Christian Flickinger talks about setting your Facebook status via the API:

Welll, it appears that one month after Facebook asked me, and others, to remove my little cURL ‘hack’ for updating your Facebook Status, Facebook has finally implemented a users.setStatus() method in their API.

Interesting.

According to Nate, the Ruby on Rails site is (still) powered by PHP.

…but then, so is this site. ;)

Update: Adrian is quick to point out that the Django site is built on Django. Also, I believe the phrase is “Eat one’s own dog food.” But I think I like the Nate-ized version better. Heh.

Lots of people are talking about the latest Django vs. Ruby on Rails vs. Symfony benchmarks. It’s the two sentence summary that seems to be getting the most attention:

Summary

Rails performed much better than Symfony. And Django performed much better than Rails.

More at the Django Weblog and from Ian Holsman. You can also check out some other benchmarks.

Quoth Matt Palmer:

…I have commenced an incremental rewrite of an in-house business management application from crazy-PHP (a common — some may say overwhelmingly so — dialect of the language noted for it’s complete lack of any sort of good software development practices, such as the creation and use of functions (!))…

Heh! I’ve seen a lot of web apps written in crazy-PHP before… in fact, I’ve written some myself.

Ian Bicking says that orthogonality is pretentious. If I understand correctly, he means that well designed languages/systems (i.e. ones that are orthogonal) are less desireable for beginning programmers and “mediocre experienced programmers.” Therefore, presumably, less people are apt to use them.

So, that’s why PHP is so popular. And it’s entirely deserved. And Basic before it — another language that seems so painful because of the lack of orthogonality, but that is both its curse and greatest feature.

Thus, while it’s “bad design” for PHP to have a million functions that possibly overlap, it’s “good” in the sense that you can skim the whole list and see what you need. Makes it easy for beginners, because that’s how they think. He then goes on to compare this to Django templates.

Read the whole thing. It’s really a thoughtful piece.

Quoth Avernus:

…but I constantly find myself wishing it was more like the PHP documentation in that related functions and methods are displayed in a sidebar.

I guess I’d just like to see something like the PHP documentation for Python. Whenever I do things in PHP, their web documentation (and their user comments) prove to be an incredibly useful resource. Maybe I could write up something similar during the upcoming semester.

Good point. I think one of PHP’s strong point has always been the quality of the documentation (function reference in particular) at PHP.net. It’s easy to use and highly informative. Additionally, the annotated version of the docs (with user comments) usually has the answer to just about any question I might have.

The state of the Python documentation is good… but there are definitely opportunities for improvement.

Side note: I should add that Python, unlike PHP, does have a detailed and strongly recommended style guide in the form of PEP8. That’s a Good Thing. I’ve been working on my first “real” application, and the guide has been a huge help for me.