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PHP Addiction

marco.org

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Re: PHP Addiction

#91

Post by phillmv »

adventureful wrote: post #55

The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. And that's a terrible place to sit for any product. It runs half the Internet quite well, but if you went by the posting on HN, you'd think it was Windows Vista. I've probably read every article critical of PHP that has hit the front page of HN in the last few years, and the one thing they all have in common is the vague refrain that PHP is a…

>And yet the gap between tangible proof of that being the case in real world use and the gossip of it supposedly being true, couldn't be wider.

Just because something is shitty to use doesn't mean you can't do productive work in it. We're all just poking Turing machines here. Let's not even talk about the enormous weight of sunk cost fallacies.

Re: PHP Addiction

#92

Post by ch0wn »

bkorte wrote: post #42
adventureful wrote: post #28

Yeah, I wrote Tumblr in PHP, but I'm eager to abandon it. You know, it's just an easy to use, broken language that you can scale a site to 15 billion page views per month with. I'm sure my next project will need a better language, because it's going to scale to 400 billion page views per month, and PHP just isn't going to cut it. Hilarious suggestions contained throughout his post.

Where did he say anything about scaling in the article?

I was actually pleasantly surprised by not reading about the usual "webscale" BS in these two articles. Both authors made it very clear that this is not about being able or unable to build something with a given language, but the quality of how you do it.

Re: PHP Addiction

#93

Post by denysonique »

maratd wrote: post #69
adventureful wrote: post #55

The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. And that's a terrible place to sit for any product. It runs half the Internet quite well, but if you went by the posting on HN, you'd think it was Windows Vista. I've probably read every article critical of PHP that has hit the front page of HN in the last few years, and the one thing they all have in common is the vague refrain that PHP is a…

> The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. Hey now, we're all human. Even engineers. As soon as something becomes popular, it is no longer cool. Cool is the next popular. Cool is being different. That's just how things work. Apache is slooooow (NGINX is cool!). MySQL is retarded (Postgres is cool!). PHP sucks (Python is cool!). Red Hat is lame (Ubuntu is cool!). See a trend? The tech…

Ubuntu is more popular than RedHat Linux

Re: PHP Addiction

#94

Post by brlewis »

blindhippo wrote: post #66
z92 wrote: post #33

Here is another point that highlights the problem: If I want to write a hello world application in PHP, it's neither as long as nor as short as Rather it's simply: hello world. Just type in those 11 characters in a text file and save it as hello.php. Now load it on your browser [or run it from command line] and it will print hello world. I don't think it can get any more simpler than that in other languages. PHP was…

What people continue to fail to explain is why PHP needs to be replaced. Why not improve it? After the millions of man hours that have gone into the plethora of open source PHP based frameworks and tools (aka, what powers the internet) - wouldn't we as a community want to improve the foundations rather then scrap them entirely? You know, like what happened with Javascript...

When you "improve" inconsistency and misfeatures, you're essentially replacing anyway. Else you're building a mess of backward compatibility like in the fopen() example in http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Re: PHP Addiction

#95

Post by RegEx »

sid05 wrote: post #86
Killswitch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As easy as PHP in what sense? That Python is basically part of all OS' now or as easy as putting in in a .php file and uploading it to your server? I severely doubt it's as easy as the latter. I'd like to see an article that explains in less than 140 chars how to deploy a simple app as Hello World to the web in Python without the use of a framework like Django or Flask. Edit: In the amount of chars Twitter accepts, h…

Your example of simplicity is a bit conflated since you don't even need PHP to put hello world on a internet visible web page in the first place: echo 'hello world' > /var/www/index.html Set up something a little more useful albeit trite such as a blog and you wouldn't be able to do that in 10 minutes with PHP without using a framework either. PHP is great for "unit testing" of ideas but once it grows out of that it'…

> Installing git and installing Heroku, you're only 2 lines of code away though.

Which requires you to learn git.

Re: PHP Addiction

#96

Post by j_baker »

maratd wrote: post #69
adventureful wrote: post #55

The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. And that's a terrible place to sit for any product. It runs half the Internet quite well, but if you went by the posting on HN, you'd think it was Windows Vista. I've probably read every article critical of PHP that has hit the front page of HN in the last few years, and the one thing they all have in common is the vague refrain that PHP is a…

> The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. Hey now, we're all human. Even engineers. As soon as something becomes popular, it is no longer cool. Cool is the next popular. Cool is being different. That's just how things work. Apache is slooooow (NGINX is cool!). MySQL is retarded (Postgres is cool!). PHP sucks (Python is cool!). Red Hat is lame (Ubuntu is cool!). See a trend? The tech…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Just because a technology is "cool" doesn't mean that you're acting like a high schooler for using it. Nor does using non-"cool" technology make you an adult.

