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PHP: the quiet powerhouse

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Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#81

Post by techiferous »

lucperkins wrote: post #69
larrys wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ruby is by no means inferior to PHP, and you will get paid more per hour to program in Ruby." 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…

Right right right. I would add this: Ruby could well be considered "passé" someday (history tells us it necessarily will be), and the Rubyists of the future would really bristle at the suggestion that what they're doing is worth less simply because the market says it is.

The Rails MVC architecture is already past its prime, since it solves the problems of 2004. It's possible that startups may move more toward backend-as-a-service + JavaScript front-end instead of using Rails as their MVP.

In any event, the transition should be slow and I fully expect Ruby to be around for a long time, but people may notice a slow decline in demand for Rails programmers in the next few years compared to other hotter technologies. Sinatra (or some other Ruby framework) may replace Rails as a backend.

I'm a Rails programmer and I don't bristle at the suggestion that market demand changes. I welcome the change and adapt. I don't mind learning new languages.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#82

Post by lucperkins »

techiferous wrote: post #77
lucperkins wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but just out of curiosity: what do you think would be the language of choice beyond JS for the browsers of the future? I honestly don't have a clue. I might guess Python because it's so big at Google and Chrome is already more or less the industry standard.

We really need a quantum leap in language technology. Currently the Internet technologies have grown organically and because of this, most of what we use to program has been repurposed. HTML was meant to describe text, now it describes regions of the screen to be repainted as well as the "content" to be repainted. CSS was meant to add simple effects like bold, italic and simple newspaper-like positioning (float this…

Absolutely agreed. I really love JavaScript for a lot of reasons, but it still astonishes me that that our lingua franca was designed in 10 days. In 1995. For NETSCAPE.

I'm not so sure I would describe the mishmash as unambiguously depressing. It's also pretty inspiring seeing people using the mishmash in a sort of bricolage kind of way. One thinks of libraries like Underscore and Backbone that seek to account for some of the "deficiencies" in JS.

And don't even get me started on CoffeeScript.

But I think we would both agree that it's strange that no one has come along attempting to really REALLY break the mold by designing a new browser from the ground up that wasn't tied to JavaScript and the DOM (and maybe not even HTML!).

You go first :)

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#84

Post by lucperkins »

techiferous wrote: post #81
lucperkins wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right right right. I would add this: Ruby could well be considered "passé" someday (history tells us it necessarily will be), and the Rubyists of the future would really bristle at the suggestion that what they're doing is worth less simply because the market says it is.

The Rails MVC architecture is already past its prime, since it solves the problems of 2004. It's possible that startups may move more toward backend-as-a-service + JavaScript front-end instead of using Rails as their MVP. In any event, the transition should be slow and I fully expect Ruby to be around for a long time, but people may notice a slow decline in demand for Rails programmers in the next few years compared…

I think that Sinatra will become increasingly popular within the Ruby community (and financial help from Heroku/Salesforce can't hurt!), but I also think it's interesting that the micro-frameworks inspired by Sinatra (Flask for Python, Express for Node, plus many others), will become the fall-back for more advanced developers because they do a lot less specification and leave a lot more space to the developer.

So I say don't give up on Ruby. And if you insist on Rails-style MVC, there's always Padrino for Sinatra, Tower for Node, etc.

So much going on, so little time...

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#85

Post by getsat »

Killswitch wrote: post #61

Here's an idea.. If PHP is so bad.. Don't use it. Simple as that. Let the people who want to use it... There's absolutely very minimal things wrong with the language. Everyone's quick to compare it with Python or Rails or something else saying "PHP does this wrong that Python does right" well, if PHP did everything the same way as Python, Rails, or something else, when what makes it different? Who wants to use a lang…

> There's absolutely very minimal things wrong with the language.

I guess you missed this post that highlights a few of them: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

I agree on using what you enjoy using, but implying PHP isn't riddled with flaws is absurd.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#87

Post by Killswitch »

getsat wrote: post #85
Killswitch wrote: post #61

Here's an idea.. If PHP is so bad.. Don't use it. Simple as that. Let the people who want to use it... There's absolutely very minimal things wrong with the language. Everyone's quick to compare it with Python or Rails or something else saying "PHP does this wrong that Python does right" well, if PHP did everything the same way as Python, Rails, or something else, when what makes it different? Who wants to use a lang…

> There's absolutely very minimal things wrong with the language. I guess you missed this post that highlights a few of them: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... I agree on using what you enjoy using, but implying PHP isn't riddled with flaws is absurd.

Just like Python, Perl, Rails, Node.js, and any other language out there. Why all the hate towards PHP?

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#88

Post by zzzeek »

techiferous wrote: post #23

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…

> Server-side view rendering is on its way out. So this is not a real advantage.

server side is "on its way out" the way relational databases were "on their way out" when everyone was hysterical about NoSQL 18 months ago. That is, while client side rendering will become much more prominent, server side will remain quite popular as well. Hybrid approaches will likely become the norm.

We've written an app here with 100% client side templates, and while there are some nice patterns that fall out of it, unless you're writing your whole server in javascript as well, you have to give up a lot of conveniences offered by server side templating.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#89

Post by rhengles »

lucperkins wrote: post #75
techiferous wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to predict 10 years out, but not too hard to see 5 years ahead. Generally speaking, what's popular now existed in some form 5 years ago. JavaScript has a monopoly as the only language that runs in browsers. If this were to change, it will take years, not months, for browsers to start supporting another language (or go to a bytecode model). Then it will take more time for developers to start using these new…

I agree, but just out of curiosity: what do you think would be the language of choice beyond JS for the browsers of the future? I honestly don't have a clue. I might guess Python because it's so big at Google and Chrome is already more or less the industry standard.

Remember that Google already launched a second language for the browser - Dart. But no other browser vendor seem to want to support it...

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#90

Post by brendoncrawford »

> But I also think that it might be the best language to use in gaining an understanding of the fundamentals of web development

OP admittedly has less than one year of web development experience. Perhaps it would be wise for OP to gain a more thorough understanding of web programming before coming to conclusions like this.

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