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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)

#71

Post by pvg »

shmichael wrote: post #63
pvg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

Let's put the term "framework" aside. The Wikipedia article states it is "a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues, usually a set of tools, materials or components". I believe a scripting language that is pre-designed for website design could be considered a framework, but it's not that important whether there is a consensus. I'd like to see your source for the performance claim. To my own…

The benchmarks you're linking are pretty limited (especially the first one that tests just instantiation and method dispatch). Also synthetic but somewhat more comprehensive -

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

As I said, if threading is a problem in PHP, it's as much of a problem in Ruby and Python. Common workaround is async message queueing with a great number of solutions available for all of these languages. There's a parallel curl available in recent versions of PHP that covers the simple 'multiple data services' case reasonably well.

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

#72

Post by senko »

To add to the noise here: all people bashing here, please remember webdev landscape around the time PHP got started (or around the time it got to version 3, which looked somewhat a real language).

I started using PHP as a switch over from Perl (which had some powerul but cumbersome templating engines, and boiled down to much more boilerplate than PHP for the same task) or C-based CGI (that was not fun).

So, I see PHP as an enabler to webdev to the masses. It was really hard to do "dynamic web pages", as these were called back in the days, in anything else, and it was a breeze in PHP. I believe this is why many people started doing it, which in turn resulted in developing better frameworks for better languages (like Rails, Django, etc.).

Comparison with IE6 has been drawn. IE6 was the best browser in its day. The trouble is, it stayed dominant for far too long. The same could be said for PHP. If it was massively replaced by other alternatives by, say, the time PHP5 came out (which IMHO looks as the first PHP version that considered itself as a serious language; phpI personally use Django nowadays for any new projects I do, having done stuff in PHP before. I have a hate/hate relationship with PHP, I consider it a very bad language as languages go, but it's still invaluable for quick hacks, in which boilerplate for other system takes more to generate than writing the 10 or so lines of PHP.

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

#73

Post by ubernostrum »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
akamaka wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It fits, he got arrested for posting an idiot comment about Obama on the Yahoo message boards.

Used to be you had to do something before you got charged. Threatening seems so much like thoughtcrime.

Making threats has been a "something" that's considered a crime for... well, a long time. Typically the law requires that the threat be at least somewhat believable in order to be successfully prosecuted, but there are certain types of threats which are criminal regardless of ability to be carried out (e.g., threatening to plant a bomb in a public square is a crime, even if you have no way of building or planting the bomb).

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

#74

Post by jacquesm »

ubernostrum wrote: post #73
jacquesm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used to be you had to do something before you got charged. Threatening seems so much like thoughtcrime.

Making threats has been a "something" that's considered a crime for... well, a long time. Typically the law requires that the threat be at least somewhat believable in order to be successfully prosecuted, but there are certain types of threats which are criminal regardless of ability to be carried out (e.g., threatening to plant a bomb in a public square is a crime, even if you have no way of building or planting the…

A message on a yahoo board seems to be a bit of a stretch though.

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

#75

Post by jacquesm »

shmichael wrote: post #69
idlewords wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I'd be happy to learn, but you'd have to expand the one-liner.

I am involved with two very high volume sites, one is written in Java using tomcat as the server and it needs 3 servers to handle between 650K and 1.5M uniques daily, server load is ok but fairly high, the other is a PHP based service that serves up 1.8 million pages on a good day to 50K uniques, the server load on that box is a relaxed 0.6.

When used properly PHP is performing quite well. Note that this is without any front-end caching, each page gets generated anew.

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

#76

Post by jacquesm »

shmichael wrote: post #63
pvg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

Let's put the term "framework" aside. The Wikipedia article states it is "a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues, usually a set of tools, materials or components". I believe a scripting language that is pre-designed for website design could be considered a framework, but it's not that important whether there is a consensus. I'd like to see your source for the performance claim. To my own…

Crawling is a problem that is fundamentally different from serving up dynamic websites. I've written a php based crawler framework, it simply uses a database as a central synchronization area and a bunch of parallel scripts to do the crawling.

I could have done the same using curl but for technical reasons chose to do it this way. It's definitely a work around kind of solution though.

I hope to replace the whole thing with a clojure/jvm based solution.

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

#77

Post by sunkencity »

idlewords wrote: post #50
shmichael wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Php is pretty fast in its way actually because a lot of the stuff is just plain wrappers for C functions. Use PHP right and do as much as possible with the built in functions and it's pretty fast -- build complex OO junkworks and it'll slow down a little.

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

#78

Post by bensummers »

jacquesm wrote: post #75
shmichael wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy to learn, but you'd have to expand the one-liner.

I am involved with two very high volume sites, one is written in Java using tomcat as the server and it needs 3 servers to handle between 650K and 1.5M uniques daily, server load is ok but fairly high, the other is a PHP based service that serves up 1.8 million pages on a good day to 50K uniques, the server load on that box is a relaxed 0.6. When used properly PHP is performing quite well. Note that this is without a…

Are these two sites doing equivalent work? Without knowing what kind of work these sites are doing, this isn't really a useful comparison.

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

#79

Post by jacquesm »

bensummers wrote: post #78
jacquesm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am involved with two very high volume sites, one is written in Java using tomcat as the server and it needs 3 servers to handle between 650K and 1.5M uniques daily, server load is ok but fairly high, the other is a PHP based service that serves up 1.8 million pages on a good day to 50K uniques, the server load on that box is a relaxed 0.6. When used properly PHP is performing quite well. Note that this is without a…

Are these two sites doing equivalent work? Without knowing what kind of work these sites are doing, this isn't really a useful comparison.

Yes, absolutely.

Otherwise I wouldn't have used them as examples. They are basically implementations of the same kind of site but on different platforms, the one more successful than the other.

In terms of raw performance I'd say the java environment is a little bit faster, but not by much.

In terms of programmer performance I'd say the PHP environment is a lot faster than the java environment.

The java I would qualify as more maintainable though, but it is less stable in production than PHP (we see the occasional freeze on java, the apache/PHP stuff seems to run itself for year after year without any issues).

Both use mysql db backends.

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

#80

Post by ubernostrum »

jacquesm wrote: post #74
ubernostrum wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making threats has been a "something" that's considered a crime for... well, a long time. Typically the law requires that the threat be at least somewhat believable in order to be successfully prosecuted, but there are certain types of threats which are criminal regardless of ability to be carried out (e.g., threatening to plant a bomb in a public square is a crime, even if you have no way of building or planting the…

A message on a yahoo board seems to be a bit of a stretch though.

Threats made against the President are handled rather specially, by people who aren't inclined to view online message boards as trivial.
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