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Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

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Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#101

Post by xd »

seiji wrote: post #83
xd wrote: post #8

Hey Jeff, let's throw down the gauntlet. You're obviously an experienced developer. I've been in the game for over 11years so should have enough experience to tackle you on this bigoted rant. You choose a problem that you think PHP can't solve[well]. You solve it using your high level language of choice and I'll solve it using PHP. Let's compare the outcome on reliability, ease of re-factoring, speed, whatever .. the…

Congratulations! You just Blub Paradox'd yourself. At this point in your knowledge cycle, you are unable to understand something more complex than what you already know. Knowledge is power. Defending your own knowledge by refusing to expand and learn something new is cutting yourself off at the knees (or fingers, as it may be).

I'm sorry, but at what point did I say I was refusing to "expand and learn something new"?

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#102

Post by kalmsy »

cageface wrote: post #81
polyfractal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debatable. What's your end goal? If your primary goal is making money (through the web) and you are non-technical, easier does in fact equal better. The GP's brother isn't going to stop what he's doing and learn Ruby so he can rewrite his whole website in gloriously succinct and elegant code. He's going to tweak his site, continue making money and stop caring about whatever the hell his site is written in.

Life is full of tempting shortcuts. Take them at your peril.

I'll still get there before you.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#103

Post by xd »

EvilTerran wrote: post #49
xd wrote: post #8

Hey Jeff, let's throw down the gauntlet. You're obviously an experienced developer. I've been in the game for over 11years so should have enough experience to tackle you on this bigoted rant. You choose a problem that you think PHP can't solve[well]. You solve it using your high level language of choice and I'll solve it using PHP. Let's compare the outcome on reliability, ease of re-factoring, speed, whatever .. the…

"fucking childishness" I love that sort of phrase, I really do. It's so ... lacking in self-awareness. Really tells you a lot about the attitude of whoever utters it.

Cool story, bro.

Edit: OK, I'll bite. Um, so you're telling me, I lack self awareness because I said "fucking childishness" .. and that you understand me on some level because of it. You might want to get down of that high horse of yours.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#104

Post by nicholassmith »

cletus wrote: post #48

I seriously groaned when I saw this post (title). I was expecting an elitist diatribe about PHP (because this is perennially popular amongst particular programmers) but that's not what this post is intended to be. Interestingly Jeff does take the usual potshots at PHP almost like he thinks he'll lose street cred if he doesn't but the basic message I agree with: if you want someone to stop doing something you consider…

Please don't use Facebook as an example, the fact they gave in and built HipHop to get it into C++ spoils it. Are they coding in PHP? Sure! Are they actually using it like it's meant to be used? Not quite!

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#106

Post by mikeryan »

nicholassmith wrote: post #104
cletus wrote: post #48

I seriously groaned when I saw this post (title). I was expecting an elitist diatribe about PHP (because this is perennially popular amongst particular programmers) but that's not what this post is intended to be. Interestingly Jeff does take the usual potshots at PHP almost like he thinks he'll lose street cred if he doesn't but the basic message I agree with: if you want someone to stop doing something you consider…

Please don't use Facebook as an example, the fact they gave in and built HipHop to get it into C++ spoils it. Are they coding in PHP? Sure! Are they actually using it like it's meant to be used? Not quite!

Almost every web stack at the scale of a Facebook at some points starts writing some part of it in C. Its a pretty consistent pattern.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#107

Post by RobAley »

papsosouid wrote: post #99
RobAley wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I cited Rails is that its usually proposed as the better alternative in these anti-PHP threads. Most "high" performance PHP doesn't use one of the usual-suspects in the framework world and can easily beat Rails (and usually plain ruby too). Edit: I should add "in my experience" to the end of that, I have no stats to hand.

>Most "high" performance PHP doesn't use one of the usual-suspects in the framework world and can easily beat Rails (and usually plain ruby too). If you skip a framework on both languages, they end up as the two slowest languages. Hard to say if either is faster overall, but they are both awful. Using jruby provides a huge performance increase, and PHP really has nothing to compare with that.

To be honest I've not used jruby. It would be interesting to see how it compares to implementations PHP on the JVM such as IBM's WebSphere sMash, and Caucho's Quercus. Do you have any views on the performance of jruby vs hiphop'd PHP?

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#108

Post by acoyfellow »

chez17 wrote: post #73

Ok, so here it goes. I haven't commented on this site for over a year. Full disclosure: I am an average programmer compared to many here. I come to this site to improve my self and read about what brilliant and amazing things you all do. Now you have a reference. I use PHP on a daily basis, have been for years. I am a freelance developer who has been able to carve out a living with a lot of hard work and a lot of luc…

"Finally, let's use his tool analogy. PHP is a double-clawed hammer. What if your job was to remove nails from wood all day?"

Brilliant.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#109

Post by jerf »

gecko wrote: post #85
ars wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> default to HTML escaping on output ??? Is that a joke? Don't do that! That's just as bad as magic quotes. > no register globals It hasn't existed for a quite a while now in PHP. Other than that I quite agree with what you wrote. Most of the criticism of PHP is simply a desire to be special. If lots of people are using something, you want to make sure not to, so that you feel special. Now that you've decided not to…

> > default to HTML escaping on output > ??? Is that a joke? Don't do that! That's just as bad as magic quotes. Microsoft's Razor and Python's Django templates have both shown that HTML-escaping-by-default can be cleanly done in a way that is not magical and that is highly reliable. I'm not honestly sure what you're protesting here.

In a way, "default escaping" isn't even the way to think of it. There is everywhere functions to emit raw characters and to emit them HTML-encoded. "Default" escaping just means that the function that emits HTML-encoded characters is easy to get at and smoother to use than the raw one.

I understand the debates Django had about changing what the unspecified output function did, but nowadays if you're building a new template language of any kind it's an absolute no-brainer: Make it easier to encode than to bypass encoding. The alternative is just awful.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#110

Post by [deleted] »

gecko wrote: post #85
ars wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> default to HTML escaping on output ??? Is that a joke? Don't do that! That's just as bad as magic quotes. > no register globals It hasn't existed for a quite a while now in PHP. Other than that I quite agree with what you wrote. Most of the criticism of PHP is simply a desire to be special. If lots of people are using something, you want to make sure not to, so that you feel special. Now that you've decided not to…

> > default to HTML escaping on output > ??? Is that a joke? Don't do that! That's just as bad as magic quotes. Microsoft's Razor and Python's Django templates have both shown that HTML-escaping-by-default can be cleanly done in a way that is not magical and that is highly reliable. I'm not honestly sure what you're protesting here.

[deleted]
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