There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
Bjarne Stroustrup
Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
21–30 of 341 posts
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#22Cue legions of PHP drones blubbing about how it does the job just fine, it's available everywhere and how it's used by Facebook and half the internet. We get it. We used to be PHP developers too. We took the time to learn other languages and now work with them. We enjoy our jobs significantly more than we used to. You might too.
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#23Sorry Jeff. The only thing broken with PHP is you (and other people like you). How much PHP do you use Jeff? Lets assume none. How is PHP hurting you? I mean seriously, how much contact do you even have with PHP? PHP is easy to learn, easy to make websites with. There are a tonne of paying jobs which require PHP. PHP runs a lot of websites. I am a PHP developer. I prefer Python but my PHP job pays me just fine. There…
The "problem" is that PHP's popularity breeds more popularity, uninformed choice, and single-language programmers that only know PHP (a real tragedy!). Bashing PHP is in a serious sense a public service if it can reduce any of these outcomes.
Yes, because PHP monoglots have their homepage set to codinghorror.com and browse right over to Hackernews afterwards. It is not a public service, it is a waste of screen space.
The startup scene's dirty little secret is that (anecdotal from several local companies I've worked for and/or collaborated with) PHP development is fast and cheap. Once you have proven you can solve a business problem and get funding, then you can decide if you really need to do a re-write.
There are just too many small companies focusing on real problems(instead of what language their webapp is built in) to make me think PHP is evil or that Rasmus Lerdorf is a bad person.
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#24The problem is that the barrier to entry with coding PHP for the web is to open up notepad for 30 seconds and then upload a file. It's hardly more complicated than writing a static HTML page.
The barrier to entry with any other popular language such as Python or ROR is that's it's hard to just toss a script up and see results.
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#25PHP got Facebook up and running, so it has that to its credit. And that's a huge credit.
As a result, Facebook engineers developed things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
Which is an impressive piece of technology, but makes you wonder if Facebook engineers wish their website wasn't written in PHP.
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#26This rant boils down to a tweet "If you don't like PHP then use another language or build a better one". What a revolutionary concept! That has worked wonders for languages since. Except not one has come out that is as simple as PHP thus PHP will continue to exist. Everyone that invents a language now focuses on abstract concepts that do not help the everyday developer do anything useful. Is it so shocking it's still around? If these rants are supposed to be rally cries they are really just awful attempts. Who wants to follow a whiner?
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#27PHP is broken in many little aspects but if you use a high quality framework, it's quite enjoyable to work with. The main gripes I have with it are in the details, like: You can't do: $something->doStuff()[0] if(empty($something->doStuff())) Overload fucking functions. Fuck. What sucks: The namespace separator. The naming conventions of the core functions. The speed. But, overall it works and elegant solutions can be…
"You can't do:
$something->doStuff()[0]"
Yes you can.
"Speed"
Care to expand on this one?
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#28Cue legions of PHP drones blubbing about how it does the job just fine, it's available everywhere and how it's used by Facebook and half the internet. We get it. We used to be PHP developers too. We took the time to learn other languages and now work with them. We enjoy our jobs significantly more than we used to. You might too.
I'm a full time PHP dev. My work is in PHP, my personal projects is in PHP, I even have a PHP framework (like everyone!) that I maintain.
Yet I thought this post was right on target. I'm busy cleaning and finishing up my PHP projects, and then I won't start another project in PHP. It will be ruby or python, or maybe I'll go functional. It depends on what I want to do. Yes, I can say everything that you so sarcastically proposed, but I also see the value in getting new coders to not start off with PHP.
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#29The irony of this post is boundless.
> Except now it's 2012, and fellow programmers are still writing long screeds bemoaning the awfulness of PHP!
Yes, and not only did Jeff write one in 2008, but he wrote another one just now. You can't write 10 paragraphs about what a blight PHP is and then pretend like you're being constructive by admonishing us to create better tools.
In fact what everyone is doing with these rants is bike-shedding about an easy-to-hate language. It makes an easy topic that drives a lot of traffic because everyone has an opinion. It's just tabloid garbage for the hacker set.
A more objective view of things is that PHP is a capable-if-ugly language, and it co-exists just fine with thousands of other programming languages and frameworks all with their own visions, communities, and production applications. The existence of PHP is not harming other "better" languages at all. And if you really want to make an argument about languages hurting the state of programming, how about asserting that the dominance of imperative languages is irreparably damaging the ability of most programmers to work in functional languages where solutions are fundamentally more robust. Or what about the damage that proprietary platforms like .NET (which Jeff uses if I'm not mistaken) or iOS do to the programming world by restricting progress to a single company.
I won't belittle Jeff's contributions to the software world, because Stack Overflow is an amazing service, but despite the fact that I hate PHP, Rasmus' contribution to the software world is certainly much more important than Jeff's feel-good blog fluff.
Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
#30PHP is broken in many little aspects but if you use a high quality framework, it's quite enjoyable to work with. The main gripes I have with it are in the details, like: You can't do: $something->doStuff()[0] if(empty($something->doStuff())) Overload fucking functions. Fuck. What sucks: The namespace separator. The naming conventions of the core functions. The speed. But, overall it works and elegant solutions can be…
"You can't do: $something->doStuff()[0]" Yes you can. "Speed" Care to expand on this one?
"You can't do: $something->doStuff()[0]"
Yes you can.
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AFAIK, yes, in PHP 5.4 only so far, which is only about 4 months old. The first 15+ years of PHP's life, no, that wasn't possible. I'm glad it's there now, but frustrated it took so long.