Live data from Hacker News

PHP is much better than what you think

fabien.potencier.org

1–10 of 346 posts

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#5
> PHP must have done something right, no?

Shitloads of people also believe in organised religion or naturopathy, doesn't mean that's a good thing.

> PHP is the best web platform... ever.

So because it's nearly caught up with other languages and you can install stuff easily if you have the prerequisite of knowing about composer? Bullshit.

I'm sure composer is great, but if your main argument is that PHP requires zero previous knowledge you can't really use that.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#7
"PHP is the best web platform ever", because it (finally) has a decent package manager. And don't mind that far fetched statement, the author will surely delete any rude comments.

Congrats, PHP has a package manager. This does nothing to shake my feeling that PHP's most ardent advocates have little hands-on experience with the more full-featured alternatives. You know, like the ones that also have decent package management without PHP's baggage and limitations.

edit: hell, calling PHP a "web platform" at all is insulting. Maybe if "web platform" is constrained to JSP/PHP/ASP style pages with no more complexity. Don't mind anything that requires websockets or anything other than... PHP style page rendering.

Can we stop with the "PHP is everywhere so it must be good meme"? PHP's availability makes it convenient; it doesn't make it good. I said it before and I'll say it again despite its painful obviousness. If you want to write a random script and upload it to some $2/month hosting, PHP is great. If you're going to build a real webapp that is going to have developers working on it and real users hitting it, you're going to be on a VPS or colo or on your own metal and have all sorts of choices that... have package management and aren't PHP. And if we're talking about throwaway quickie scripts, who really cares anyway?

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#8
No, it's exactly as bad _of a language_ as everyone is saying it is. In addition, it filled a void that is no longer a void (dynamic HTML generation in a programmer-friendly way) and has rightfully been supplanted as the go-to language for new projects by a number of superior languages.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#10
Granted, there has been a lot of PHP bashing lately and by and large, those who bash PHP the most - whether they are right or not - generally have little to no meaningful experience with it and are re-iterating whatever they've read about it. Fact.

However, this is just stockholm syndrome, plain and simple. Fabien is the author of Symfony.

Post reply on HN