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Bye bye geocities!


Adam

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il have you know the master of devlopment in training(me) developed his first site on geocites

 

 

 

I would venture to say that most websites on geocities were their owners' first websites.

Good grief, some of you are young.

 

 

I don't think 17 is that young....  Well, not when it comes to PHP :).

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il have you know the master of devlopment in training(me) developed his first site on geocites

 

 

 

I would venture to say that most websites on geocities were their owners' first websites.

Good grief, some of you are young.

 

I remember when I was 15 and thinking how awesome I was that I knew PHP. That I must be like a near genius or something. Then I went online and realized it wasn't as rare as I thought XD

 

 

I don't think 17 is that young....  Well, not when it comes to PHP :).

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I remember when I was 15 and thinking how awesome I was that I knew PHP. That I must be like a near genius or something. Then I went online and realized it wasn't as rare as I thought XD

 

I wouldn't discredit yourself. Really it is something that is not common. Most people who run websites can't code, some people say they know PHP, but they dont. They think bcuase they change a variable in a pre-made PHP script their automatically a programmer. I would venture to say most webmasters are using opensource scripts or paid scripts. Really the fact their running a website is only becuase of genius of some other person.  :D

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I would imagine to remember the full effect of geocities, we would have to be like 24 lol.

Good guess..  Well maybe a little older, I'm sure I missed a year or so of the Geocities excitement (I'm 23).  I was 12 in '98 and I believe I was maybe 10 or 11 when my dad set me up with my first hotmail account.  The rest is history.  I couldn't tell you how I found out about Geocities but I remember "hotbot"ing for how to create websites for awhile.  At this time I had no clue what HTML was...even when I found Geocities.  Everything was pretty much forms, nothing nearly as fancy as the myspace themes that are setup today.  Yeah, times have changed.

 

It wasn't long until I ran across another version of Geocities called Homestead.  That made use of a "Preview" technology.  Something that could be compared to clicking Design view in Dreamweaver after you've been in Code View.  There were still plenty of forms to fill out though.  But it was FREE.. just like Geocities.  and Angelfire and Tripod (Lycos)

 

When it's all said and done though, if I had never found those websites, I wouldn't know what I know today.  But it's hard to go back to using things like that once you get spoiled with a domain name and find out that it's really not that expensive (the space too).  Especially when you finally learn how to maintain it and what it is that you're maintaining.

 

RIP GeoCities

 

 

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I mean, did they even have a decent mainstream serverside language?

 

I'm glad I'm this young

 

Yeah its called Perl.  :smoker:

perl-powered.png

 

If Perl was decent, why'd they bother to make PHP?

 

If Python is good why did they make Ruby? Or if PHP is good why did they make ASP.NET or Coldfusion?

Why has Microsoft made Silverlight when there Adobe flash? The answers are purely subjective.

 

My opinion is that Perl is extremely developer unfriendly for making websites.

 

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i still haven't figured out the benefits of using pearl over php in php current state

It is PERL, not pearl! (Practical Extraction Report Language)

There are no beneifts unless you state what you are using it for! It's like saying to get from A to B what are the benefits of a Ferrari over a Ford. Well there are none, however if you ask the same question stating you are on a race track then there is a definitive answer.

 

For dynamic websites, PHP has to be the preferred choice (as this is a php forum few will disagree). However for server scripts performing operations such as database/filesystem backup, working with extremely large amounts of data in files, ftping to remote storage then I look to PERL. Not 100% sure but I think it performs faster and have never seen any memory allocation warnings when working with massive amounts of data like in php.

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when working with RADIUS servers, i was told to create account disabling interface, so i tapped into the radius server and then let the interface change the variable i added to the account record.

 

Radius uses a PERL engine, i had to tweak it slightly to look past accounts with a 1 for disabled.

 

i used a bit of perl at UNI i noticed it was more closer syntactically to C, i can imagine its faster yes. But how much ???

 

i can imagine it is probably very pluginable like ADA

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Guys remember back in the day, everyone's site has cgi-bin in their urls if their site was dynamic. lol

That would of been Perl I think. Then after 2000's PHP 4 hit the scenes and became mainstream. That was probably the death of Perl being used for developing web applications.  But perl still has uses, also languages like Ptyhon, I'm pretty sure some "sensitive" sites are using this languages, maby like Paypal.

 

I also remember back then Geocities didn't allow you to upload PHP files, I think thats why Geocities died , becuase on other hosts you can upload PHP files. Who  would would want to use a host and you can't upload some php files? Also they had a 4MB bandwidth limit per hour!  :facewall:

 

 

 

[...]PHP has to be the preferred choice [For dynamic websites]. [Perl is great for ]operations such as database/filesystem backup, working with extremely large amounts of data in files, ftping to remote storage [...] never seen any memory allocation warnings when working with massive amounts of data like in php.

 

I would say right on the money, Perl is definitely great for that.  On my dedicated server I use Perl scripts to do tasks like that. I am actually running Squid Cache on my server and I had to write a perl script that modifies how Squid handles the naming the file cached files. I used Perl, becuase its faster. It can handle hundreds of connections a second with boging th server down. If I used PHP, it would of probably killed the ram.

