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PHP: A fractal of bad design

me.veekun.com

31–40 of 514 posts

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#31
post #5
post #2

This is just another example of someone beating a dead horse (which has already been beaten) for page views. Next week we'll have another "bash php" post, and the week after that another. I wish people spent as much time creating new things as they did bitching. As well written as this article is, it contains absolutely nothing that hasn't been said ten thousand times already- in fact, most of this seems to be regurg…

Make your mind up—should I have spent less time on this or more? :) Like I said, I wrote it to get this /out/ of my system; I am now impervious to PHP arguments. Either this will convince someone or it will not. Done.

You probably also shit after a bad meal to get it out of your system, but although you may have convinced someone to not eat the chicken, the rest of the office has to deal with the terrible stench you left behind, when you could have just gone home and taken care of things in private.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#32

Oh! Do one on motherboard design next! Or the highway system of the eastern US. Or, as others already said, just realize it's warped beyond repair and hindsight is 20/20 for all involved. Very very very comprehensive post, but... yeah.

Well, you can't really much rip the US highway system off the face of the Earth, and I'm guessing that it's rather inconvenient to route around it, but you surely can not use PHP, and inform those poor misguided souls who believe that it's a standard, or the web's assembler (seriously, I've heard both of those personally!) or that it's, you know, good.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#33
post #12

> PHP ... bad design PHP wasn't "designed" ... it evolved. Pieces were added, here and there, re-factored, deprecated, etc. etc. PHP is a natural language. It wasn't fabricated at some university, nor in the lab of some billion dollar company. It evolved. That is its strength. It is the most adaptable language around. It can be used for anything and it has been used for everything. And that is why it is the most popu…

Exactly! One of the reasons I hate Ruby is that nearly every person I've come across that likes it is exactly how you describe. It seems to be part of the Ruby culture.

Exactly! That's the reason I hate broccoli -- every person who tries to feed me it seems concerned that salt and vinegar potato chips are the only vegetable I eat. It seems to be part of their whole culture.

They're clearly just potatohaters.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#34
post #12

> PHP ... bad design PHP wasn't "designed" ... it evolved. Pieces were added, here and there, re-factored, deprecated, etc. etc. PHP is a natural language. It wasn't fabricated at some university, nor in the lab of some billion dollar company. It evolved. That is its strength. It is the most adaptable language around. It can be used for anything and it has been used for everything. And that is why it is the most popu…

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Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#35
post #12

> PHP ... bad design PHP wasn't "designed" ... it evolved. Pieces were added, here and there, re-factored, deprecated, etc. etc. PHP is a natural language. It wasn't fabricated at some university, nor in the lab of some billion dollar company. It evolved. That is its strength. It is the most adaptable language around. It can be used for anything and it has been used for everything. And that is why it is the most popu…

"It evolved" is a reasonable excuse for an 0.7 product, or an ecosystem like the Internet, where no single entity is in control.

But when you've gone through 5 major versions over a decade, I don't think you can say, "Well gosh, it jes' growed that way." That takes it from "evolved" to "poorly planned".

Also, I wouldn't lean too hard on "most popular". Bud Light is the most popular beer and American Idol is the most popular TV show. "PHP: The Bud Light of programming languages" is not really helping your case.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is a natural language. It wasn't fabricated at some university, nor in the lab of some billion dollar company. It evolved. That is its strength. It is the most adaptable language around. It can be used for anything and it has been used for everything. Programming languages are not human languages. Programming languages are engineering tools. Would you cross a dangerous river on a shaky, lashed together bridge tha…

Well, if you take the engineering analogy in a somewhat different direction, you end up with all the structures we ever created before we mastered statics and material sciences. Those bridges the Romans built were evolved patterns based on trial and error of previous designs, where the last design was the testing. Anyhow, just something to ponder about.

Those bridges weren't continually "enhanced" by slapping on more stone and wood (at least not the ones that remained standing for long). Each bridge was a fresh design, based on the best practices of the day.

Kind of like new programming languages.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#37
post #19

"(And strictly speaking, Facebook isn’t written in PHP; it’s written in a C++ macro language with a striking resemblance.)" I'm a Facebook engineer who works on the HipHop compiler and HipHop virtual machine. It's in PHP, absolutely full stop. It's amazing how much the fact that g++ is involved somewhere in the toolchain confuses people in this matter. C++ is just an intermediate representation; the source language r…

Interesting. Redacted, with apologies.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#38
post #30

I got into the web space through WordPress and naturally progressed into learning PHP. There are times that I wish I could work with another language just as well as I can in PHP. I've attempted to learn Ruby. I know C++/C#/Java/Objective C. Yet I still come back to PHP. I can't explain it. I like PHP. I understand PHP. There are nice people willing to help me with PHP. PHP does what I ask. It's not the greatest. It'…

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Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#39
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's using poetic license, if that's not obvious.

"Prosaic license"? If the essay was written in iambic pentameter, it certainly escaped me. Anyway, "C++ macro language with striking similarities" has a pretty precise technical meaning, which sane, literate people might actually mistake.

"poetic license" isn't the same as "poetic."

From the free dictionary:

poetic license n. The liberty taken by an artist or a writer in deviating from conventional form or fact to achieve a desired effect.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#40

My goal is to move away from PHP completely by 2013 for my websites. I've recently been toying around with various methods of tying C++ to a web frontend, with varying degrees of success. My current favorite method is to use mongoose to create a very simple HTTP interface for any C(++) project (mongoose is great!) and then use AJAX and JSON for any and all communication to and fro client and server. However, this lea…

I agree that statically typed languages have a lot of advantages but I can't see much reason to use C++ for anything if you have reasonable alternatives. Why not Scala or Haskell or even just plain old Java?
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