Re: [tlug] ruby and python in Japan

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@??>]

Brett Robson writes:

 > I haven't had to deal with Japanese in PHP yet, but my understanding is 
 > that PHP doesn't support Unicode and apparently Python does. Does anyone 
 > have experience with Japanese programming in PHP or Python?

I encourage you to go with Python ;-) but PHP should support Unicode,
at the very least UTF-8, since it supports multibyte strings.

Since I don't use PHP I can't really comment.  I can make a
meta-comment ("praising with faint damns") that most of the anti-PHP
comments I've seen from people I respect are of the form "You should
use Python [etc] instead of PHP because PHP doesn't ...".  But the
stuff that goes in the ellipsis is of the same genus as when the same
folks deprecated MySQL: "You should use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL
because MySQL doesn't ...".

You have to wonder "Does anybody in the real world really need ...?"
Or, more precisely, you should wonder, "Do *I*?"

I recommend Python because I think "..." is the RightThing[tm].  But
in practice, Real Programmers don't seem to much miss it, at least not
before they change jobs. :-)  And no, it's no accident that I didn't
fill in the "...", because I know it's there but I can't remember what
it is.<wink>