Re: PHP Addiction

#97

Post by arms »

maratd wrote: post #69
adventureful wrote: post #55

The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. And that's a terrible place to sit for any product. It runs half the Internet quite well, but if you went by the posting on HN, you'd think it was Windows Vista. I've probably read every article critical of PHP that has hit the front page of HN in the last few years, and the one thing they all have in common is the vague refrain that PHP is a…

> The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. Hey now, we're all human. Even engineers. As soon as something becomes popular, it is no longer cool. Cool is the next popular. Cool is being different. That's just how things work. Apache is slooooow (NGINX is cool!). MySQL is retarded (Postgres is cool!). PHP sucks (Python is cool!). Red Hat is lame (Ubuntu is cool!). See a trend? The tech…

> Now, if this is just a hobby, who gives a shit? Roll with the cool kids. If you're starting a business, be aware that the future welfare of your family is relying on your decisions. Think real hard about that.

Truer words have never been spoken. When you think about it that way, these types of arguments about why language X rocks/sucks become trivial and unimportant.

I like to geek out over languages and technologies as much as the next guy, but there needs to come a time when you put your foot down and make a decision based on more important reasons than personal preference/feelings towards a language.

Re: PHP Addiction

#98

Post by berntb »

btilly wrote: post #73
blindhippo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people continue to fail to explain is why PHP needs to be replaced. Why not improve it? After the millions of man hours that have gone into the plethora of open source PHP based frameworks and tools (aka, what powers the internet) - wouldn't we as a community want to improve the foundations rather then scrap them entirely? You know, like what happened with Javascript...

The one thing that can never be fixed is a poorly chosen feature. PHP has a lot of them. And they interact badly.

Yes, but...

All languages (like any system) will have cruft, after a while. Is the solution really to do a periodic break with backwards compatibility for purity reasons, Python 3 style?

There should be a better way?!

What about a low level machine like Java/.Net and just let the next language evolve on top of that -- so old libraries could run? (Maybe there could be Xcompilers for Ruby/Perl 6/xxx to the Perl "bytecode", to take advantage of CPAN?)

Re: PHP Addiction

#99

Post by ijoyce »

maratd wrote: post #87
ijoyce wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP "runs half the Internet quite well"? Source?

Common sense. Calculate how much traffic Wikipedia + Facebook + Wordpress + All The Rest generate. Calculate in the fact that most services talk to other services and more importantly, talk to Facebook. Click on a link? I promise, at some point, PHP is involved.

When you actually have a real source or numbers, let me know.

Re: PHP Addiction

#100

Post by calinet6 »

maratd wrote: post #69
adventureful wrote: post #55

The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. And that's a terrible place to sit for any product. It runs half the Internet quite well, but if you went by the posting on HN, you'd think it was Windows Vista. I've probably read every article critical of PHP that has hit the front page of HN in the last few years, and the one thing they all have in common is the vague refrain that PHP is a…

> The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. Hey now, we're all human. Even engineers. As soon as something becomes popular, it is no longer cool. Cool is the next popular. Cool is being different. That's just how things work. Apache is slooooow (NGINX is cool!). MySQL is retarded (Postgres is cool!). PHP sucks (Python is cool!). Red Hat is lame (Ubuntu is cool!). See a trend? The tech…

> It has nothing to do with any objective qualities of platforms.

The problem is, it often does take into account objective qualities.

The downsides of popular platforms are often ignored because they carry with them all the advantages of popularity: good support, a well-established community, a wealth of experienced people you can hire or draw upon.

These are not "objective qualities" of the technology, but real side-effects of popularity. In fact, you could say it's a technology's popularity that fools you into ignoring many of the objective qualities of the platform.

I think part of tech hipsterism (which, let's face it, is what you're talking about) is a rejection of this groupthink, and a return to true technological thinking. It's the ability to say "we don't care what's popular, we're just going to look at what works again and see where we end up." I think this very idea is considered 'cool' in the tech world because we tend to like people who think logically about their problems and don't just blindly follow what people have already done. We like people who look at lesser-used technologies (which all of the "cool" tech you listed above actually are) just on their technical merits alone. This is, perhaps, one reason they're considered cool; because it takes actual thought to break away from simply using what everyone else has used for years.

So I think you have noticed a definite trend, but I don't believe it's as purely social as you imply.

That said, "be aware that the future welfare of your family is relying on your decisions" is an argument that's used in so much Enterprise software that it's almost scary. Often the most popular, most entrenched, least risky, biggest company with the largest pockets wins because the CTO can't be blamed for fucking up that decision. It's an incredible driver of technological stagnation in the Enterprise world. It is great to think through your decisions to their far-reaching impact, but be thankful that all of technology is not driven by that kind of strictness, or we'd never use anything new.

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