61–70 of 112 posts
This makes me love PHP more. If that was possible. He just gets it. If you want to spend your days drawing UML, writing documentation and unit tests. That is dandy, but you're in PHPLand now. This is our land, and we dont care about no freakin' memory leaks.
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How do you get anything done? You seem so hung up on the tools versus creating stuff with tools. I guess it makes sense because you're the maintainer of a web framework ... for perl ... a language saddled with a checkered history of generating some pretty unmaintainable shit. And my guess is that you will respond saying "you can write maintainable code in perl!" And, of course, one would counter that you can do the s…
You undermine your argument by making it personally aggressive.
Personally aggressive? Maybe. Deservedly? Probably.
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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")
I wonder what you're comparing PHP to. PHP is faster than Ruby and about the same speed as Python. Threading is not a pressing need in the sort of environment PHP typically runs - multiprocess web servers. Python and Ruby, when used for web apps also manage just fine with 'little to no support of multithreading'. And as someone else pointed out, it's not a framework to begin with (although there are PHP frameworks).…
I'd like to see your source for the performance claim. To my own I can bring e.g.
http://xodian.net/serendipity/index.php?/archives/27-Benchma...
http://blog.dhananjaynene.com/2008/07/performance-comparison...
I found threading a great shortcoming of PHP. I had web services that required data from several sources and was in need of querying in parallel. there are about 370,000 results for +php +multithreading on Google so I assume it's more than just myself.
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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…
I'm completely for PHP as a simple and accessible language. The previous author wanted to hear about the shortcomings of PHP and I tried to provide some. PHP sites such as Wikipedia probably need more servers (since every request is a separate process). They might be saving a lot of manpower by using PHP, so it might be an OK tradeoff.
By the way, Facebook uses Erlang for its performance-critical parts (such as chat).
> PHP is a share nothing architecture; each request is completely independent.
You could still use an agent-like messaging system for shared-nothing multithreaded/multiprocessed environment.
> 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.
e.g. When using cURL you must poll the handler until the request is complete. Obviously you'd need multithreading to achieve a better control flow in such a scenario.
> Nobody mixes in code & design in PHP anymore
I've written and debugged some wordpress plugins, and I can't say I came to the same conclusion as you...
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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 lo…
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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 .
Java and C++ made me money, PHP made me bupkis. Python at least is fun.
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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…
That may be true today but PHP is old in web terms, when PHP began to become popular it was at a time when it had little competition that offered the same ability to build dynamic web pages with relative ease. PHP spent enough time at the top of the web dev heap to build up a substantial network effect. The comparative advantages of other technologies, large though they may by, are not yet enough to push PHP from the…
* CGI (mostly done with Perl).
* mod_perl (a huge ungainly mess)
* ASP (no thanks, not a Microsoft guy)
* Various proprietary things
* Various niche players (my own mod_dtcl [later Apache Rivet] was faster and IMO, nicer than PHP, but never got more than a modest amount of traction).
By the time I even started writing mod_dtcl, PHP was already pretty widely used, and we were using it in production at the company I worked for, and it was certainly better/faster than doing things in Perl CGI's.
These days, I really, really, really don't like having anything to do with PHP after having dealt with too many unholy messes, but I can't deny that it got some critical things right at the right time.
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Same here, but I can't deny that PHP made me more money than all those other sexy languages combined .
I'd argue that being in a market that people wanted made you money, not PHP. I dunno what the timescale of your successes was - I think PHP actually was the best option for webapps between about 1998 and 2004 - but there are better technologies available now. Java and C++ made me money, PHP made me bupkis. Python at least is fun.
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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" Compared to what? Assembler? There are valid criticisms to be made of PHP, but poor performance is not one of them.
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…