Re: Wiki written in Ada?

[Marius Amado-Alves <marius@amado-alves.info>]

>> Me thinks the speed and robustness of a compiled language would be
>> ideal for any large scale web application. Not an interpreted  
>> language
>> like PHP.

> I agree

I also agree so far

> - but it isn't beyond my comprehension! PHP is quick to write,
> fairly easy to understand and has intuitive interfaces to the front  
> and
> back ends.

- now this is exactly the opposed of my view.

> I'd say that it really was the nature of PHP that brought
> about the iea of a wiki in the first place.

Not at all in my view. Not for Casbah [1]. And I'd be surprised if  
Ward's Wiki [2], arguably the first Wiki ever, was written in PHP or  
the like (I think it was in C).

> A testimony to the ease of writing in PHP is the large number of
> separate wiki engines that have been written in it (relative to the
> smaller number in things like C and Python).

These numbers may be true, but to me they do not testify to the  
easiness of PHP. Some years ago (when PHP was in version 3 IIRC) I  
considered using it for web systems, since yes it seemed everybody  
was do it. I found the documentation, and the snippets I saw, very  
hardly understandable. So much for easiness. I used Ada. (Actually I  
wanted to use MAWL, but I was not able to install the compiler.)

So it seems views vary greatly. Or one of us is living in another  
world :-)

[1] BTW don't look at my Casbah expecting excellent Ada code. It was  
one of the first works in Ada by a guy coming from C.

[2] The Portland Patterns Repository at c2.com; incidentally, it  
includes pages on Wiki History, and lists Wiki systems by language-- 
alphabetically, so guess which is the first entry :-)