41–50 of 140 posts
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It depends on how you define powerhouse. Is PHP my favorite language or framework? No. But the use cases I provide show that it's worthy of consideration. Perl, on the other hand...
You just did to Perl exactly what your article complains about re: PHP.
I believe you have overstated your case, perhaps due to inexperience with other languages. In particular, claiming that any modern scripting language is inflexible sounds a bit crazy.
I have attempted explaining how to get a WAMP stack running, with EasyPHP, to an absolutely new-to-web-dev indiviual who was curious about creating a chat room. Let me just say that the situation is ten times better now than when I was the same age and was poring, lost, over Bruce Eckel's Thinking In Java trying to do the same thing, which must have been sometime around 1999/2000.
These efforts to teach a newcomer reminded me that there's a lot I take for granted. There is a step where you are saying "okay, we've got to see where Apache is; what port is it listening on, how can we get you to phpMyAdmin; here's how you set up rows and columns in your tables and think about a database; no the reason it's not working is because you saved as '.html' and not '.php'; I know you've seen URLs that don't end in '.php' but that requires invoking the Rewrite Engine and teaching you about .htaccess files; oh the header modifications can't be the first thing you emit; here's the docs, you basically have to search them because there is no organizing principle and no way to find out what you can do..."
I agree, Python+Django will make you learn a bunch of weird "modeling" stuff first. To me, setting up the data model at the beginning of an app is like inputting a character name at the beginning of an RPG: as some sources testify [1], you can easily waste several hours on purely aesthetic concerns before you even really start to play.
Nonetheless, Python+Django comes with a lightweight dev server and an interactive console and a routing table, as well as a template language. The knowledge of the database is internalized to the language, so that I don't have to teach someone how to use phpMyAdmin but rather when to use a ForeignKey. If we talk purely about learning to develop on the Web then PHP has much, much more useless overhead.
Sure, eventually we will have to get a production-ready web server communicating with the application, but that can be abstracted until later with Django: it occurs as an up-front teaching cost with PHP.
I say this not even as a Python aficionado per se. If anything I like Node, and Node is nowhere near either of them in offering pleasant functionality.
I agree that PHP is good for starting learning web development and for small sample apps, but from experience I really think that large-scale PHP applications are not easy to manage. The codebase becomes disorganized very quickly, and tracking down a piece of code's "hierarchy" (what it inherits from, what methods it has available, etc.) can be a whole new kind of hell. IMO, of course.
Building your application as a series of small applications that work with each other is a solution that has worked for me.
"Dozens of new language-specific communities have now entered the fray and brought along their legions of devotees with them, and many of those devotees see PHP as being passé. I even had the following happen to me, and this is absolutely a true story and can be verified by our VP of Operations, Richard Kotulski: I was in an elevator with O’Reilly’s very good “PHP Cookbook” in hand and an older gentleman scoffed at m…
With regards to "Direct HTML embedding."... PHP is a Web scripting language (which I consider to be very different from a general-purpose programming language or even a scripting language), designed and developed to generate markup. I have seen a lot of "templating" libraries (Smarty among them) and all they do is mimic the basic syntax of PHP using something else that is not PHP. I know the theory ("designers don't…
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> Server-side view rendering is on its way out. So this is not a real advantage. No it isn't, client side view rendering is just experiencing a faddish phase; it'll fade. It'll never overtake server side rendering on the web.
there is a place for both. There are certain things that make sense for server side rendering. If I have a blog, why render it on client side, its evergreen content... makes sense for the server to deliver the static content. For web apps, there is a lot of value to client side rendering.
There are hundreds of examples that show how bad PHP really is. Why make the choice of using a broken language when there are so many better alternatives?
I strongly believe that using a complex, non consistent and hard to debug language actually slows down development and is even dangerous.
Being "absolutly everywhere" is not an argument. COBOL, PASCAL and FORTRAN used to be everywhere too.
If you are just starting out as a web developer and aren't planning on changing careers anytime soon, the #1 language you should learn is JavaScript. It, or languages that compile to it, will still be in fashion in 5 or even 10 years. That's because the web is shifting to thick clients, and JavaScript is the only choice in browsers. JavaScript is also finding its way into server-side code (Node.js). "I think PHP is t…
Any decision you make to learn anything based on payback has to factor in what will happen if more people choose to learn something. If more people learn Ruby because it pays better (let's assume that is correct) then supply and demand could equalize and the pay will go down. Right now if pay is high for Ruby it means most likely there is a supply and demand in balance. When that changes so will the pay. The only time I haven't seen this happen is with the rates lawyers charge. And the reason for that has to do more with personal relationships and quality of work.
I've lived Ruby land and Python world for quite some time and I must say it's good to be back in home in PHP where getting things done doesn't involve clever semantics and tying yourself up in layers of abstraction. Oh yeah, and it's nice to read code that has comments explaining what the hell is going on too (seems Rubyists and Pythonistas don't believe in comments, you know, because that'd make the code too obvious…
+1 for pragmatism. Despite the stigma attached to PHP, it's my go to language for web stuff because it gets shit done very very quickly. You can't beat drop file, edit, refresh and entire deployments which can be done with cp/scp and no process restarts.
In what way does PHP help to get things up and running faster than other languages?
If you are just starting out as a web developer and aren't planning on changing careers anytime soon, the #1 language you should learn is JavaScript. It, or languages that compile to it, will still be in fashion in 5 or even 10 years. That's because the web is shifting to thick clients, and JavaScript is the only choice in browsers. JavaScript is also finding its way into server-side code (Node.js). "I think PHP is t…
How in the world can you predict what will be in fashion 5 and especially 10 years from now?
"That's because the web is shifting to thick clients, and JavaScript is the only choice in browsers."
How do you know that won't change?
I've lived Ruby land and Python world for quite some time and I must say it's good to be back in home in PHP where getting things done doesn't involve clever semantics and tying yourself up in layers of abstraction. Oh yeah, and it's nice to read code that has comments explaining what the hell is going on too (seems Rubyists and Pythonistas don't believe in comments, you know, because that'd make the code too obvious…