Designing a consistent language is *very* hard

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote in message 
news:oughgmvgoiiietkedaxa at forum.dlang.org...
> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 09:41:06 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote in message
>> news:jngarb$14un$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>
>>> Well, I cry everytime I am using it on my web site, but the effort to
>>> port the scripts is not worth it.
>>
>> Abandoning PHP is *always* "worth it".
>
> Rewriting seldom brings anything new. It almost like starting
> from zero, without the benefit from all the bug fixes the
> software has had along the years.
>

Well, rewriting != porting.

> The hours wasted porting to a new language, could be used adding
> features to existing code base, or refactoring.
>

I had a big project recently that was about half Flash. About halfway 
through, I ported all the Flash from AS2 to Haxe (and switched the 
resource-embedding from the Flash IDE to swfmill): It wasn't particularly 
difficult, and it more than paid off in the end.

> I know how I am speaking about, many of the big bucks we get on
> consultancy jobs, are from companies that decide to keep rewriting
> their software on the flavour of the month framework, just because
> "everyone else is doing it".
>

Well, yea, *that* would certainly be a problem. And I agree there are times 
when porting languages is not worth it. But I do have a very hard time 
imagining that porting away from PHP could ever be unworthwhile.

I'm not trying to talk you into porting your stuff, though. Just sayin'.

> So I rather keep my "almost clean" PHP scripts running, as getting
> to the trouble of switching ISP just to be able to rewrite the site
> in a more sane language.
>

Eh, personally, I find the PHP-only webhosts to always be nightmares to deal 
with. Even the shared hosts that are nice enough allow native-compiled CGI 
still tend to be a pain. I switched to Linode (VPS) about a couple months 
ago, and I'm absolutely in love with it already.

Heck, last night, I even got the thought in my head of converting one of my 
client's sites (that's hosted on a real shit PHP-only webhost) to my linode 
server, and just making their server proxy to mine (via PHP if I have to). I 
don't think I actually will, but it's a tempting thought (after all, I have 
gotten him to agree, at least in principle, to switching to shared host that 
allows native-compiled CGI). But I guess I'm rambling now. And YMMV, FWIW, 
Etc, OMGWTFBBQ...