321–330 of 366 posts
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What does this have to do with faults of the language? I can think of a lot of stupid things to do in any language; it doesn't mean the language is the problem.
It does if the language itself makes it easier for you to make those kind of mistakes.
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I once found a login form where 1e3 was a correct password, when yours was 1000. I'm still not sure if it eval'd your password, but it was PHP for sure.
What does this have to do with faults of the language? I can think of a lot of stupid things to do in any language; it doesn't mean the language is the problem.
For example, this specific problem is harder to create in stronger-typed languages, since you would need to explicitly cast from an integer to a string.
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The issue is that both C (portable assembler) and Fortran (portable math library) solve some problem pretty well. What problem is it that Java solves well? That is what makes java such a shitty language to program in, for any particular problem you encounter there are much better languages to solve that problem in, C# comes to mind immediately as to what Java should be. Note: Yes I realize that Java has excellent cro…
> Yes I realize that Java has excellent cross platform support and a huge ecosystem Java's cross platform support is awful if you go anywhere beyond Windows, Linux, OS X and Solaris (and even there both OS X and Linux have second-class status at best and suffered from serious issues at least until recently). Even Python and plain old C (if you know how to write portable code) are much more portable than Java ever wil…
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The issue is that both C (portable assembler) and Fortran (portable math library) solve some problem pretty well. What problem is it that Java solves well? That is what makes java such a shitty language to program in, for any particular problem you encounter there are much better languages to solve that problem in, C# comes to mind immediately as to what Java should be. Note: Yes I realize that Java has excellent cro…
The goal of Java was always to be able to "write large programs quickly." In some ways that sounds terrible by itself, but I think it turns out to be legitimate. I've been on python projects that need to grow but struggle b/c all the things that make it easy to get a lot done the first few weeks become liabilities very soon. Adding developers to a project that doesn't declare types and encourages just passing around…
I agreed with him.
Minute later he understood what he said
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I wouldn't be surprised if it happened more than usual with PHP, but in my experience programmers always curse the language/framework/api that they use heavily. You always learn the seams and hit issues with the design if you work with something for long enough.
Nope! I love me some Python, JavaScript, C, and even ActionScrip, Java and Pascal. Blaming the tools is bad form unless you can prove they are bad, which can be done with PHP.
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Just wondering ... what is "large enough developer base"? If you are hiring, you are not hiring 10000 people, you are hiring one or two people. If you can choose between a pool of 10000 developers in PHP and 100 in Haskell (whatever...) you will probably find more candidates you want to hire in the second pool. And it is certainly more likely that you find the appropriate candidate if you don't have to wade though hu…
My general point is that evaluating languages based on personal or technical preferences might just be a flawed metric. Unless what you are doing is a hobby you have to deal with additional criteria. I pointed out just one such data points. I, for example, really love APL. I would also never think of using APL as the basis of a commercial project unless there was an overwhelming reason to do so. A friend of mine buil…
+ know PHP
+ are experienced enough to deliver a working, maintainable application
are also fluent in at least one of ruby or python, both of which are much nicer languages in general and have strong web-dev presences.
The issue with hiring "people who know PHP" just because a whole lot of people know PHP is that issues with maintainability of whatever gets written tend to be much more of a pain than with similar projects in other high-level languages.
It's not, of course, that you can't write a ball of unmaintainable mud in any language -- you certainly can. PHP is lacking in areas that make fixing that less of a nightmare, and lacking in areas -- both in the language, and in the community for lack of a better term -- that make writing maintainable stuff in the first place easier. The devs who know how to create maintainable PHP codebases, or fix unmaintainable ones tend to have experience with other languages.
This should be, in my opinion, a pretty major concern for business. While it may not be apparent at first, there tends to be diminishing returns from maintenance and development of a product if it's a giant mess. Doing PHP on new projects for ease-of-hire is inviting that mess, due to a whole bunch of little things that tend to snowball. Skilled people won't want to work for you, people that will be skilled but lack experience will leave your employ, and eventually the project will grind to an iceberg pace and stress levels will get high for everyone.
A good dev will probably not have a problem picking up whatever language, as long as you're using "general-use" languages. In the web-dev world, this is currently mostly ruby and python. Choose haskell, and you'll probably have some (read great) difficulty finding people to hire. Choose ruby or python and you'll be more likely to attract the type of devs you want, and at the worst you'll get someone inexperienced who makes a mess that is easier to fix than it would be in a PHP codebase of similar messiness.
If it was just the merits of the language, I don't think I'd have much of a leg to stand on talking from a business end. It's not though, it's a whole lot of little negative things that can make a long-term project more likely to be a failure. The language, and the tools, and the community are getting better, but that's mostly due to the efforts of people who are skilled and experienced with a variety of things improving it because it's paying their bills. It's still far, far away from any other "popular" language in terms of tools, community, available libraries, and just about any other measurement you can make other than "number of people that can say they know it on a resume"
The biggest advantage of declarative programming is that the compiler's got more information to work with, and then Prolog throws this away with weak typing and weak moding (every predicate is nondeterministic by default).
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> I think this sums up everyone I've met who actually likes PHP. That says more about the people you associate with then with the language. The people I know care about programming, care about doing it well, care about elegant solutions, and care about a wonderful end product. What they don't care about are stupid language wars. > the grass actually IS greener in Python and Ruby land. I never got serious with Ruby, s…
OK, how about I rephrase to: > I've never seriously learned a second language, so I think it's a great language Do the people you know have experience with other comparable* languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform? I concede that the PHP community, and PHP itself, has dramatically improved in the last few years. PHP 5 is a revelation compared to PHP 4. [*] i.e. not "The other language…
For the most part, yeah. There are the obvious quibbles you get with any language, but for it's domain, it's the best bang for the buck. Does that mean it's the only language in our stack? No. But for my money, for the web side, it can't be beat. If I were to do a site in a non PHP language, it would be Python hands down. That being said, it all depends on what the project is, and what it entails.
Listen, I can't help but wonder if your imparting some past on the current crop of PHP developers (and by current, I mean those that moved to PHP5 some 8 years ago). Maybe you had experiences with another group of people that focus on just one language.
The PHP community of today is far from that. It's made up of practical people, who focus on more than just PHP. More to the point, calling someone a PHP developer these days just reflects that when they do the server side web code, they are using PHP. Not that it's their only language.
To be honest, my personal experience is that everyone I've met who pans PHP and proclaims to have switched happily to Rails (because that's what they switch to first, never Ruby), or Python is that they needed the extra structure these languages enforced. Basically, the PHP code they deride so much was code they helped write.
That, of course, is just my point of view. I don't know many people who use Ruby for web development, so it would be unfair for me to suggest the entire community was like that.