News from Builder.com this morning: With my sincerest apologies to the PHP crowd, I?d like to pose a question: Can we finally bid a long-overdue farewell to the messy business of building applications by sprinkling script code among HTML? Can Web development finally move out of the dark ages and into the realm of compiled code? Is it time for scripting to finally die?

In this new article from Builder.com, the author poses the idea that, since Microsoft has their ASP.NET technology (with OOP and compiled code), they were the ones that made it okay for "web developers" to just move into the realm of "developers" with the rest of the programmers. There's even a quote that makes me wonder how much background in other scriting languages these people have: As Builder.com member jeffyjones succinctly put it, "...using ASP.NET makes you feel like a real programmer instead of a script kiddie."

I wonder how much of the higher-level PHP functionality that this author has looked into. Just because PHP doesn't allow someone to compile their code (yet) doesn't mean it's "just not there" when it comes to web languages. On the contrary, I think that PHP, because of it's ease of use and powerful structure, is much more than ASP.NET could ever be...what do you think?