Re: Interview questions?

On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 10:33:53 -0700 "Joshua D. Drake"
<jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> sat down, thought long and then wrote:

>
> >I used to be a PHP-user for a long time, but these problems with
> >different PHP versions have brought me back to the usage of Perl CGIs
> >with FastCGI. Never had any problems with that combination yet,
> >excellent speed, excellent stability, no release version related
> >problems. YMMV.
> >
> >
>
> You can run into the same problem with perl. It is just a matter of
> knowing what you are doing (this is not a slam).
> It is my experience that there are a lot of would be programmers who
> claim PHP experience that really don't
> know what they are doing. Perl at least, to some degree can be
> intimidating and will scare alot of those same people away.
>

I agree, and I think this holds true for most programming languages for
which there is no real well defined standard (as is for C for example,
but again not for it´s additional libraries), but updates for PHP are
extremely frequent compared for example with Perl. I use Perl 5.6 and
5.8, and I have found absolutely no backward compatibility problem (at
least not yet :-) ), and I use PHP 4.0.6 and 4.3.3, and have to
fix lots of backward compatibility problems there, sometimes perhaps
simply caused by unclean (but in earlier PHP releases
allowed) programming style. Between these releases is a period of two
years, with Perl and PHP, but PHP released a lot more versions during
that time than Perl did. And they still discourage the usage of PHP with
Apache 2 (see http://de.php.net/install.apache2), which is for me also a
major drawback to use PHP.

But regardless, what programming language and environment you use: The
main point is: If you have problems with an application on different
environment, take everything into account as a reason: Database,
programming language, external modules, webserver, even different
browser releases can cause strange problems (for example, if you use
Javascript for input checking). Usually problems are caused by more than
one reason at the same time...

Have a nice weekend,

Frank.