On Perl Cons
Some muppet just brainfarted a long list of personal dislikes about Perl.. I've tried to make sure this remains objective, I could dig up an even longer list along the same lines for any of Ruby, Python and especially PHP-Aaron
On Python cons
- Not having curly-braces on "if" statements and other blocks makes long blocks hard to read.
- I think this is mostly a red herring. First, you should not write long blocks to begin with. Second, I've used Python almost exclusively in a large project for over three years and this has rarely been a problem.
- Okay. But if there was one thing I could change about the basic nature of the language, this would be it. It can be very difficult to remember how many spaces you need to put, if you're adding a line after a complex series of blocks. -mkanat
- That's a feature. Seriously. You're complaining about Perl being too hard to read, and Python is designed so that totally unreadable code won't compile. Do you really want to review patches where someone has managed to get the braces in the right place but the indentation wrong? I'm actually quite surprised to see someone looking primarily for a maintainable language and not putting this in Python's "pro" column. I often hear it called "executable pseudocode" because it's so readable, and the indentation-based syntax contributes to that. -Slamb
- Okay. But if there was one thing I could change about the basic nature of the language, this would be it. It can be very difficult to remember how many spaces you need to put, if you're adding a line after a complex series of blocks. -mkanat
- I think this is mostly a red herring. First, you should not write long blocks to begin with. Second, I've used Python almost exclusively in a large project for over three years and this has rarely been a problem.
- Poor Unicode handling--strings are ASCII by default, and are Unicode only if you prepend them with u, like u"string".
- I think u"" can easily be enforced as a coding policy. Depending on how ambitious your Unicode needs are, Python Unicode may not be enough for you. For Chandler we created PyICU to fix cases where Python's natural Unicode support falls short.
- I was trying to avoid having to enforce code guidelines, though. That is, that's one of the reasons we want to move away from Perl. I can check out PyICU though. -mkanat
- I think u"" can easily be enforced as a coding policy. Depending on how ambitious your Unicode needs are, Python Unicode may not be enough for you. For Chandler we created PyICU to fix cases where Python's natural Unicode support falls short.
- No standard way of installing modules like CPAN.
- There is: Python eggs. These are pretty new, though, so not all projects make eggs or upload them to cheeseshop (equivalent to cpan).
- Ahhh. Yeah, I've seen cheeseshop, but I haven't seen it integrated into *nix distros yet. -mkanat
- There is: Python eggs. These are pretty new, though, so not all projects make eggs or upload them to cheeseshop (equivalent to cpan).
- Python has no equivalent to Perl's "taint" mode.
- I know of some attempts at this, and I believe Zope has a sandbox thingy as well, so the situation is probably not as bleak as you think.
- This is really one of my primary concerns. Bugzilla is already used in a lot of situations that require strict security, such as US Government installations. I didn't find anything that would be adequate, in my brief Google search. -mkanat
- I know of some attempts at this, and I believe Zope has a sandbox thingy as well, so the situation is probably not as bleak as you think.
On Java Cons
- Much slower to write in than scripting languages.
- This is why most webapps use a scripting language as part of the templating/GUI layer, which is the bit that will require the most customization for most sites
- Although some tasks can be written very quickly in Perl/Python/Ruby (for example a SOAP client in just a couple lines of code) I'm not sure that is a fair comparison. Although the syntax of those scripting languages is inherently more compact, I don't think this is a fair compairson since the compactness (while impressive in showing off the language) makes the code not only less readable/maintainable, but a good Java IDE or set of Emacs macros will take care of writing/autocompleting most of that for you anyway.
- The Java Classpath is not FOSS
- It should be mentioned that Java's licensing is rapidly changing and I believe Tomcat can actually be run under 100% OSS components
- Nothing like CPAN's client-side module installer
- While this is true, it is also completely unfair because Java does not need such a mechanism. There are lots of Perl modules with native code but few third-party Java modules contain any native code, eliminating one of the major third-party module installation headaches. "Installing" a module in a Java webapp is usually as simple as downloading a single JAR file from the module's website and dropping it in your webapp's lib directory. True there is no single repository of Java modules (like CPAN) but finding a module to meet just about any need should not be difficult in this Google age.
Ruby cons
- Performance is apparently orders of magnitude slower than Python (something like 2-3x).
- 2-3x is not orders of magnitude, except in bizarro-world where log_10(2) > 1. This is an important distinction: since performance is down at #3 on your list of priorities, I don't think you should be worrying about anything but order of magnitude differences. -Slamb
PHP Frameworks
You may want to have a look at eZ Components for PHP:
- Backed by a middle large, but well known PHP company: eZ Systems
- A quality first approach: Discussing Requirements, discussing Design, Writing Tests, Coding+Documenting, Reviewing: dev_process
- Some big names from the PHP core developers are part of the team (Derick Rethans is the project leader)
- Sebastian Bergmann, the creator of PHPUnit contributed a workflow component that he developed as part of his diploma thesis. You'll certainly need a workflow for bugzilla
- The Console Tools component helps you with user interaction for shell scripting
- The company toolslave proposed to contribute it's WebServices libraries to the components. This will give us SOAP and REST