NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

Leam Hall wrote:
> Gang, I'll confess that I'm happy to support Java as it provides lots of 
> reasons to upgrade hardware and buy newer/faster machines. However, from 
> a systems engineering standpoint, I'm baffled by the recurring 
> inefficiency of hundreds of corporate programmers...
> 
> What does Java provide that PHP can't do faster and with lighter 
> resource usage?

Don't know in detail, but my guess is that PHP is thought of about to be a 
pure web only scripting language where as Java is more for desktop 
applications or the like. In typical use you need a web server for PHP, for 
Java you don't. That said, I am well aware that you can use PHP to write 
non-web and even desktop applications.
One other reason could be that Java is used to torture CS students, while PHP 
is poopooed as something script kiddies use. Same question can be asked about 
ASP.NET, that in no way does anything better than PHP, especially not performance.

I attended a Java course at university and eventually dropped out and changed 
majors. I did ANSI C before and that was already more painful than necessary. 
Java topped that by a mile. I have no idea why developers pick Java. I find it 
kludgey and the development tools stink, but apparently it is good enough to 
bring us awesome software like OpenOffice. For years I always found that I 
hate programming and programming hates me...until I came across PHP. It just 
makes sense (OK, except for some of the date functions that were written half 
by Americans and half by Europeans using their date format respectively).

Any other reasons? Java is Sun and PHP is, hmmmm, Zend? Na, there are plenty 
others. Java is Eclipse and PHP is, hmmmmm, can think of three or four great 
IDEs from freebie (Waterproof) to we charge you for every dot release 
(NuSphere). Nobody gets fired for using Java or .NET....unless you are hired 
to do PHP I could see that it is a tough sell to the mindless preventors of IT 
services.



David