PHP is much better than what you think • Hacker News Board

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#211

Post by xd » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:31 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #208

xd wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"PHP's most ardent advocates have little hands-on experience..." And from what I've been seeing, PHP's most ardent critics have little hands-on experience with PHP, itself. Edit: see this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4198900 current rambling nonsense I'm having to contend with. Edit edit: the voting is up and down, I can only assume that ~ 50% of this community just don't care about facts and would rather subs…

Yeah, sure seems like this guy has no clue about PHP alright: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

And I guess this guy doesn't either: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177516

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#212

Post by papsosouid » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:33 PM UTC

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…

>Hacker News really doesn't like PHP. There's a whole lot of blind prejudice in this thread

PHP apologists make this claim every time PHP is mentioned here. And yet the threads are always full of these apologists, claiming PHP is awesome because facebook uses it, or because every cheap shitty webhost has it installed. Never making any actual argument that PHP is good, or rebuttal to the numerous arguments that PHP is bad. I'm sorry, but for a site that is supposed to have an intelligent, technically literate userbase, HN has far too many head in the sand PHP supporters, not too many PHP haters.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#213

Post by papsosouid » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:34 PM UTC

xd wrote: post #211

papsosouid wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure seems like this guy has no clue about PHP alright: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

And I guess this guy doesn't either: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177516

He seems like he does. You might notice I never said no PHP apologist understands PHP, but rather contradicted your (frequently posted) lie that PHP detractors don't understand PHP. Of course, he doesn't offer an actual rebuttal to much, mainly just "well yeah it sucks, but I know it sucks so its ok".

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#214

Post by xd » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:36 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #213

xd wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I guess this guy doesn't either: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177516

He seems like he does. You might notice I never said no PHP apologist understands PHP, but rather contradicted your (frequently posted) lie that PHP detractors don't understand PHP. Of course, he doesn't offer an actual rebuttal to much, mainly just "well yeah it sucks, but I know it sucks so its ok".

"well yeah it sucks, but I know it sucks so its ok"

Sorry, but I really don't see how you got to that assumption. Can you enlighten me to what you are seeing that I'm not?

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#215

Post by slurgfest » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:37 PM UTC

robryan wrote: post #86

I think at this stage it would be tempting to give some kind of penalty to PHP good/bad posts. Pretty much everyone who cares one way or the other has taken a position and there is a minimal amount of people actually moving one way or the other. Anyone who frequents Hacker News is well aware of the options out there for web development. If some people decide that they like PHP for any number of reasons and produce aw…

There are almost no "X killed my startup posts" at all. Indeed, there are very few "killed my startup posts" of any kind. So that means nothing about PHP. It means that people don't see a lot of benefit in publicly advertising failure and then flagellating themselves for their own choice of tools. People don't do that, they just quietly switch.

People do hear about the problems with PHP, when they are mentioned. It's good to have specifics available rather than just delivering some general subjective statement, which is why we get one article after another highlighting various screwups in the project itself.

You can use any Turing complete language to write programs. That sets an upper bound on how difficult it can be to do virtually anything. But this is hardly a defense of PHP. There are also principles of good engineering beyond "write something which seems to work for now in any way possible".

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#216

Post by giulianob » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:38 PM UTC

mikegirouard wrote: post #186

Kiro wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so horrible about CakePHP?

Its legacy (who wants to still support PHP4?). AFAIK, it's no longer maintained; I believe all the core development is now taking place on the Lithium project: http://lithify.me/

CakePHP 2.x did a major rewrite of nasty parts and dropped support for PHP 4. It's actually very well done and much more consistent now.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#217

Post by mekwall » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:40 PM UTC

As a developer I have great respect for Fabien Potencier and his contributions to the PHP community. Sadly thoguh, I think he's done so in vain. You cannot fix what's infinitely broken.

* PHP may have evolved to support many new methods and features that is expected from a modern language, but mixing and mashing ideas and implementations from other languages in a semingly random fashion doesn't make a language good; only messy. It still and always will lack a proper philosophical design.

* PHP's ecosystem is far from healthy. It's flooded with outdated and/or badly written code, so it really doesn't matter if dependency management is good. Wordpress is proof of this, just look at the source.

* PHP is neither easy to learn or code (correctly). It's just so forgivable that you can do more or less everything wrong and still have a working application. Fabien, you should know this.

* PHP is a resource hog compared to the competition; even with the tiniest stack. I.e. running Node.js will use less then a third of the resources compared to a LAMP stack.

There will never be a "best language" to rule them all. Every situation have different needs. Sure, PHP have filled its purpose during the years, but I'm certain that we've hit peak-PHP. It's the IE of programming languages, and its slow death have already begun.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#218

Post by frewsxcv » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:41 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #137

scotty79 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hacker News really doesn't like PHP. But Y? function Y($F) { $func = function ($f) { return $f($f); }; return $func(function ($f) use($F) { return $F(function ($x) use($f) { $ff = $f($f); return $ff($x); }); }); }

You can write that code in almost any language and it will look bad and be hard to mentally parse.

That might be true, but it's a lot easier to do in PHP than Python for example

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#219

Post by slurgfest » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:47 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #195

slurgfest wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a host doesn't stay up to date and doesn't let you stay up to date, you shouldn't be using it!

I'm referring more to end-users of PHP packages :/

I feel for you :(

If people are so incompetent that they can't choose a decent host or install a recent PHP (or deploy on anything but mod_php) then there is probably nothing that package maintainers can do to rescue them, no matter how much they want to.

End users need more help but there are lines between "end user" and "needs to learn things" and "stubborn idiot". If you want to write and deploy web apps, it is your JOB to choose a halfway decent host, keep dependencies up to date and deploy with some appropriate technology!

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#220

Post by papsosouid » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 1:50 PM UTC

xd wrote: post #214

papsosouid wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He seems like he does. You might notice I never said no PHP apologist understands PHP, but rather contradicted your (frequently posted) lie that PHP detractors don't understand PHP. Of course, he doesn't offer an actual rebuttal to much, mainly just "well yeah it sucks, but I know it sucks so its ok".

"well yeah it sucks, but I know it sucks so its ok" Sorry, but I really don't see how you got to that assumption. Can you enlighten me to what you are seeing that I'm not?

Read the thread, it isn't like his post went without responses.