Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PHP Sucks

evertpot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 297 posts

Re: PHP Sucks

#171

Post by krapp »

ThomPete wrote: post #114

Many great things suck. PHP will still be the most accessible backend language for a long time and only JavaScript stands a chance at outcompeting it for a long time. (And yes I know JavaScript is normally seen as a frontend language)

>Many great things suck.

PHP, Javascript, C, C++, Java. Arguably "great" languages given their success, and each attracts a mob with pitchforks and torches wanting to burn it down.

I would like to see Hack take off a bit more though. The XHP extension alone solves so many headaches with templating. Treating XML elements like first class citizens and having the language be able to reason about its current context, and not having to echo HTML strings everywhere and just hope you escaped everything properly, is something I wish PHP had picked up years ago.

Re: PHP Sucks

#172

Post by aeturnum »

There are always two responses after an article like this:

> PHP is great at gettings things done, pedantic points about design don't matter.

> PHP is a huge mess of a language - that people have overcome that to create things doesn't change that.

Both of these responses can be (and are, imo) true.

Re: PHP Sucks

#173

Post by pmontra »

trebor wrote: post #85

I started freelancing in my area doing Ruby on Rails, and found it far harder to maintain a project. I also found it harder to acquire clients in my area for new RoR development. More work was available locally with PHP. Clients were more willing to pay. I've done a ton of things in WordPress that shouldn't have been, "to save money". And I've done greenfield development with CodeIgniter, Laravel (v3 and v5), and a c…

What's beautiful and what pays our bills are unrelated.

If I have to do a beauty contest of the programming languages I used a lot, from uglier to most beautiful, I'd sort them like this: PHP, Perl and C (no ++), Java, JavaScript, Ruby.

I didn't use Python a lot and I'm undecided if it should be placed before or after JS. That silly method(self) looks as useless as PHP's silly $this->attribyte. They're just bad designs and other languages knew better. I'm starting to use Elixir and it goes between JS and Ruby so far. Java has its own way to make me feel like wanting to wash my hands at the end of the day (the language and the tooling) but not as much as PHP, even if I agree that PHP7 is somewhat more sane than it used to be. Why didn't they do it at version 2?

And if I have to sort them about what pays more... We could sort them by looking at the salary stats but eventually it's a matter of where we live and which opportunities we have. Any language will earn us money. No hard feelings.

Re: PHP Sucks

#175

Post by tajen »

ransom1538 wrote: post #121
trebor wrote: post #85

I started freelancing in my area doing Ruby on Rails, and found it far harder to maintain a project. I also found it harder to acquire clients in my area for new RoR development. More work was available locally with PHP. Clients were more willing to pay. I've done a ton of things in WordPress that shouldn't have been, "to save money". And I've done greenfield development with CodeIgniter, Laravel (v3 and v5), and a c…

I graduated in 2003. I haven't been able to stop coding php. Why? Because of the amount of work . I know other languages, but the pay for php these days is totally astronomical. (I live in sf, pacific-heights / WELLL over 6 figs / wife doesn't work). Currently I feel like I have a massive technical advantage (I wont share). Right now I work on iphone/android backends - at massive scale, top 10 (PHP is fast). When peo…

Any advice on how to build our own technical advantage, apart from studying and applying a lot?

Re: PHP Sucks

#176

Post by legohead »

The true programmer doesn't get attached to one language or another. If you get 'fed up' with a language and switch, then you are taking the language way too seriously. Use languages for what their particular strengths are, and that's it.

Re: PHP Sucks

#177

Post by vans »

tremon wrote: post #32
ishener wrote: post #21

The author's biggest mistake wasn't betting on PHP, it was betting on a single language. He should have learned more languages a long time ago, just to expand his set of tools, and maybe way of thinking. Besides, learning a new language is fun and not that hard... They are all pretty much the same...

... until you try to switch paradigms (e.g. to Lisp, Erlang or Haskell). I agree that learning new languages is very useful. But as analogies go, going from PHP to another imperative language is more like switching dialects than learning a foreign language.

He can switch to a static typed one. I don't know php but it should be a huge mindshift i guess

Re: PHP Sucks

#178

Post by tluyben2 »

porker wrote: post #163
tluyben2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that clients really want WP a lot. Bigger and bigger companies currently and for most of their departmental sites. This is WP shoe-horned in a full site CMS function. The thing is, users seem to love it. I would wager that if you just rip out the guts of PHP and leave only the frontend (the /wp-admin part that is), but leave it 100% as it is and write a solid backend in Django/Rails, you have a winner.…

> The problem is that clients really want WP a lot. This. I can waste my breath talking about another CMS which is better suited for the task, has cleaner data representation (good for 5 years' time) etc, and try to get stakeholders to buy into it. Or I can mention WordPress and have brand recognition do the work for me. > The thing is, users seem to love it. In my experience, the users find the admin confusing. It's…

> In my experience, the users find the admin confusing.

My 'entry' into the enterprise world was web CMSs; my previous company used to make/sell a respected web CMS. If you talk about 'confusing admins' then the web CMS world is where you should look. Boot up a Liferay (oh and check out that code by the way) or Alfresco or Sitecore or Oracle CMS and stare in disbelief.

This is what these users are used to and compared with those, WP is really very simple. That's why no (?) enterprise will replace an international corporate roll-out with WP, but regional, if allowed (and it usually is as marketing simply doesn't work the same way worldwide), they will. Because of the ease and less friction; create a new content writer? Fill in paper work and ask the main IT dep vs do it yourself in 5 seconds and that kind of thing.

Re: PHP Sucks

#179

Post by dpcx »

Navarr wrote: post #62
staticelf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy. There is a lot of boilerplate in Laravel today and it was changing too fast for me to keep up with it.

Have you tried Yii at all? In my most recent (side) project, I'm doing a Yii2 website and I'm feeling like it's not enterprisey enough. I have to go out of my way to figure out the best way to split things apart (which, I guess is good because it doesn't actually make that difficult for me at all - it's just something I have to choose to do)

I used Yii2 at a previous job. The way that it splits things out feels horrendous. The documentation is sub-par, and I feel like I spent more time trying to figure out why something didn't work the way I expected (from reading the code) than I did fixing things.

I'm sure at least some part of that was the previous developer who built the application. But there is absolutely no reason for documentation to not answer the basic questions that seem to come up many times per day in their IRC channel.

Re: PHP Sucks

#180

Post by [deleted] »

pmontra wrote: post #173
trebor wrote: post #85

I started freelancing in my area doing Ruby on Rails, and found it far harder to maintain a project. I also found it harder to acquire clients in my area for new RoR development. More work was available locally with PHP. Clients were more willing to pay. I've done a ton of things in WordPress that shouldn't have been, "to save money". And I've done greenfield development with CodeIgniter, Laravel (v3 and v5), and a c…

What's beautiful and what pays our bills are unrelated. If I have to do a beauty contest of the programming languages I used a lot, from uglier to most beautiful, I'd sort them like this: PHP, Perl and C (no ++), Java, JavaScript, Ruby. I didn't use Python a lot and I'm undecided if it should be placed before or after JS. That silly method(self) looks as useless as PHP's silly $this->attribyte. They're just bad desig…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN