[derefr]

That is a total mischaracterization of what it means for a language or DSL to be "powerful." When you are writing not-X to assist X in doing Foo, that doesn't mean X is powerful-enough to let you do Foo; that means that X isn't powerful-enough to let you do Foo without breaking out of X.

To put it another way: the fact that you can greenspun Lisp in C doesn't mean C has all the power of Lisp. It means that Lisp has all the power of Lisp. Every even-mildly-useful language is Turing-complete; so, in order to be able to give a ranking to languages at all, we have to restrict our discussion of a language's merits to its merits if you aren't just using it as a glorified Turing machine for implementing a different language.

Without writing custom PHP, Drupal is less powerful than PHP. That's perfectly okay.

[AdrianRossouw]

It's called the inner-platform effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

DSL's are generally not turing complete. When they are, they tend to look more like lisp.

[TylerE]

I don't think so, since Drupal does many things that vanilla PHP is actually quite poor at - like getting away from the whole "each URL is a seperate file" thing.

Also, Drupal is NOT a DSL, even in the way, say, Rails is.

[AdrianRossouw]

that has nothing to do with drupal or php.

drupal uses an apache config hack to rewrite the urls.

[AdrianRossouw]

i'm going to respond to the sibling in here because I don't want it to get more nested. I also suspect it might be downvoted. (as some of your others have been)

I'm _intimately_ familiar with the feature. That feature came in with Drupal 4.2.0 back in december of 2001, which was the second Drupal release I deployed a site on. It was also the first Drupal release to include any of my own code.

https://drupal.org/drupal-4.2.0

Back in the day the only way to get anything committed was to roll a patch and commit it to a special cvs repository, manually numbering it. then you had to mail the dev list with the name of the patch so you could discuss it, and then if it still applied dries committed it.

I tried finding the mails on gmane, but the repo itself and the emails seem to cut out before.

So while q?= was considered an acceptable fallback, and it was still cleaner than what we had before ... this feature has always explicitly been about supporting url rewrites.

This is me : https://drupal.org/user/1337

When I built bryght.com, my first startup in 2004, trying to be the wordpress.com of drupal, before wordpress.com was a thing : I had to make sure this worked with it.

When I wrote Aegir, a distributed turn-key automated hosting platform for Drupal sites, I had to write the logic that made sure this stuff worked. I did that for apache, and with some help from omega8.cc, nginx.

Please don't try to act like you're an expert on what 'design patterns' we were implementing when we did that, because I'm telling your straight out now, that wasn't why we did it.

I spent 9+ years of my life building major components of the system, and I'm still really proud of all of it. Millions of people all over the world run the software I helped build.

[TylerE]

No it doesn't.

For one, Apache isn't even what I'd recommend to use for serving Drupal - at my last job we were serving 50M reqs/monthly via nginx and it worked very well.

Drupal implements the front controller pattern...it has nothing to do with URL rewriting.

It is true that if you want "pretty" URLs on Apache you need to use rewrites, but I think it is a cheap shot to characterize using a core feature as it was intended as a "hack".

[TylerE]

I don't think so.

The original assertion was that Z was more powerful than X, and I merely stated that that is false because X is really the superset X+Z, whereas if you are using JUST Z you don't get X.

We're not talking about 2 different languages here.