Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Still acceptable to use PHP for new projects?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 23 posts

Re: Ask HN: Still acceptable to use PHP for new projects?

#11

Post by tjlytle »

Spoom wrote: post #10
tjlytle wrote: post #7

There are pros/cons to any language. If you're developing something web related, PHP is certainly worth considering (especially in your case, as you have experience with it). Just a few quick thoughts: PHP is - in most cases - very tightly coupled to the HTTP request. This can be good or bad depending on what you're building. Doing a lot of offline processing? Probably bad. Serving up web pages? Probably good. There'…

Good points. I feel I should point out that you can use PHP independent of any web server by using the command line interpreter (CLI) version. This is, for example, how we run PHP cron jobs where I work.

True. Not a strength for the language though - if that's a big part of what you do, then I'd consider something else. That said, I've built plenty of applications that used PHP on the command line or as a daemon.

Re: Ask HN: Still acceptable to use PHP for new projects?

#12

Post by tjlytle »

jfaucett wrote: post #9
stevencorona wrote: post #4

On one hand, you should use the tool that you know best. On the other hand, putting the language itself aside, dev-tools and existing libraries are few-and-far in between (and they usually suck). And when I say libraries, I don't mean snippets on the internet.. true libraries with tests, etc. Besides the frameworks and a handful of active packages on PEAR- good luck. There is a reason why Ruby and Node have awesome t…

I think your statements about lack of libraries for PHP would have been correct about 4 years ago - maybe even as late as 2010 (pre namespacing in PHP). But as of date, I don't think they hold up. The Bundle concept implemented by Symfony2 - and being adopted by others, has really caused a boom in solid high end libraries that can easily be integrated with any project. ( check out: http://knpbundles.com/ )

Composer as well (http://getcomposer.org/) - no one true way with PHP, but that doesn't mean there can't be a few good ways.

Re: Ask HN: Still acceptable to use PHP for new projects?

#13

Post by rsanchez1 »

I really don't think this is the kind of question to ask on HN, which hinges on the latest fads, the latest of them being Ruby on Rails and possibly Node.js. Use PHP if it's most convenient for you. Heck, I would say you should even use Perl if it's most convenient for you.

Re: Ask HN: Still acceptable to use PHP for new projects?

#14

Post by allardschip »

If you enjoy programming in it, mostly doing http work and you think you can find talented , smart php developers in your area, go for it.

If your ideas need thing like massive concurrency or lots of number crunching, you may want to look at some other options as well.

Re: Ask HN: Still acceptable to use PHP for new projects?

#16

Post by Lazare »

Use whatever language/framework is best for you. That could well be PHP, and if you only know PHP well, it probably is.

Yes, PHP is objectively a bad language. The PHP ecosystem is poor, development is stagnant, the syntax is ugly. Whatever the future of the web may be, it's certainly not PHP.

But...you know PHP. Presumably you know what it's good at (and what it's not so good at). You also know your project. Think you could code it faster and easier in PHP than anything else? Yes? Awesome, knock yourself out. As a bonus, a ton of other developers also know PHP, so you'll probably be able to hire coders easily.

(On the other hand, as a coder, I like to keep my skills current, and that means learning new technologies from time to time. Yes, PHP is currently dominant, despite what you may hear on HN, but it's not the future. I jumped from the PHP ship a long time ago, and I have never regretted it for a split second. Are you going to learn a new tech stack eventually? If so, why not now? If not, then when?)

Re: Ask HN: Still acceptable to use PHP for new projects?

#18

Post by yousuffauzan »

rsanchez1 wrote: post #13

I really don't think this is the kind of question to ask on HN, which hinges on the latest fads, the latest of them being Ruby on Rails and possibly Node.js. Use PHP if it's most convenient for you. Heck, I would say you should even use Perl if it's most convenient for you.

> latest fads, the latest of them being Ruby on Rails

Really?

Re: Ask HN: Still acceptable to use PHP for new projects?

#19

Post by Chrix »

I'm a Grails developer but when friends asked me to develop their web site for an association, I had to learn PHP. Why? Economic reasons! Web hosting pricing are divided by three (3$ vs 9$) between PHP and Grails/JVM website hosting. Before that, I'd prejudices on PHP like it's ugly, inelegant. And it can be that. PHP is like C language: you can do bad code, ugly implementation if you aren't rigorous.

And it's your project is a "standard" website (i.e. only display page and make some SQL queries), PHP is good enough. No need to use a canon for killing a fly.

Post reply on HN