[thelist] Recommend a Server Side Language?

Katherine Spice k.spice at acu.ac.uk
Wed Apr 11 08:53:44 CDT 2001


Ok, I can't take it any more I _have_ to add my 2 pennies worth!

I fully agree with Philippe's points:

> Hopefully noone will be able to answer this. You have to test any
> recommended langage and find which one suits your needs.
> 
> Imho, a good language needs :
> 
> -cheap or free (else I won't learn it) ideally opensource.
> -supported by a large community (widely used)
> -powerfull enough
> -suported by cheap hosting / free hosting
> -have decent docs.

especially the testing 'till you find one that fits, but I must object
to this:

> - Perl : seems quite cryptic to read. If I don't understand the sources very
> quickly, I feel either stupid or the tool is too complex for me.

IMO _any_ code which is badly written, not commented, or even written by
someone who thinks they're great and has done something unintelligible
in one line which could be done readably in 5 lines, is "quite cryptic
to read" - regardless of language - hell I've spent days swearing over
badly written HTML!

Now Perl may not be the best solution for the original question - it's
not "simple" and the learning curve can be (depending on what you want
to achieve) quite steep. But, it's extremely powerful both for web stuff
and other systems admin sort of stuff. I an with David - learning Perl
was the smartest thing I could have done - knowing it has opened so many
doors. As an aside, PHP was adapted from Perl specifically for web
scripting (a kind of Perl-Lite with advanced database bindings).

My 2p!
Katherine




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