mine.  But I at least
recognize those others persectives.

>  Just previously you complained how difficult it is to stitch 
> together drupal, wordpress etc. Why? Because there is no 
> single person who can handle that kind of complexity. 

Never said there way.  My point about independant components actually
supports that concept.

> Complexity is the key. And complexity exists so that it can 
> hide itself from the end user. That's programming. You make 
> your programming incredibly complex so that your user doesn't 
> have experience it.

You "make them complex?"  Do you really hear what you are saying?!?  No, you
factor the complexity out so that you can handle the complexity without it
causing you to make mistakes.  

>  Drupal, wordpress etc has decided to keep it simple. What's 
> the end result? Complexity has been passed on to the end 
> user. This is one of the absurdities of Open Source. 
> Programmers are saying: We want simplicity, so we will throw 
> all the complexity at the end user.

That's not my take on Drupal.  My take is that the developers are pretty
much all brilliant, and they can't relate to the needs of lesser skilled
peopl; after all, they understand it why shouldn't everyone else?

OTOH, their module architecture is great if it were not for the PHP language
making it so verbose and hence complex.

>  RDF is not a language.

Yes above point about quibbling nits.

>  Powershell is not meant for writing applications. 

"Not meant" for writing applications?  What inside information do you have
my dear friend?  Have you travelled to Redmond and met with the people on
the Powershell team and discussed Powershell with them?!?!?  (like I
have...)

> But funnily enough, I love powershell, because it is pure C#. 

According to the book written by the PowerShell team lead, Powershell is
part Perl and part Python. It is not part C#.  And it doesn't have those
infernal semi-colons. '-)

> You gotta love MS, how they are screwing over their VB 
> programmers. No more VBscript. Now even Windows shell 
> scripting uses C. Ha.  That's another reason I have started 
> liking MS. 

Screwing over?  Everything's a conspiracy in your world I see.  I guess the
Ruby guys are screwing over the PHP guys too?

>  To be frank, python focuses how to make it easy for the 
> compiler writer to get away with least amount of features. 

And with that they allow Python to be built mostly in Python, and they've
created a really elegant language.  Your point is?

> Python doesn't even allow you to embed variables in strings. 
> How insane can it get? 

Here's how insane: You can take one feature from a language and claim it
discredits an entire language. Now THAT is insane.  The more you type, the
less credible you sound.

> And you need to add 'self' to every 
> method in a class. 

That's a design decision that many people agree with, myself included.

>  Sorry. The general perception is that PHP is a bad language 
> but simpler than Python, and that's why people perfer it. If 
> you are so much against braces and C heritage, you might like 
> it, but python is generally not considered as simple.

Here's where PHP is simpler than Python. EVERY LINUX SHARED HOST IN THE
WORLD SUPPORTS IT BY DEFAULT.  Getting Python to work on a shared host can
be a PITA.  The base language itself has less confusing syntax and is thus
easier to work with than PHP

If all other platforms were on equal footing, I think PHP would not be so
strong.  But things aren't equal so in reality it is your opinion vs. my
own. 

> > > Python is supposed to be an elite language. 
> > 
> > By whose definition?
> 
>  People who use python. 

There is not a single collective mindset.  I use Python as well as PHP and I
don't see it as an elite language.  I do see it as a language that is far
more consistent than PHP. With PHP you pretty much have to remember function
names, parameter orders, etc. because there is no consitency.  Learn a few
things in Python and you already know a lot of the things you didn't learn
directly.

But we are so far off on a tangent that we are just wasting ours and other
people's time.

> > > In fact, as
> > > everyone points out, without Rails, I sure none of the 
> code monkeys 
> > > would ever touch Ruby, and run away scared from its OO.
> > 
> > I highly doubt OO is that off-putting these days. It was in 
> 1990 when 
> > i was first teaching it, but it is not today.
> 
>  That's the idea I get reading comments posted everywhere.

I guess I'm not reading those same comments.

> > >  MS is gaining hard on the server arena. Being a server services 
> > > vendor, we have no choice but to fully support windows or lose a 
> > > huge market. IIS powers 31% of the websites now.
> > 
> > But IIS supports PHP as I quoted already. What's the problem?
> 
>  Why stop there. Why not take the next step. As I said, for 
> backend I will be using PHP/IIS, but what will I do for the 
> silverlight frontend?

Nothing is stopping you. Go for it.  (we are full circle now.)

>  As I said, this is not a discussion of whether silvelight 
> will succeed or not, it is about giving your PHP developers, 
> the ability to develop apps in .NET platform too. If you 
> merely consider that topic alone, then there is no ambiguity 
> there: IT is a really great thing.
> 
>  So now the next step, what can we do to make this happen?

Recruite a team of crack developers who want the same and pick of the
Phlanger project.  Heck, go talk to Miguel at Novell and ask if he can
provide you some guidance.

>  Thanks for the nice conversation.

Ditto.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us



[1] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/