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by mercurial 4488 days ago
> PHP as a server-side 'clever templating' language really isn't that bad.

I only touch PHP as little as possible, and work with a legacy PHP codebase, but AFAIK, it hasn't evolved a tag to automatically HTML-escape/JSON-escape content. So, it's as good a templating language as it is a programming language: pretty terrible. I'll trade PHP for something as barebones as Python with WSGI + Jinja2 any day.
1 comments
pestaa 4488 days ago
It's not fair to compare to compare pure PHP and Jinja2. Twig is the PHP-equivalent of Jinja2, and it is an extremely well designed templating engine.
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mercurial 4488 days ago
What's not fair about it when talking about PHP as a templating language? My point is that while PHP is often lambasted as a terrible programming language, people forget that its HTML templating part is even more abysmal. If you need to have a templating system in your "advanced templating language", this really tells you everything you need to know about its capabilities.
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pestaa 4488 days ago
It's not fair because PHP came way earlier than Jinja2. Both Twig and Jinja2 could learn from its predecessors.
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deckiedan 4488 days ago
Sure. But it /is/ a fair comparison, _in this discussion_, as essentially I did say - rightly or wrongly - in the grandparent to your original post that PHP was a reasonable templating language.

The fact is that it has been surpassed by Twig, Jinja2, Cheetah, and many other templating languages - which rather proves the point of @mercurial who you're arguing with, which is that PHP is not a great language to use for templating.

And, to be honest, I agree with him, actually. I'd be very very hard pushed to start a new project in PHP. Python+Jinja2 is a much more powerful and sane way to work.

However, as a templating language, for basic blogging stuff, if you're careful, PHP can be made to work, and, on a cheap host, may end up being easier to deploy than a technichally better system.

Just as BASH can sometimes be an easier solution to some problems than python or perl or whatever else. I'd never claim that BASH was a nice language to work in, but for very simple scripting, it can end up being an easier automation system than the alternatives.

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mercurial 4488 days ago
Your rebuttal would only be correct if the two following propositions were both true:

- software cannot evolve

- the notion of sanitizing input/output has magically appeared out of thin air in the last 15 years (I'm pretty sure that Perl Mason could do that when it first came out, around the same time PHP did)

Since clearly neither is, attributing the current state of affairs to bad technical decisions early on followed by inertia is the most logical explanation.

It's like comparing Java and C#: C# has managed to regularly introduce interesting features, while Java has stagnated for a long time. Of course it's easier when you start from scratch, but especially for simple features like escaping, which I highly doubt would require major changes in architecture, there is simply no excuse.

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