Ask HN: Why no love for PHP? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#71

Post by breck » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:09 PM UTC

RossM wrote: post #21

ErrantX wrote: post #2

holds hand up I use PHP. Indeed I use PHP for most of my commercial web stuff (i.e. stuff I make at work & most of my startup ideas). Mostly I'm a Python fan but for websites PHP is just 100% easier for me because I have a framework I know well (KohanaPHP) and years worth of snippets/experience to use in prototying sites. I bet I can code a simple site faster in PHP than Python. As to why PHP isnt discussed much on h…

I agree with this statement. I've reached a stage where I could code a PHP-based website much quicker that in other languages. Admittedly it's what I started programming on (and has taught me a few bad things, but certainly kept my interest in programming). I don't agree that there's nothing interesting going on though. I'd like to see some more innovative extensions (which might be because they are coded in C) but P…

God I hate phpclasses.org

The code is great, but the site is awful, just awful. Mirrors? What is this 1999? How much bandwidth can downloading ZIPPED php scripts use?

Oh yeah, and there's registration required and big, ugly, flashing banner ads.

If someone knows of a site with the same contents, please, please let me know :)

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#72

Post by octane » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:10 PM UTC

PHP sucks, that much is clear to anyone who's ever used Python or Ruby or whatever. But...

1. It's on every server.

2. It works consistently.

3. There's a lot of it already written.

4. It's easy to find people who know it.

5. Who will work for reasonable pay.

#4 and #5 are usually overlooked by people for various reasons which I won't get into here.

You really have to go back to the days of Perl SSI, cgi-bin scripts, and stdout shell scripts to really understand why PHP became popular in the first place. The whole inline code paradigm grew directly out of Apache SSI and how much it sucked.

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#73

Post by Kaizyn » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:11 PM UTC

weavejester wrote: post #64

unexpected wrote: post #27

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…

It's not just the experience. Languages like Ruby and Lisp tend to be a lot more concise and have more functionality than PHP, so it's more like comparing a blunt knife to a razor sharp one. You can still cut with a blunt knife, but it takes longer and is harder work.

You're kidding right? You're claiming that Lisp has more 'functionality' than PHP. By functionality, do you mean standard library? Or do you mean core language?

Elegance != more functionality.

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#74

Post by breck » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:11 PM UTC

jcapote wrote: post #46

If you can develop as quickly in PHP as you can with RoR, then you are not using RoR to it's full potential.

I strongly disagree.

Maybe for a few classes of web apps, but if you know the LAMP stack well, you can create any type of web app you want in a flash.

RoR locks you down to building conventional CRUD sites.

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#75

Post by breck » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:13 PM UTC

JeremyChase wrote: post #10

I have often thought the same thing as PHP is a fantastic web development language, and it is very well developed. The documentation is very good, and as you mentioned there are useful code examples right in the documentation. The learning curve for PHP is very low, and there is library support for pretty much anything you want to do. Oh, and it is dead simple to deploy. I think RoR is one large reason why PHP is loo…

Why do you need a framework? LAMP is a framework.

With a simple ORM class and a class for handling forms and inputs, PHP gives you wings.

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#76

Post by coglethorpe » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:14 PM UTC

zacharydanger wrote: post #65

coglethorpe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to be your unintentional hammer. Dane Cook is a comedian who hit it BIG, in part, due to MySpace. He's been in a couple of movies, including "Employee of the Month." He's got millions of fans, but also a sizeable group of haters, inlcuding many of his fellow comedians. He's just another in a series of people or items that hit it big, leaving many of us wondering why.

Could it be that he's hated because he steals material?

Well, I didn't want to get into the details here, but yes, that's part of it. :-) He's also been criticized for not actually telling jokes when it is his material, being/attracting the worst sort of humanity, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#77

Post by Kaizyn » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:16 PM UTC

The truth is that this is Hacker News. No matter how appropriate PHP may be as a tool for many web programming jobs, no one wants to admit to their cool 'Hacker' friends that they use it. Just like you won't hear many people talk about how they're using ASP.Net or C# for their startups. It's not that these are in some way inferior or bad; it's just that you don't get any hacker cred for using or talking about them.

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#78

Post by KirinDave » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:19 PM UTC

Kaizyn wrote: post #73

weavejester wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the experience. Languages like Ruby and Lisp tend to be a lot more concise and have more functionality than PHP, so it's more like comparing a blunt knife to a razor sharp one. You can still cut with a blunt knife, but it takes longer and is harder work.

You're kidding right? You're claiming that Lisp has more 'functionality' than PHP. By functionality, do you mean standard library? Or do you mean core language? Elegance != more functionality.

Usually people talk about Lisp's superior expressiveness. The ability to "draw down" (or up) a language to the concepts you're working with directly is a powerful thing, and very few languages do that as well as lisp.

Maybe that's what he meant? "Functionality" of a language is kind of a vague term.

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#79

Post by zackattack » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:21 PM UTC

mdasen wrote: post #34

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…

This is embarrassing, but I had no idea that 0 == "string1" would return true. I had to write a test script to verify it.

Re: Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

#80

Post by zackattack » Wed, May 06, 2009, 6:22 PM UTC

zacharydanger wrote: post #65

coglethorpe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to be your unintentional hammer. Dane Cook is a comedian who hit it BIG, in part, due to MySpace. He's been in a couple of movies, including "Employee of the Month." He's got millions of fans, but also a sizeable group of haters, inlcuding many of his fellow comedians. He's just another in a series of people or items that hit it big, leaving many of us wondering why.

Could it be that he's hated because he steals material?

A worse insult would be calling it the 'Carlos Mencia of frameworks'.