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PHP is much better than what you think

fabien.potencier.org

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Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#111

Post by rplnt »

tomelders wrote: post #60

Hacker News really doesn't like PHP. There's a whole lot of blind prejudice in this thread Arguments against PHP are as futile as arguments in support of PHP. It's a programming language. The only thing that matters is the person using it. I'm sure Ruby, Node and Go are super duper awesome in a lot of academic ways, but unless we're talking about awesome things that have been made with them, it's just blah blah blah…

I don't think not liking language so broken as php is a blind prejudice. That language is garbage. His creator said so many times. You don't have to care about that, but don't act like it's not true.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#112

Post by aviraldg »

illumen wrote: post #65
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put my comments in another light, let me postulate this. If I started a project in python, Go, ruby, C# or even something that ran on the JVM, I could give reasons for why I would choose it for something non-trivial. Outside of "I can hire cheap devs" and "I can run it on el-cheapo hosting", I can't think of a good reason to specifically pick PHP.

Reducing the cost of your project is a pretty good reason to choose something. Which template language would you choose for those other platforms? One of 200 half-baked templating languages, or something more complete like php? PHP has better documentation than all of those platforms, so that could be another reason. It has more advanced, popular, and featureful Content Management Systems than all of those platforms.

> "Half baked"

Meh. jinja.pocoo.org

> "better documentation"

By what measure? docs.python.org is just as good (if not better.)

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#113

Post by dangrossman »

talkingquickly wrote: post #88
philjohn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP 5.4 has a local development server, so even that point is moot. But how hard is setting up apache, mysql and PHP? sudo yum install apache php mysql done. And anyway, for a serious project you need a local dev environment that somewhat mirrors live, and then staging (which exactly mirrors live).

Agree it's not that hard, I also don't think it's in any way a bad thing to have to learn how to do it (in fact probably a good thing). Just that learning how to do that is no easier than learning to deploy a rails/ django/ etc app so I'm not sure PHP really 'just works' any more than any other popular language.

You're comparing it to frameworks. You don't need a framework to handle URL routing, input parsing, output headers, etc. You save a PHP file and it's a URL; no routing. The query string, POST body, request headers, uploaded files, etc. are already parsed and sitting in variables in your global namespace. Output will automatically go to the web server, with the appropriate headers already set. No downloading or configuring of frameworks, no deploying. It "just works", to the point that an empty .php file with no source code at all is a working URL.

You can have a framework, you can do your own routing, input parsing, output sanitizing, and all the other things Rails/Django do. But unlike Ruby/Python, you don't need to just to get started on the web.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#114

Post by InclinedPlane »

yeahsure wrote: post #104
InclinedPlane wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that if you do care about nginx and fastcgi you can get blazing fast high-volume/low-overhead php hosting with varnish + nginx + php_fpm.

Not to be a hater, but what's funny about that? The point is exactly that. Most people don't care about "blazing fast".

Right, most people who decide to use PHP aren't overly concerned about performance. And the folks who are concerned about it tend to choose other solutions (say, node.js, for example). The funny part is that it's fairly easy to take even bloated PHP apps like wordpress and turn them into high performance sites on very modest hardware.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#115

Post by charliesome »

notinfinland wrote: post #53
tikhonj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And now Facebook is spending a ton of resource and man-hours programming around this. They had to write their own compiler! Also, I think they are trying to move away from PHP as quickly as possible without rewriting the entire site. The new projects and tools are not in PHP; moreover, I think most of the new people they hire never have to use PHP at all. Finally, just because they managed to use PHP to run a bi…

Do you have inside info on this? I've seen several people from Facebook comment that they are in fact using PHP. The fact that they're compiling to C++ is a consequence of the slowness of the programming language implementations of those languages that are used traditionally for web development. AFAIK Ruby was and still is the slowest of the bunch.

MRI Ruby is actually significantly faster than CPython these days.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#116

Post by InclinedPlane »

tikhonj wrote: post #37
illumen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook.

Yes. And now Facebook is spending a ton of resource and man-hours programming around this. They had to write their own compiler! Also, I think they are trying to move away from PHP as quickly as possible without rewriting the entire site. The new projects and tools are not in PHP; moreover, I think most of the new people they hire never have to use PHP at all. Finally, just because they managed to use PHP to run a bi…

You get the same issues almost no matter what you write a website in, whether it's PHP, C#, Rails, or node.js. When you get to the level of scale that Facebook is at you are in a realm that conventional web application tooling and frameworks don't cover. If anything the "best" and most trusted platform for what facebook is doing today would be java. Does that mean java is the "best" web platform? Not in the least.

The central fallacy here is imagining that one size could or should fit all, whether it's php or rails or anything.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#117

Post by rimantas »

tikhonj wrote: post #37
illumen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook.

Yes. And now Facebook is spending a ton of resource and man-hours programming around this. They had to write their own compiler! Also, I think they are trying to move away from PHP as quickly as possible without rewriting the entire site. The new projects and tools are not in PHP; moreover, I think most of the new people they hire never have to use PHP at all. Finally, just because they managed to use PHP to run a bi…

  > Yes. And now Facebook is spending a ton of resource and
  > man-hours programming around this. They had to write
  > their own compiler!
Is there a project of Facebook scale which does not have "their own" at the very core, no matter initial choice of technology? My understanding is that by solving problems no one had to solve before you are bound to create "your own" stuff. Even for desktop — didn't Excel have it's own compiler?

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#118

Post by josteink »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #102
josteink wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "proper" I mean building a piece of software which has a clean and maintainable implementation, logical semantics, proper encapsulation, and last but not least, which is solid . That is, should be able to withstand real world challenges and input-data without crashing, failing, silently failing, creating corrupted data or any combination of those things. Granted, it's been quite a while since I've done PHP, and it…

Right. So by your definition there are no good platforms to write "proper" web applications in, since it takes a lot of special effort to avoid all of those problems in any language (ruby, python, c, c#, java, node.js).

Some languages makes it easier, some make it hard. I would argue that PHP falls into the "hard" camp. And C would definitely be in the "very, very hard" camp.

And then you have stricter languages like C# which makes doing things proper the default, although often at the expense of making other things harder.

That said: This is definitely crossing the line between factual and subjective right now. And I can see how this is a subject open to discussion.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#119

Post by Kudos »

nicholassmith wrote: post #100
davidlumley wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing people mention Facebook as a reason why PHP is a great development language but they compile it down to C++ using their HipHop compiler, and from what I understand they develop Facebook _in spite of_ PHP ( http://www.quora.com/Do-Facebook-engineers-enjoy-programming... )

I got downvoted on another PHP related thread here for bringing that up. Can you truly say they use PHP when they've invested a hell of a lot of money into HipHop to essentially allow devs to write additional PHP code and transform it into C++ binaries? It's a strange way of using it for sure, but it seems to be effective for them.

Yes, you can truly say they use PHP. You are confusing the language and the interpreter. I've seen Facebook engineers comment on threads like this and say the same thing I just have.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#120

Post by corford »

aviraldg wrote: post #112
illumen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing the cost of your project is a pretty good reason to choose something. Which template language would you choose for those other platforms? One of 200 half-baked templating languages, or something more complete like php? PHP has better documentation than all of those platforms, so that could be another reason. It has more advanced, popular, and featureful Content Management Systems than all of those platforms.

> "Half baked" Meh. jinja.pocoo.org > "better documentation" By what measure? docs.python.org is just as good (if not better.)

Sorry have to quibble on that last sentence. I'm transitioning from PHP to Python at the moment and I constantly keep thinking "jesus, I wish docs.python.org was as good as php.net".
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