41–50 of 112 posts
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That email is confusing. "From: damien taylor" in 2003 yet signed "Walter Bagdasarian", which unusual-seeming name belongs to a guy who was convicted in 2009 of threatening Obama. Odd.
It fits, he got arrested for posting an idiot comment about Obama on the Yahoo message boards.
Threatening seems so much like thoughtcrime.
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On the other hand, think of all the jobs and employment created as a byproduct of all this "waste"! I daresay php has created wealth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_fallacy Think of all the cool stuff they could have been inventing had they not needed to look up the name of strfind(?), and whether it takes the needle or the haystack first.
There's a whole generation of programmers out there that couldn't hack their way out of a wet paper back without the help of an IDE telling them what function parameters go where.
And in C I also still can't remember if the fwrite call takes (buffer, sizeof(element), nelements, fp) or (buffer, nelements, sizeof(element), fp).
This is all about religion, the PHP church has a large number of followers and it's 'bible' contains some arguably wrong pages, so those in other churches will go out of their way to shake their heads at all the fools in the PHP church when it's clear to everyone else that their religion is broken.
Meanwhile the PHP guys will simply get the job done and take home the loot.
I can program in lots of languages but for quick & dirty stuff (and don't tell me everything you write is of world class importance) it is very well suited, if you're disciplined you can take it to considerable heights before you run out of steam.
Rasmus Lerdorf created the most popular language for building web apps. Websites that changed the world were built with this language, and most newcomers seem to choose it as well. It managed to get a substantial share of a market that companies like Microsoft or Sun put huge resources into. On top of all that, he actually remains a pretty cool and down to earth guy, as far as I can tell from reading his online stuff…
But it's not intrinsically good; every one of PHP's advantages is offered by other languages, without all the downsides. PHP's poor design and implementation has probably cost the world millions of lost man-hours; loss that could have been avoided by choosing a better-designed solution. It's certainly an accomplishment to create popular software, but this popular software is not necessarily something that should be u…
PHP was invented so that designers could add a
Hello Martin
and think it was cool that their homepage showed different names based on who you were. For most people basic functionality and the ability to connect to a database is more than enough. You can probably write up more than 90% of all webpages without using closuers, lambdas, recursive functions, object oriented programming and what have you. And the people who write these webpages don't care about programming at all, they just want the job done. These quotes from Rasmus shows where he's coming from.You can of course argue that people shouldn't launch webpages if they don't know what they're doing, the terrible safety concerns of letting idiots code stuff for the web, etc. but it would be like scoffing at people who don't drive an extra souped up Ferrari Enzo - very arrogant. Some pople just want to get from A to B. These are the people who use PHP. And incidentally they are also the people down in the trenches actually building all the little sites that make the world go round.
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>PHP's poor design and implementation has probably cost the world millions of lost man-hours; loss that could have been avoided by choosing a better-designed solution. Could you give some examples of this? I'm not a huge fan of PHP, but it generally works, as folks like FaceBook have proven.
It greatly depends on what you compare PHP to, but to highlight a handful of disadvantages, * PHP is considered extremely weak performance-wise * There is poor to no support of multithreading * There is no eventing system * As a web framework, it sins in mixing code & design (opposed to e.g. Django-Python or Ruby on Rails) (If the term "framework" seems unfit, think of "web-targeted toolkits")
and the HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043400
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Do you have any concept of just how much time and money hacked-together PHP has cost? Do you know how many aggregate human lifetimes are wasted on the simple act of regularly upgrading PHPBB, WordPress, MediaWiki, et al? It's mindboggling. It's sad. It's penny wise, pound foolish.
Yet Wordpress is still the most widely used blog software ever. PHPBB and it's ilk still run the forum game. Wikipedia has yet be unseated. If it's cost > it's profit, why is it still used so widely? I recently replaced a C#/.NET app with a PHP version and saved a company close to a million a year in licensing, servers, staffing and development costs. Not to mention it took my team a third of the time to develop as t…
If it's cost > it's profit, why is it still used so widely?
Network effects, data lock-in, asynchronous information exchange in markets. Just because something is rationally better doesn't mean that the market actors are rational.
That said, companies like EA, Apple, and Amazon license Jive Forums (which is not cheap), Confluence, et al for a reason.
I recently replaced a C#/.NET app with a PHP version and saved a company close to a million a year in licensing, servers, staffing and development costs. Not to mention it took my team a third of the time to develop as the original application, yet performed better and had more functionality. There was a significant gap in LoC as well.
Your anecdote is a personal anecdote, coming from the person most likely to have a particularly jaded view of both the short and long-term costs involved.
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>PHP's poor design and implementation has probably cost the world millions of lost man-hours; loss that could have been avoided by choosing a better-designed solution. Could you give some examples of this? I'm not a huge fan of PHP, but it generally works, as folks like FaceBook have proven.
It greatly depends on what you compare PHP to, but to highlight a handful of disadvantages, * PHP is considered extremely weak performance-wise * There is poor to no support of multithreading * There is no eventing system * As a web framework, it sins in mixing code & design (opposed to e.g. Django-Python or Ruby on Rails) (If the term "framework" seems unfit, think of "web-targeted toolkits")
For market success, the ideal place to be is just smart enough to be able to understand the ivory tower issues that the solution needs; but dumb enough to relate to the everyman and agree with him ("Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch"). Or perhaps it's idealistic vs. pragmatic - regardless, you need both.
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But it's not intrinsically good; every one of PHP's advantages is offered by other languages, without all the downsides. PHP's poor design and implementation has probably cost the world millions of lost man-hours; loss that could have been avoided by choosing a better-designed solution. It's certainly an accomplishment to create popular software, but this popular software is not necessarily something that should be u…
I don't think you understand PHP's greatest strength. It's all about the right tool for the right job for the right man. PHP was invented so that designers could add a Hello Martin and think it was cool that their homepage showed different names based on who you were. For most people basic functionality and the ability to connect to a database is more than enough. You can probably write up more than 90% of all webpag…
Oh, come on. Give me an instance where PHP is the right tool.
This argument is so overused that I don't even know what it means anymore.
And no, shared hosting doesn't count. My personal hosting plan costs something like $10 a month and I can choose between PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby (with Ruby it is more difficult, since I have to ask the sysadmin to add a couple of Mongrel instances for me). But mod_perl and mod_wsgi are there by default.
>
Hello Martin
Dude, that doesn't have any PHP code in it. To make this dynamic, you still have to have some way of authenticating and storing info about users. And you'll also want some way to edit those users.
Do you know how easy it is to create a simple CMS in Django, with authentication, and a functional admin? ... it takes only a couple of hours to a beginner that never worked with Python or Django before (yes, I saw one in action).
When PHP appeared, it made sense since Perl was the only game in town, and it was a bitch. But things have evolved a lot since then (even for Perl). For me, PHP doesn't make any sense.
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>PHP's poor design and implementation has probably cost the world millions of lost man-hours; loss that could have been avoided by choosing a better-designed solution. Could you give some examples of this? I'm not a huge fan of PHP, but it generally works, as folks like FaceBook have proven.
It greatly depends on what you compare PHP to, but to highlight a handful of disadvantages, * PHP is considered extremely weak performance-wise * There is poor to no support of multithreading * There is no eventing system * As a web framework, it sins in mixing code & design (opposed to e.g. Django-Python or Ruby on Rails) (If the term "framework" seems unfit, think of "web-targeted toolkits")
Compared to what? Assembler?
There are valid criticisms to be made of PHP, but poor performance is not one of them.