121–130 of 150 posts
PHP was a hack conceived long ago, in a time where there were no complex (as in "more than one page") web applications and little to no demand for them. It has the readability of Perl and the structural elegance of 70's BASIC. Need I say more?
PHP doesn't get mentioned, because it isn't interesting. I've done a lot of PHP work, and still do. But there's not a lot of NEW going on in the PHP world. Their latest earth shattering move is namespaces. The only interesting thing about PHP's namespace support is how awful it is. Almost all of the cool concurrency, natural language, efficiency, functional programming, and what-have-you research and development, is…
There was an article on slashdot yesterday about PHP6. Here's one from IBM:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-...
Not a whole lot of new, but something. I think PHP gets ignored sometimes because it is an older language, not the new and trendy thing.
People who are really good at their jobs obsess about their tools- artists obsess over their paint, carpenters obsess over their power tools, cooks obsess over their knives. PHP is like buying a chef's knife at Wal-Mart. You can create a 5 star dish with it, it cuts perfectly fine, but it doesn't inspire the same passion that a Shun knife does. Most restaurants in fact, don't use fancy-knives, they use just regular k…
>>> artists obsess over their paint Actually a lot of top artists don't. Not only because paint isn't their medium but because they don't do the work themselves. They have the ideas and then they employ minions to do the actually work of making the piece. Personally I think that makes them less than an artist, but they're the ones selling work for 100s of thousands of £s F'real.
I was thinking of artist in the traditional sense- some renaissance painter mixing pigments and material to come up with the perfect shade of red, for example.
There are lots of reasons. * PHP attracts idiots. Partly that's because you don't need to know anything to make simple PHP. So, in the large pool of PHP programmers, there are a ton of idiots. And those idiots produce a lot of verbose code that gets used because it does something. Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. all put up a larger barrier because they don't just come with a session handler or whatnot built in. And that wee…
PHP has terrible unicode support. Almost uniformly every app that starts out using the default PHP function set ends up failing horribly when data with non-european (or even just non-ascii) characters end up in it. There are a whole lot of kludge workarounds, but they're basically an admission of defeat rather than a real statement of support.
Coming from a Java background into a startup that was built using PHP, it's been my experience that PHP is difficult to scale. This is for two reasons: 1) PHP isn't long-lived. Every time a request comes in Apache launches the PHP processor/interpreter and runs through the entire script. This means you don't get a heap that you can use to cache things[0], you don't get the benefit of JIT compilation, and you don't ge…
PHP doesn't scale? Facebook has > 200 million users. It's written in PHP.
There are lots of reasons. * PHP attracts idiots. Partly that's because you don't need to know anything to make simple PHP. So, in the large pool of PHP programmers, there are a ton of idiots. And those idiots produce a lot of verbose code that gets used because it does something. Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. all put up a larger barrier because they don't just come with a session handler or whatnot built in. And that wee…
I think the first reason is probably the most significant. A lot of the other things are just warts and pet peeves, but what really got me down working with PHP professionally was the level of code I had to work with. Not only did I end up having to maintain flaming wreckages of code written by people who couldn't even properly be called amateurs, but after doing it for a couple years I found it very hard to improve…
Which is to say, most people with a clue or with much experience see all the problems with PHP and move onto something else and have no problem doing so. The remainder are those who either can't or won't and a large percentage of them are the "idiots".
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>>> artists obsess over their paint Actually a lot of top artists don't. Not only because paint isn't their medium but because they don't do the work themselves. They have the ideas and then they employ minions to do the actually work of making the piece. Personally I think that makes them less than an artist, but they're the ones selling work for 100s of thousands of £s F'real.
that's interesting to know! That also sounds like a big scam to me! I definitely want to read more about that process, if you have anything stored in your bookmarks! I was thinking of artist in the traditional sense- some renaissance painter mixing pigments and material to come up with the perfect shade of red, for example.
This is just a romantic myth. All the Renaissance painters anyone has heard of or seen in a museum employed tons of assistants.
Nearly any contemporary artist who makes any sort of money whatsoever has assistants doing most of their work. Damien Hirst has 160 employees! Murakami has dozens of employees. It even trickles down to smaller time guys like Ryan McGinnis.
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that's interesting to know! That also sounds like a big scam to me! I definitely want to read more about that process, if you have anything stored in your bookmarks! I was thinking of artist in the traditional sense- some renaissance painter mixing pigments and material to come up with the perfect shade of red, for example.
I was thinking of artist in the traditional sense- some renaissance painter mixing pigments and material to come up with the perfect shade of red, for example. This is just a romantic myth. All the Renaissance painters anyone has heard of or seen in a museum employed tons of assistants. Nearly any contemporary artist who makes any sort of money whatsoever has assistants doing most of their work. Damien Hirst has 160…
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http://osvdb.org/search?request=PHP http://osvdb.org/search?request=Python http://osvdb.org/search?request=Perl http://osvdb.org/search?request=Ruby "One of these things, is not like the others, one of these things is not the same..." No, there's nothing "mythical" about bad PHP security. At the point where there is a two order-of-magnitude difference between PHP and Python/Perl/Ruby, I stop even really caring about…
Ok.. nice way to leave logic at the door, but it's not just that PHP is more popular. It's that it's been around longer than Python and Ruby. That list goes back a decade for PHP. Anybody using PHP seriously in a production environment is also using Suhosin and PHP is secure enough at that point to just be a consideration and not a problem.
PHP doesn't get mentioned, because it isn't interesting. I've done a lot of PHP work, and still do. But there's not a lot of NEW going on in the PHP world. Their latest earth shattering move is namespaces. The only interesting thing about PHP's namespace support is how awful it is. Almost all of the cool concurrency, natural language, efficiency, functional programming, and what-have-you research and development, is…
there's not a lot of NEW going on in the PHP world There was an article on slashdot yesterday about PHP6. Here's one from IBM: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-... Not a whole lot of new, but something. I think PHP gets ignored sometimes because it is an older language, not the new and trendy thing.
For what it's worth, Python is four years older than PHP, and it still gets a good amount of attention on HN. Python just has more of the "inspiring language" atmosphere, while PHP has more of the "corporate, mundane" feel. And I'm an avid open source developer working on multiple PHP and Python projects...