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PHP is much better than what you think

fabien.potencier.org

11–20 of 346 posts

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#13
PHP is easy to deploy on. That's it. That's why it's popular. It's braindead easy to go from text editor to web URL, it's braindead easy to unzip someone else's project and run it. It requires virtually zero sysops experience to be able to use. You don't even have to worry about setting those +x bits like you used to in the good old cgi-bin days.

For those of us who aren't afraid of a little ops work, there are far better options, and I say that as developer that's been using PHP regularly for going on 13 years.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#16
For reference's sake, this article is written by Fabien Potencier, the creator of the symfony framework. This guy's probably single-handedly responsible for lifting the PHP community to a higher level, by making great software (which, when he started, was pretty unique, with horrible hacks-upon-hacks like CakePHP being the norm), and by showing people how to do so.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#17
post #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…

Honest question: Do you have more than a months professional experience writing modern PHP?

While I love appreciate the Java ecosystem with amazing stuff like Play framework, Scala, Camel (several apache sub projects actually), Python micro frameworks etc there still is something magic about PHP. I still haven't made up my mind but there is something about really fast turnaround time, transparency, and shared nothing from the ground up. Maybe "Just Works" is the word. (Cheap hosting and next to zero installation just to be an argument but I guess Play is even better in this regard.)

(background: I am allowed to be opinionated on this (programming since I was a kid) professionally mostly Java but also PHP (greenfield, maintenance), and since this is also my hobby I have also scripted non-trivial python, tried rails back at 1.0 etc.)

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#20
I disagree, just because PHP has recently obtained features long available in other languages doesn't bring it close to being on the same level. All the other ecosystems are still light years ahead in terms of features, and contain fewer gotchas.
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