Erek Dyskant writes "Yahoo has decided to switch from a proprietary system written in C/C++ to PHP for their backend scripting. Here's the notes from a presentation by a Yahoo engineer at PHP Con 2002."
I love PHP anyway. Its a great language, and the only reason I am really still doing any Perl programming, is simply due to the fact GT's products are so good, and I love contributing Plugins/Globals/help to people who need them. There is still a very large market out there for Perl, but I think Yahoo are definatly heading in the right direction with using PHP
Yahoo made a decision based on what's best for them. Only they can decide what is right for them.
I don't hate PHP, but I do get very annoyed with it sometimes daily. I've had to use it practically exclusivly at work for the past year and a half. I don't mind it, but I don't love it... it still feels like a toy language to me a lot of times.
It has it's place and is useful. Hell, my company does, on average I'd say, $750,000 a day via the web site, and the site is 99.99% PHP code (of course, we all are annoyed as hell with the codebase because of what we inherited and what's been done to it, but that's programmer fault), so it can support very big sites.
Re: [Mark Badolato] Yahoo Moving to PHPIn reply to
I was about to make the same, very good point, Mark. Yahoo! decided on whats best for them. It looks like they did some good background work before comitting to a paticular language, and all the best to them I say. The only thing that surprised me about the choice of PHP was that I personally didn't know or feel that php was that "mature" a language, and therefore, I didn't know how stable it was. I still hear of a few PHP security exploits now and again, which still makes me wonder how ready it is for a production environment.
I just skimmed the presentation, but it appeared that one of the major reasons for the choice was speed of development and ease of rapid prototyping. In my limited experience with PHP/Perl/etc. that seems like a fair line of reasoning. Other languages may more mature/robust, but if you need to whip out a relatively simple, straightforward new DB/CMS/SQL application, PHP makes the process quick and painless. I imagine they might stick with other platforms for more sophisticated/sensitive/legacy needs (e.g. Yahoo Finance). Fractured Atlas :: Liberate the Artist Services: Healthcare, Fiscal Sponsorship, Marketing, Education, The Emerging Artists Fund
Rapid development can be supported by other applications, including Cold Fusion and ASP.NET.
And I'd think that Yahoo! did their research enough to identify an application that would best suite their needs. ======================================== Buh Bye!