It changes nothing but it is a fact. The original ancestor of this thread was put off Owncloud by the fact it was PHP and Pydia was offered as an alternative. The name suggest at least to me that it would be Python based.
Now whether the PHP should put us off is a separate question. I have probably unfair doubts about the quality of things developed in PHP based worrying about the sort of people who would choose it when they have a free choice (see fractal of bad design post). However I personally don't want to learn PHP so I would prefer something in Python, Rails or possibly even Node (I've a feeling that I'm going to need to learn Javascript one day), Java, C or C+++ so that the barrier to me tinkering/fixing is lower.
> The original ancestor of this thread was put off Owncloud by the fact it was PHP and Pydia was offered as an alternative.
No, I said I preferred Pydio over ownCloud. You added the subtext to my post.
> The name suggest at least to me that it would be Python based.
Only if you place too much emphasis on naming conventions. Names are in fact just arbitrary labels, thus not everything that begins with "py" has to be written in Python.
> Now whether the PHP should put us off is a separate question. I have probably unfair doubts about the quality of things developed in PHP based worrying about the sort of people who would choose it when they have a free choice (see fractal of bad design post).
I'm aware of the Fractal Of Bad Design blog post and you're using that to justify your conclusion that 2+2=5. Just because a language might be -in our opinion- complete garbage to develop in, it doesn't mean all code developed in that language is garbage. And you're also making the assumption that all developers choose PHP because it's easy; where as many of these projects are actually written in PHP because it makes it easier for end users to deploy.
> C or C+++ so that the barrier to me tinkering/fixing is lower.
If you think writing a web application in C or C++ (two pluses) lowers the barrier of things that can go wrong or the amount of tinkering you'd need to do, then you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Sorry, but that last part just struck me as the stupidest thing I've read in a long time.
Most computer software named pySOMETHING is Python but I didn't assume and went and looked in the repo.
I said that my feelings about code written in PHP were unfair and you are right that ease of deployment is a valid reason to develop in it. I did not say that all code developed in it or developers for it are garbage but I do treat it as a slight warning flag. The big thing is that I don't want to learn enough to be working around gotchas in the language.
Yes C or C++ aren't the obvious choice for a web framework and would probably put me off to some extent but I am sufficiently familiar with them to evaluate how clean the code is and tinker here or there if necessary. Of languages that I don't currently know well that I might be prepared to learn some more to tinker are the functional programming languages (Scala, Haskell, ML) I might be interested in anyway or JS/Node.
In terms of the stupidity of using a C/C++ based web framework Apache can probably be used as a basic web framework and I've heard about people using Postgres to do the templating not just managing the data so it isn't implausible to use C/C++.
> Most computer software named pySOMETHING is Python but I didn't assume and went and looked in the repo.
This isn't named 'pySomething', this is named 'Pysomething'. It's not camel cased like a lot of python software is.
>I said that my feelings about code written in PHP were unfair and you are right that ease of deployment is a valid reason to develop in it. I did not say that all code developed in it or developers for it are garbage but I do treat it as a slight warning flag. The big thing is that I don't want to learn enough to be working around gotchas in the language.
When you're rolling out software that's accessible to the world via the web, then all languages will have their "gotchas" which you need to work around. Even C++ (in fact especially C++ since it's prone to buffer overflows and that's a pretty common attack vector for remote code execution)
> In terms of the stupidity of using a C/C++ based web framework Apache can probably be used as a basic web framework and I've heard about people using Postgres to do the templating not just managing the data so it isn't implausible to use C/C++.
Apache is only the web server, a web framework would consist of the tools required to build dynamic web pages (including the templating you mentioned in Postgres, but not just limited to), parse the HTTP request data (which Apache does do) and connect to the db. This is where things like CGI come in to play, but that's massively slow. Other languages have their own C++ hooks that compile into Apache (perl -> mod_perl, Python -> mod_python, etc) so they can provide a webframe work while tying closely with the Apache web server, but Apache on it's own wouldn't give you enough tools to provide a web framework.
In addition to that, you don't want to offload your templating to your database because that will be slow and will cripple your site. In fact most sites are built around minimizing DB queries rather than thrashing the database. This is why templates are cached (in fact whole pages are where possible) and even db lookups are cached with tools like memcache.
So even ignoring the fact that you're missing a whole stack of essential frameworks to build modern web applications, you're also setting yourself up for building a slower and buggier site than most of the PHP sites are that's already online.
If you really want to develop sites in a C/C++-like language, then you're much better off developing in Java, Go (lang) or C#. But honestly, trying to build a pure C++ website would cause you more problems than if you developed in PHP.
I'm sure you're very adept in C++, I'm not trying to dismiss your abilities here, but I genuinely post from experience as I've developed in about a dozen different languages, build websites and manages web servers for a living. Like yourself, I've spent a lot of time in C/C++ over the years and even I wouldn't dream of building a website in either of those languages (in fact since my work as drifted more towards web and sys admins roles, I've found I rarely touch C++ these days)
Though I do also run ownCloud for automatic photo uploads from my phone