PHP vs. Python/comp.lang.php?

[phil hunt]

On Fri, 23 Nov 2001 05:08:06 GMT, stephen cox <stephen at stephencox.org> wrote:
>> 2. I also need something practical to get away from the borg; I made
>> a big mistake during the 1990s and moved from Clipper to Visual Basic,
>
>MS's new .NET Framework is impressive. And believe it or not it works. And
>you can use Python as you lang of choice if you prefer. Also supported are
>J#, C#, C, Cobol, and of course VB (ASP w/VB. No more VBA). Another shocker
>is that the Framework is available for free.

That's free beer not free speech, right?

I doubt very much that it is free (as in beer), in the sense that the 
only reason they would be willing to distribute it without you giving them
money is that it would be hard for you to do much with it without paying
MS in other ways.

Like with IE; you can download it without cost, but you need to buy other
MS stuff to use it (Windows).

> And MS is porting it to Linux

I will believe this when it happens.

>and FreeBSD.

Ditto this.

Remember folks, MS's strategy is to attempt to lock you in to a MS-only
world. If you write you code for a MSA platform, and then you find that
it doesn't run on non-MS platforms, and that you are subject to gratuitous
incompatibilities, upgrade treadmills, and extortionate software rental
agreements, don't come crying to me. Because it'll be your own fault.

> Also you do not need Visual Studio

I agree. You don't need MS at all. FORMAT C: and install Linux.

> (which is crap. Even the new
>one). I use Dreamweaver for design work, and do my scripting in ASP, or PHP
>depending on the job. I'm also learning Python.. and plan to use Python to
>replace PHP and ASP.

For most jobs Python is better than PHP. Though for simple, web-based
applications PHP is good.

>Oh, I too made the same mistake moving from xBase (Fox, dBase, Clipper) to
>VB and regret it. Although FoxPro was acquired by MS a few years ago, they
>still treat it like a step child. It's the best damn desktop DBMS in the
>world. And the play it down all the time.

That's because it doesn't fit in with their plans of locking users in.
They only bought it so they could migrate FoxPro users to their other
products such as Access.

-- 
*** Philip Hunt *** philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk ***