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Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

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Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#51

Post by tentonova2 »

potatolicious wrote: post #29
tentonova2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a false dichotomy: - A world that has PHP and enabled web developers. - A world without PHP in which only Java EE-enabled engineers can write webapps. I think that's a demonstrably false assessment. A language as poorly designed and implemented as PHP isn't necessary to be accessible to "millions of people" -- in fact, does the opposite in enabling them to make serious and expensive mistakes.

Yet the fact of the matter is that's how the cards fell - we had the well-designed, well-implemented languages and frameworks that failed utterly to find any foothold with amateurs and beginners, and only found refuge with the Java EE-enabled engineers. And then we had PHP. I'm inclined to side with the parent poster - yes, PHP has a lot of problems when you attempt to make it overly complex, but on the other hand it…

Yet the fact of the matter is that's how the cards fell - we had the well-designed, well-implemented languages and frameworks that failed utterly to find any foothold with amateurs and beginners, and only found refuge with the Java EE-enabled engineers.

When did we have all that? In 1995, when PHP was started, I remember having Perl, shell scripts, and C server-side CGIs.

I don't recall significantly better viable alternatives becoming available until quite some time later.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#52

Post by wvenable »

shmichael wrote: post #39
mcantelon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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")

> PHP is considered extremely weak performance-wise

I don't know, it seems a lot of the very high trafficked sites (Facebook, Yahoo) run PHP. Yes benchmarks do show PHP doing poorly, but when was the last time anyone used PHP to crunch numbers? It's apparently fast at what it needs to be fast for.

> There is poor to no support of multithreading

That is not a flaw. PHP is a share nothing architecture; each request is completely independent. This is a good match for the stateless nature of HTTP. Multithreading isn't at all appropriate for PHP and I can't think of a scenario where it would be needed.

> There is no eventing system

PHP is a programming language not a framework. I'd make more of a comment about the various PHP frameworks but "eventing system" seems kind of vague. Maybe you can clarify this a bit and then I'll comment.

> As a web framework, it sins in mixing code & design (opposed to e.g. Django-Python or Ruby on Rails)

Nobody mixes in code & design in PHP anymore -- you won't find it terribly common among the various PHP frameworks. I do use it from time to time as a debugging aid and my compiling template engine uses it as the compilation target.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#53

Post by nostrademons »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
nostrademons wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what. Tell me you never use the man pages for the standard C library. 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 r…

I have to use the man pages for most languages when I'm learning them. PHP is fairly unique among languages I've worked with (and that doesn't include C) in that I have to keep using the man pages even after I've become fairly fluent with it.

In Python, by contrast, that fwrite call is just:

  fp.write(text)
In some ways, the religion metaphor is pretty apt, since the strongest critics of a religion are usually those raised in the religion who consciously reject it once they realize what else is out there. I learned web programming with PHP, and I've done several fairly large projects with it (the largest had ~100k registered users and ~250k hits/day at its peak). I ended up hating it enough that when it came time to look for full-time positions, I explicitly said "no PHP" and disqualified any jobs that used it.

(And actually...of late, everything I write is of world class importance, but that's an artifact of my current project and the fact that it's sorta taken over my life. I used to write quick & dirty stuff much more often, and I usually used Django for it.)

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#54

Post by tentonova2 »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
nostrademons wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what. Tell me you never use the man pages for the standard C library. 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 r…

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.

This "we get it done, everyone else doesn't, ergo X is better despite its flaws" logical faux pax drives me up the bloody wall.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#56

Post by jacquesm »

tentonova2 wrote: post #54
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what. Tell me you never use the man pages for the standard C library. 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 r…

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. This "we get it done, everyone else doesn't, ergo X is better despite its flaws" logical faux pax drives me up the blood…

Where did you read 'x is better' ?

That's not what I wrote. It's simply good enough.

A toolbox analogy:

We all know that brand 'x' is 'the best' possible tool available.

So why doesn't everybody use brand 'x' ?

Well, because some people have gotten used to brand 'y' and it is good enough for them.

What's better doesn't enter in to it. There is a minimum level of performance required for the job and both tools meet those requirements, so both are valid tools to solve the problem with.

Which one is the 'better' one is a matter of perspective, and in that sense there are as many truths as there are observers.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#57

Post by jawngee »

tentonova2 wrote: post #46
jawngee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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? 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 l…

We dropped PHPBB and moved to Jive Forums several years ago, as the costs of weekly updates and surprisingly regular break-ins easily outweighed the cost of licensing Jive's software. However, moving away from the forum required data migration, which was difficult and time consuming.

And that's not a personal anecdote? You aren't particularly jaded? I don't understand why I would have a jaded view of the short and long term costs involved. You'll have to explain. I'm not a PHP developer, btw. I consult across a wide variety of technologies and have done so for the last 15+ years. I would have certainly been better paid for that particular gig had I stuck with C#.

It would make sense that Apple and Amazon use Jive since all of their web properties are largely Java based, why step outside of a core competency?

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#58

Post by jacquesm »

nostrademons wrote: post #53
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what. Tell me you never use the man pages for the standard C library. 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 r…

I have to use the man pages for most languages when I'm learning them . PHP is fairly unique among languages I've worked with (and that doesn't include C) in that I have to keep using the man pages even after I've become fairly fluent with it. In Python, by contrast, that fwrite call is just: fp.write(text) In some ways, the religion metaphor is pretty apt, since the strongest critics of a religion are usually those…

Same here, but I can't deny that PHP made me more money than all those other sexy languages combined.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#59

Post by Jach »

bad_user wrote: post #49
mixmax wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's all about the right tool for the right job for the right man. 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…

> Do you know how easy it is to create a simple CMS in Django, with authentication, and a functional admin?

Frameworks have their place. PHP has a number of frameworks that can also make this claim. I would say raw PHP fits nicely where frameworks don't.

And

Hello !

. Populate SESSION however you like, whether it's from a database or a simple form submission.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#60

Post by jawngee »

bad_user wrote: post #49
mixmax wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's all about the right tool for the right job for the right man. 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…

>

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.

Dude, he was saying they could add personalization to the page.

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