Classic ASP Vs PHP.. Which is Best?
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If you've searched the internet for this subject then you'll no doubt realise that there's been a debate raging about this ever since they both first appeared around 1995/6. Everybody has a different opinion, but here's the real reason why one is better than the other..
Firstly, let's take a brief look at PHP. It grew out of a Perl/C application, and if you look at any examples of Perl or C code you can immediatly see similarities to PHP. Now the thing is, both Perl and C were clearly developed by sadistic illogical jokers who are now quite probably in some lunatic asylum laughing uncontrolably at how their sorry excuse for a programming language has just about taken the world over. Anybody who is fluent in Perl is clearly a mixed-up anti-social geek with a serious wiring problem in the upstairs department.
So if you accept that as a fact, then it follows that PHP is actually nothing more than a collection of apparently random curly brackets, semi-colons, and dollar signs, thrown together by said geek in such a way that anybody with a grain of common sense cannot understand any of it. Worse yet, some poor souls have at some stage written the interpreter for PHP! These inhuman freaks must each now be a sort of shivering vegetable, if they weren't already.
Classic ASP on the other hand is actually readable, and actually makes sense when you read it. It is without doubt, as programming languages go, infinately superior to PHP. So why hasn't it taken over the world like PHP has? I'll tell you why, it's because it was developed by a different kind of moron, one that actually wanted to rule the world and get rich doing it. And that's what this issue is all about, there's the thing right there.. Money!
PHP was open source so anybody and everybody could develop components for it and plug it right in to the code. It ran on Linux, which was also free, so you ended up with a highly functional programming language for web servers which was free to use and had a worldwide community of developers making it even more functional as time went by.
ASP on the other hand was owned by Microsoft and only developed by Microsoft who made you pay a fortune for their overdeveloped and overpriced server software first before you could be granted the privelidge of using it.
So the only reason PHP is more popular and more widespread than ASP is because Microsoft got it wrong, again, and put their profits before any sort of medium term view on how the web server market was going to pan out.
They still haven't learned. They could have knocked out some free Windows Web Server software and released the ASP code and said "There you go fellas, knock yourselves out", but no, what do they do instead? They release ASP.NET. ASP bloody NET! ASP.NET is a typical Microsoft production; overdeveloped, unstable, wildly over-complicated piece of software which once again needs excessive resources in terms of manpower and finance to deploy successfully.
People say ASP.NET is more scaleable than PHP and cite the NHS website and MySpace as examples, but I know Wikipedia and Flickr use PHP so that really doesn't stand up. What I think does stand up, and I'd be willing to bet on it, The NHS and MySpace have put more time, effort, and cash into developing their sites, page for page, than Flickr and Wikipedia have put into theirs, simply because they're using ASP bloody NET!
So to conclude, there is a VHS/Betamax analogy here. PHP wins because it had, and still has, a vastly better marketing proposition (i.e. it's free), not because it's a better language, because it isn't.
This article was written by Paul Clarke and is copyright Web Equip Ltd. If you want to use it please contact us. Please don't run the risk of using it without contacting us.
