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Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

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Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#71

Post by adaml_623 »

oemera wrote: post #46

Lately these questions and discussions are everywhere and most times I think people are missing the point: it's all about code you want to write. We created all those high level languages to make code easy to read, to make them people understand. I mean you could probably write your website in Assembla but the language won't help you to write down what you really want. As a developer you are trying to develop somethi…

I agree that PHP is a noisy language and I feel that it has a few sad inconsistencies with some of it's more common functions. Remembering parameter order in functions like in_array($needle, $haystack) is sometimes difficult as the choice they've made is arbitrary. I code in PHP everyday and have to look up functions every few days to remind myself of silly stuff like that.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#72

Post by adaml_623 »

jeffreymcmanus wrote: post #17

If you are a software entrepreneur as opposed to an individual coder, one of the things you have to consider is how easy it is to hire someone who knows the platform or language you've selected. It's a fact that in the US and around the world, PHP developers outnumber Ruby developers by a significant margin, probably at least an order of magnitude. In some ways, this may seem like an unfair comparison (by way of anal…

But you have to ask yourself what your new hires are going to be bringing to your company? Are you going to be hiring dinosaurs or mammals?

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#73

Post by jasonlotito »

chriseidhof wrote: post #31

I've built a large application in CakePHP (and had plenty of PHP experience before that). For most things, it worked well. Last week, I started doing RoR again (after a couple of years), and it beats the hell out of any other ecosystem for webdevelopment. Ruby is (for me) a much better language than PHP. I've done a lot of Haskell, too, and Haskell is even a better language than Ruby, but doesn't have the same amount…

I don't know. A lot of the smart PHP developers are still there. Maybe people using PHP moved on, but PHP devs are still strong.

As for PHP code, pear is still widely used for code distribution. Combined with pecl, and you have two resources for code distribution depending on how the code is integrated (PHP or C). And don't confuse pear as a library. It's a distribution method. For example, PHPUnit is installed via pear.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#74

Post by bilban »

qixxiq wrote: post #28

I find the hardest problem to overcome with PHP is finding developers, as it isn't a particularly nice language to work with. If you're not doing a computationally expensive startup, speed won't matter much. If you ever get to the size where it does (i.e. Facebook) - there are always solutions. I've been seriously considering trying to start up an alternative language that takes the best parts out of PHP, but drops a…

That would be Python!

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#75

Post by bilban »

hardy263 wrote: post #59
oemera wrote: post #46

Lately these questions and discussions are everywhere and most times I think people are missing the point: it's all about code you want to write. We created all those high level languages to make code easy to read, to make them people understand. I mean you could probably write your website in Assembla but the language won't help you to write down what you really want. As a developer you are trying to develop somethi…

Informative: I believe the term you are referring to is Sigil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming) I actually never found having the dollar sign as a sigil was any problem. There are a lot of punctuation symbols used in programming that are not used the same way as they are used in English grammar. In English, you don't create a new paragraph for every line indented in, the ^ sign is not often us…

I like the dollar prefix for variables. But each to their own.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#78

Post by 9ec4c12949a4f3 »

oemera wrote: post #46

Lately these questions and discussions are everywhere and most times I think people are missing the point: it's all about code you want to write. We created all those high level languages to make code easy to read, to make them people understand. I mean you could probably write your website in Assembla but the language won't help you to write down what you really want. As a developer you are trying to develop somethi…

FYI, your English looks rather good for someone who's learning it. The only real issue I saw is how you make almost every sentence into it's own paragraph.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#79

Post by 9ec4c12949a4f3 »

ntulip wrote: post #76

Oracle just put a price on InnoDB. So unless you got $2000 a year - NO. http://www.mysql.com/products/ Postgresql is your next choice.

That's actually what I'm looking at right now. I'm half way into my project and it's all freaking mysql :( On the plus side, the SQL is abstracted decently enough that I don't have to change my body of code to any major degree.

Any experience or articles you like that talk about transitioning between the two?

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#80

Post by 9ec4c12949a4f3 »

ntulip wrote: post #77
ntulip wrote: post #76

Oracle just put a price on InnoDB. So unless you got $2000 a year - NO. http://www.mysql.com/products/ Postgresql is your next choice.

FYI: InnoDB is transaction safe. MyISAM being ok for basic things.

I would say if you're using MyISAM for basic things, you might as well go with SQLite.
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