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Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

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Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#191

Post by apitaru »

I worry that these kind of articles are not just annoying. They can cause real damage.

// A Dramatization //

Consider a young developer that knows a bit of PHP and wants to get started on her project. Then she (or "he", or "they" .. whatever) reads HN and finds out that PHP sucks. HN is Mecca to her, so she now spends the next 3 months figuring out that (truly) superior language. She picks whichever framework most HNers are (innocently) promoting at the time.

What she doesn't know is that those karma-gods took their sweet time to figure out 10 other things (== 1000 hours) before using said superior language and framework. It's supposed to be easy, she thinks. She gets frustrated because no-one had told her about those 10 other things. Time is running out on her savings. "I'm not a real hacker", she thinks. She never airs her project.

// End Scene //

Now run the same story, only she doesn't read HN and just codes the thing in PHP. It's actually a pretty cool project and ends up on first page of HN ...

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#192

Post by anuraj »

Unfortunatley, from language design perspective, both PHP and JavaScript are down right horrible. But they get the work done. In general dynamically typed scripting languages are playgrounds for errors - a statically typed paradigm might help - but we are too late for that.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#193

Post by tomkin »

I'll start off by saying I don't know shit all about PHP on a fundamental level. What I have noticed is there there is a sweet-spot of developers, engineers that need to be involved.

Comments for "Adobe confirms it won't support Android" [1] are typical. Achshar writes[2], "I think the problem isnt flash itself but the fact that it's proprietary. This is the reason we have such news in the first place. If adobe drops support, it's dead. No such thing with open stuff. No one entity has all the control. This is where html5 upper leg, no one can suddenly start charging you for using it or dictate it's development."

K, so if being open is what prevents crap, then why are we here talking about PHP? Maybe its that there are too many hands in the cookie jar. Maybe too many people working on fundamental design is the problem.

Whether its A/B testing of choices or how many people should work in a group together – numbers matter. And maybe being too open, rather, too many (different) people working on the same spec, can also be bad as well.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175399

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4176485

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#194

Post by postfuturist »

neovive wrote: post #178

I'm a long-time PHP programmer and have been programming with Lua (for gaming) for the past year and Python for command-line (NumPy) based scripts for the past two years. Obviously, in comparison, the syntax in Lua and Python are a thing of beauty as are the data structures (Lua tables FTW), but I always fall back to PHP for web projects since I haven't had the chance to completely grok the Python deployment process.…

mod_wsgi + Flask (or just about any WSGI-based python app) is relatively straight forward: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/deploying/mod_wsgi/

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#195

Post by CGamesPlay »

glassx wrote: post #46
CGamesPlay wrote: post #4

http://xkcd.com/927/ s/standards/web app platforms/

Okay, not directed at you, but... It was posted yesterday. Does this really have to be posted EVERY SINGLE DAY? Every time anyone suggests improving anything, or make another product in a crowded space, this comic is posted. The author of this article doesn't even suggest a new platform - he suggests improving a platform that exists to enable easier deployment. It was posted yesterday for Chocolat... do we really hav…

Well, not exactly. The author does suggest a new one:

> I'm starting a new open source web project with the goal of making the code as freely and easily runnable to the world as possible.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#196

Post by zaphar »

chez17 wrote: post #188
zaphar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I in no way meant to suggest that any criticism of PHP should be considered 'ivory tower'. I thought I was clear in my opinion that PHP is not perfect. I disagree that writing PHP code is 'painful'. It's perfectly fine for countless developers. Also, again, don't blame the tool for people who use it properly. If you think that it is literally impossible to write good code in PHP than you are being ivory tower.

I never said it's impossible to write good code in PHP. I said it's painful. Don't conflate that with impossible. You may not feel pain when you write it but that doesn't mean other people don't.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#197

Post by innerspirit »

kaffeinecoma wrote: post #112

Everyone's jumping on the PHP bashing. I don't think that's what this blog post was really about. Did you read to the end? 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. Kind of a cliffhanger ending... What are you building, Jeff?

Whatever it is, it better be fucking perfect after all that. This post is PHP bashing with a cherry on top. But mostly PHP bashing.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#198

Post by elorant »

The whole web development thing is broken. Even with cutting edge tools like asp.net mvc, or rails or whatever we're still using half a dozen different technologies to build a web page and to me it feels like I'm fighting around the http protocol trying to hack my way through various inconsistencies.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#200

Post by Arshdeep »

apitaru wrote: post #191

I worry that these kind of articles are not just annoying. They can cause real damage. // A Dramatization // Consider a young developer that knows a bit of PHP and wants to get started on her project. Then she (or "he", or "they" .. whatever) reads HN and finds out that PHP sucks. HN is Mecca to her, so she now spends the next 3 months figuring out that (truly) superior language. She picks whichever framework most HN…

"she doesn't read HN and just codes the thing in PHP. It's actually a pretty cool project and ends up on first page of HN ..." This happens alot. I see cool PHP projects on first page all the time.
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