Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

>I wasn't disagreeing, and in fact I didn't even express an opinion regarding this. Success means a lot of different things to people; I was stating your definition of success for clarity.

Oh, alright. Thought you meant it was not a good metric.

>The user doesn't care whether I write a website's back end in PHP, Ruby, Python, Haskell, C++, Ada, Clojure, or even Erlang. The success depends on how useful the site is and how well it's marketed. This isn't circular reasoning. There are more websites written in PHP because PHP is an easy language for beginners and therefore more common compared to Ruby or Python, for example.

Yes, that second argument is not circular reasoning because it searches for the causes.

But the argument in your previous post, I read it as: "PHP is used by more of the popular sites because PHP is used by more sites in general" Which is kinda circular, mostly repeating "PHP is popular".

>It's an absolutely untenable position to assert that the programming language itself affects how much traffic an site receives, which is what you originally defined as "success".

I did the opposite: the success of the site affects the programming language.

That is, I am a pragmatist: I see every successful site built with a programming language as one more verification that said language is good for building sites with (whatever the reasons).

If we have 200,000 high volume sites in PHP and 0 in X, as a pragmatist, I will avoid using X in my next high volume site project.

Working from that, one can also see why it is so. For example:

1) it's because X is obscure, so I wouldn't be able to get a team easily. Perhaps even no one in my city, at least without adding the overhead of teaching them X first.

2) it's because X is more expensive to host. I'll need to get a VPS whereas I can just put PHP on a $10/year server.

3) it's because PHP has more libs and stuff. This DB/service API/etc I want to use does not have X drivers (or has a semi-abandoned project).

4) it's because PHP has Drupal/Wordpress and I can have a high traffic portal/news style site in minutes, whereas X has only ho-hum solutions for that, or I would have to build one from scratch.

and so on.

Surprisingly, many so called "scientists" and "engineers" choose to argue from first principles. "X is a bona fide academic language, and has all those meta programming features, higher-order types and such, so you are crazy to use PHP over X for your project".

So, instead of reading the situation pragmatically, and finding the real pain points PHP eases and why it's used, they resort to idealistic rants about how masses are ignorant, "beating the averages", etc etc.

Well, this Zuckerberg guy, with his average PHP, beat Viaweb's Lisp by about 100x better valuation. If, according to "beating the averages", ViaWeb's success was a pro-Lisp point, why isn't that a pro-PHP point? Or does it only work when Lisp wins (as in, "ViaWeb won because of Lisp but Facebook won despite of PHP"). Talk about having it both ways!

Note that I specifically wrote >1m visits per day.

Note also that the mention of one site is too literal and meaningless interpretation of my question, which is more rhetorical, and should be read like: "There are TONS of high volume PHP sites and very very very few high volume Lisp sites".

That said: the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy is only a fallacy half of the time, like most of those so-called logical fallacies.

They assume a perfectly logical world, where you have infinite information at your disposal and infinite time to check it. E.g I'd rather listen to my doctor on my medical condition over a random guy on the subway, even if that's "appeal to authority".

Similar cracks in the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. There ARE cases where a category/taxonomy is used badly, and no true member of said taxonomy would so something. That is, membership in a taxonomy is not always 100% solid, and you can have true and less true (fuzzy) membership.

E.g

- No KKK member would attend a NWA concert. - But I just saw a KKK member rocking it at a NWA concert. - Well, no _TRUE KKK member_ would ever attend one.

It's obvious that the first guy is correct: no TRUE KKK would ever attend a NWA concert.

Now, a random KKK member could possibly attend one (say, out of curiosity). The "no TRUE" argument in this case, says not so much the impossibility of an event happening, but that it is against the very concept of the taxonomy under discussion for it to happen.

Hackers shouldn't touch the "logical fallacy" stuff with a ten foot pole. They presuppose that conversations and argumentation can just go "by numbers", without examining each individual case.

This problem has already been solved in the Haskell ecosystem [1]. For example, you get typesafe URLs so that if you have a standard query like myapp.com/person/345 you can't mistakenly misuse 345 as an article id. Every input string is tracked by the type system so the possibility for escape issues, injection attacks or cross site scripting exploits to sneak in is minimal. Static types also make sure that internal links can not be broken - if for example you decide to change the above URL to myapp.com/getperson instead, your application won't compile until you've fixed every other part that still references the old link .../person, and so on.

Not to mention the (also type safe) dead easy to use persistence framework.

I'm still in the process of evaluating different solutions for my next web project but so far I'm pretty sure this is gonna be my go-to framework in the future.

[1] http://www.yesodweb.com

It's a shame you are suffering from what I can only assume are poor PHP code bases. This is unfortunately very common with PHP because of it's popularity.

I've dealt with my fair share of poor PHP code bases, and have experienced PHP mature over the years into a very capable language; so know how to wield it to the best of it's abilities. If you ever need any advice feel free to email me.

I for one will freely admit that my Haskell still sucks and so I presume I'm not even smart enough yet to start on Agda. Do you recommend it? Do you find it to be (one of) the highest known point on the power continuum?