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I can't speak as to the performance of Perl vs PHP, but assuming that Perl is faster because it's syntax is closer to C makes no sense at all.  C is compiled to byte code; PHP and Perl and both interpreted.  Unless closeness to C in syntax directly correlates with parsing speed (and it doesn't) that would offer no advantage.

 

 

As for the memory allocation errors, that's not PHP's fault.  That's your fault for not setting the memory limit higher.

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As for the memory allocation errors, that's not PHP's fault.  That's your fault for not setting the memory limit higher.

Agreed, but how do you know the amount of memory required for a task? I would also agree that performance has nothing to do with syntax, but still it seems to perform much better at system tasks. Maybe the size of PHP's library and the number of compiled extensions is much larger than PERL reducing parse time. I'm only guessing here now.

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Parsing is parsing.  You can only tokenize something so fast, just as you can only read a page in a book so fast.  But, PHP might read faster than Perl, or the opposite way around.  In reality, parse time is probably more important than execution time since parse time is often longer than execution time in both languages.

 

 

as for the memory allocation, you can always set a limit of like 32GB or something retardedly high.

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What makes perl slow when using it for a website is it has to be loaded threw CGI with apache which is a huge bottleneck.

 

Not if you use mod_perl.

 

Perl continues to be used for website development, however I think it fell out of popular favor for a couple of reasons.  First it's syntax can be hard to read, because it uses a lot of unix shell stuff.  Since Larry Wall was first and foremost a linux sysadmin/hacker type, he was catering to his audience and himself, and using things that were similar to bourne and c shell syntax which certainly made sense considering his primary audience.  Perl was intended to be a swiss army knife for the unix sysadmin, and so in that way it's very general purpose.

 

Since then, and especially with the success of CPAN, there's perl modules that allow it to do just about anything, but it isn't inherently focused on server side web programming.  PHP on the other hand, started out as a toolkit for web development and form processing.  It's primary goal was always to be a good serverside web development language, so it has features that focus on the problems web developers face. 

 

Some of PHP's best features were borrowed either in design (dynamic associative arrays) or implementation (the preg_* functions).

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so its the libraries that make it better ?

 

I don't think that there is a "best" language.  Whatever you are most productive with, is the best language.  If you're talking about PHP, I think one of the reasons for its success is that it was designed for extensibility.  PHP's core, is really small -- basically the Zend Engine, which does the parsing, and the Server Application Programming Interface which talks to whatever server PHP is running against.  Right away, when you look at that design, you can see how PHP is intrinsically built to do serverside programming, since it comes built in with the idea that it should work well with a variety of (typically) web servers.

 

PHP is also written in C, and what we think of as PHP is mostly a bunch of PHP extensions.  The PHP team realized early on that having tools and resources that made it relatively easy for C developers or interested parties to be able to make use of an existing library in PHP would provide all sorts of functionality to developers in a very short amount of time.

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I think PHP's popularity is most likely due to its easy learning curve, i.e. you can get to do something really quickly with minimal knowledge. Ironically, that is also its curse, IMO.

 

Well i disagree a bit.  I don't think PHP would have had the uptake it did, if it didn't have so much functionality.  No matter how simple a language, if people can't do what they need to, be that interface with a particular database, or dynamically create images, or what have you, they would not have used it.  When PHP started to gain traction, the leading web development languages at the time were vbscript, ColdFusion and Perl.  So basically you had 2 commercial products with limited libraries, and one language that really wasn't built for doing web development specifically.  While you could certainly do everything in those languages that PHP does, there wasn't the wide range of free extenstions, since traditionally commercial companies like Allaire and Microsoft would have satellite companies that would grow up to provide commercial addons.  People who were on a limited budget, or hobbyists and developers couldn't or didn't want to pay for tools just to do things like create graphs, so when they looked at PHP and saw that it came with the ability to do all sorts of complicated things easily and for free, the adoption rate for PHP became very rapid. 

 

When I think about these things, it all reminds me that I'm starting to sound like an old man talking about "in olden times when we just had CGI and we used C for our web pages, and we liked it!"

 

Anyways, I agree with you Daniel that PHP's surface level simplicity, which could also be thought of as, cutting out the needless complexity and focusing on productivity, certainly helped make the language popular, but I also was witness to that period of time, and PHP rode the wave of Open source and linux adoption. It wasn't all that long ago that most websites ran on Sun hardware.

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somewhat more on-topic, i'm 24 and i think i saw geocities at its apex. we had a series of personal sites from 97-99, mostly between angelfire/tripod/geocities (as someone said, the free ones), that we poured our hearts into. i remember one of the big stepping stones was getting frames (OH MY! FRAMES!) implemented, since that was the first thing we had to manually hack in and couldn't use the in-page editor for.

 

i didn't realize geocities was running past 2000.

 

i believe nadeem wins an award for the most posts thinly veiled as relevant in order to trumpet one's own horn.

 

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