Lighting a match.
25 July 2007For those who do not know, I still hang out on IRC (internet relay chat).
Up until the server smashed itself to hell, I even had my own private server for close friends and such. But, that’s not strictly relevant to the topic that’s going to be discussed today. =)
I hang out on the Freenode Network, in a channel named #modus. It’s populated by some very talented people, who are reasonably well spoken, and very clued. These are people who don’t know everything, do not pretend to, and still find time to wonder at the discovery of new things. I have enjoyed their company since I started hanging in there, a few years ago.
Now, the nice thing about #modus is, if you have a clue, and you understand that debate about anything is healthy as long as you don’t take it personally, you will get along just fine. To illustrate this: I think Chris62vw has some strange views on a couple of issues, and we often disagree on alot of topics. But, if there is one thing I have the utmost respect for, its someone who can articulate and stand by their views, without resorting to sheep mentality, or weasel words. Anyone who has the balls to stick to their guns (And, lets face it, Chris is well armed. Literally.), without resorting to ad hominem attacks on the INTERTUBES is a rare sight indeed.
There are some talented folks in #modus, perl hackers, debian developers, machinima directors…it’s a fairly small group of people, who have varied interests, but one commonality: they all have a clue. All of them. Not one of them is willfully ignorant. They all have their little quirks, as I do. But none of that ever seems to get in the way of discussions ranging from Doom’s new GPX2, to “Little Miss Sunshine”, or what’s going on in Washington DC.
Now, the point of my discussion today: PHP Sucks. I know that it sucks. I know that its a pig. I know that it has really stupid inconsistencies in its deign, I know its a deeply flawed thing. I know, kinda weird coming from a blog published with WordPress, isint it?
But, php has one thing going for it: it’s everywhere. PHP is kind of like the windows of the scripting world. Its screwed up, everyone knows its screwed up, and people use it despite the flaws inherent in its design, implementation, and use. It jives fairly easily with apache and MySQL with a minimum of fuss. It’s widely adopted. It’s used in everything from Content Management Systems, to blog packages like the one you are reading this on.
In #modus, there is often discussion of perl, as there are people devoted to it. Some of these discussions evolve into php/perl comparisons. I myself, have always admired perl, because by and large, the language is well thought out, and it tends to do what it says it does. It does not try to be everything for everyone, and in doing so, is capable of doing quite a bit more than you would expect. In other words: the language and the culture behind it are, for the most part very unpretentious. And it’s that very attitude that has made perl the robust do-almost anything language that it is.
I use PHP because, I really have no desire to dick around with things. I like easy to deploy. I like availability. I like the the fact that I can throw a drupal or wordpress install up in about 15 minutes, and have a ready to use framework with which to build a site. That’s not to say I do not use perl. Over at stats.digitalarcadia.com, the AWStats package, which gathers all the useful little bits of data from my webserver logs, uses perl. Webmin, which I use on the backend to administrate things here, uses perl extensively.
Perl, of course, does a wonderful job at collecting and generating stats for me. Would I use a php solution for the same job? Possibly. But, its hard to beat perl when it comes to jobs like these.
Perl, of course, does a wonderful job at helping me manage alot stuff on the backend I would rather not have to crack open a terminal to do. Would I use a php solution for the same job? No Freakin Way. Why? Because it’s one thing to give control of a blog to PHP. It’s quite another to put it in charge of making changes to the core of an operating system. There is no way in hell I would let PHP have write access to an fstab file. Or a passwd file. Sorry, next teller please.
So, back to #modus. Chris and I have had discussions in the past about php, and the same things I have discussed here, came up there. And I specifically remember saying very matter of factly, that if perl had some solutions for these things, I would probably use them. AWStats and Webmin are good examples of nicely developed, tight and trouble free packages with perl dependencies. They work. Out of the box, with a minimum of fuss. And, I’ll go on to say: they are elegant, well planned and designed, and are well supported.
And, the whole thing has been sticking in my mind awhile. And has recently been pounding my brain a bit, because of some research I am doing. I have been looking for a good, modular and extensible auction package. Drupal has some options, and there are non free PHP solutions, and alot of half assed php scripts, but…this is an area I would have expected perl to shine. Especially as the choices in the PHP camp…well, they suck.
LAMP based (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) Auction pickings are slim to begin with. You can either expect to pay big money for a marginal product, or find nearly nothing with any kind of feature set. Looking for a decent turnkey framework on sourceforge on this topic is depressing. But again, I have to ask: why hasn’t the perl camp stepped up to the plate on this? This is something that should be right up perl’s alley. I firmly believe, perl could do this job with its eyes closed. I also believe it wouldnt be a bloated piece of crapware, as so many php packages are rapidly becoming.
I would love to have access to a good, free, open source auction package that was based on perl. I dont think php has the scalability, or the security for such a task. And, if anyone takes a good long look out there, you can see there’s a market for it. There’s a need for it. And there is interest.
And yet, this is the one eCommerce category that is woefully under served. And I just want to know why?
So, there you have it. I am sure this might amount to lighting a match in a room with a gas leak. But, oh well. I have a legitimate question here, and the google, she says nothing!
on July 25th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
I’ve also been wondering why there aren’t more solutions for auction systems. I had even gone so far as to plan one out, but knowing my propensity for designing software but never implementing it, the notes are probably lost.
That being said, now that I’ve got WebGUI, I could probably build a pretty decent one in a few weeks, should my schedule ever die down.
I think the main reason it’s under-serviced is because of the immensity of eBay. Far easier to just link to an eBay auction than host one yourself. In fact it’s probably easier to build something that uses eBay’s API to pull information. eBay is God in the auction world. Every other attempt to build a clone has failed (uBid?) and other attempts are subtlely different (amazon auctions).
And “Little Miss Sunshine” is seriously a powerful story. Powerful stories still give me goosebumps. Movies that can actually make me REACT, suspend my disbelief enough that I make instinctive emotional responses, are so rare that they need to be cherished.