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Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

codinghorror.com

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Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#151

Post by johnernaut »

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?"

I agree with your metaphor relating working with PHP as "pulling nails from wood all day."

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#152

Post by kintamanimatt »

kamaal wrote: post #134
kintamanimatt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other languages besides PHP have you used? I think a lot of us dislike PHP because we're putting it in the context of better designed languages.

Unfortunately what many would define as 'better designed' doesn't always translate to useful software.

Can you give an example?

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#153

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

Mr Atwood says "One of the explicit goals of my next project is to do whatever we can to buff up a ... particular ... open source language ecosystem such that it can truly compete with PHP in ease of installation and deployment. "

But which open source language ecosystem? Is he talking about mono? ruby? python? erlang? something else?

Either he thinks it's obvious what he's talking about (hint: it isn't to me) in which case it's probably mono; or he's being deliberately coy and holding back for a big reveal later.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#155

Post by talkingquickly »

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…

"I don't need a hot new framework where my time is spent figuring out how to do basic CRUD operations"

Definitely see what you're saying but the flip side is that in my experience once you figure out the basic CRUD operations in a good framework, the amount of time it takes to implement them decreases hugely compared to repeatedly writing boilerplate in PHP.

Being able to get something functional up and running extremely rapidly was exactly what caused me to move most of my projects away from PHP although it would be fair to say I didn't give the corresponding PHP frameworks much of a chance as I had other reasons for wanting to consolidate codebases into either python or ruby and I hear Zend, Symfony and various others have come on a long way.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#156

Post by sequoia »

Yawn. Can someone explain to me why this sort of post keeps getting written? It seems like it's just snooty hipsterism. "I want to make sure people know that PHP is bad!" Please, point out to me the developer who has not heard this a million fucking times already.

Serious question: besides "cred" and just stirring the pot, what is the point of writing a post like this?

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#158

Post by scott_w »

optymizer wrote: post #130
agscala wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not brilliant. You can use a regular hammer just fine to pull nails out of wood all day AND to nail the occasional one in should the need arise.

Pulling nails all day long with one side will quickly wear off that side - it won't be as sharp and you'll have to throw away the tool. Double claws will allow you to use the SAME tool twice as long (that's 99% of what you do, remember?), will avoid rotating the hammer 180 degrees in certain situations (constrained space, two nails - one on the left, one on the right) and you get to hammer an occasional (1%) nail wit…

As someone who has been hammering nails and pulling out nails for the past 8 weeks, I can assure you that hitting them with the side of the hammer is a very, very bad idea.

Also, you never find yourself in a situation where you're just pulling out nails. A large number are too difficult to pull out, or will damage the structure you're pulling them from, so you hammer them down.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#159

Post by zaphar »

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…

It's not ivory tower for all of us. In my case it all boils down to simple discomfort. Writing PHP code is painful. Reading PHP code is painful. Fixing bugs in PHP code is painful.

I don't write rants about it but that's just because I left the language behind years ago and never looked back. But if I had to write for my job? Yeah I'd write a rant every other month probably. I would need some kind of outlet for all that pain.

It looks like in Jeffs article his rant was sparked by having to take a close look at php again and all that pain just bubbled back up.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#160

Post by jonstjohn »

I work with PHP everyday at my job. Is it my favorite language? No. Are we in a position like others (e.g., Facebook) where we have a ton of code and infrastructure build around PHP? Yes. Do I love my company? Yes. We have strict coding standards and high requirements for code quality. Gradually, we are changing out some of our code for Python, where it makes sense, but I doubt we'll re-write our entire applications anytime soon.

We've taken our two-claw hammer and done some fairly nice work with it.

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