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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

#251

Post by EvilTerran »

anthonyb wrote: post #157
EvilTerran wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

horrible scut work for companies that don't give a shit about quality or decent development, even though it costs them an arm and a leg maintaining their steaming legacy codebase Damn, you just described my job perfectly. "Test framework? What's that? Sounds like it'd take up too much valuable programmer time. PS enjoy walking on eggshells whenever you try to change something because there's no regressions." (╯°□°)╯┻…

The best bit about those environments is that the devs who crank out the most code (ie. LOC-wise) are feted, but they're basically just standing in the bottom of a hole, digging.

Ah, fortunately, we aren't measured by LoCs. Instead, we're measured by the number of items we manage to knock off our in-house half-arsed basecamp reimplementation. Not quite as bad, I guess.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#252

Post by Kudos »

anthonyb wrote: post #90
Kudos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first started looking for work here in Dublin, Ireland a few years ago, I saw tens of PHP web stack jobs, 1 RoR job and no Python jobs. While the tides have turned slightly, PHP web stack jobs here still far outnumber Ruby and Python equivalents, especially at the entry level. Some developers like PHP because they can get easily work doing it. Businesses likes PHP because they can more easily hire people. Argu…

Yeah - "shit" being the operative word there. The problem I've found is that there's a kind of anti Python paradox at work with PHP: Better than 95% of the PHP jobs out there are horrible scut work for companies that don't give a shit about quality or decent development, even though it costs them an arm and a leg maintaining their steaming legacy codebase. The 5% that you'd actually want to work for need to have a se…

So don't work for those companies?

I think you'll find a similar situation with companies using enterprise languages like .Net or Java, certainly here in Ireland where our universities heavily teach using those technologies.

Shitty graduates with no real interest in programming still end up in programming jobs. The shitty PHP developers I meet are invariably actually designers winging it as programmers.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#253

Post by Kudos »

Kiro wrote: post #207
mikegirouard wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Isn't Lithium just a fork? CakePHP 2.2 was released just a few days ago and they dropped PHP4 support in 2.* I think.

It's not a fork, it's a separate project by 2 former Cake developers.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#254

Post by debacle »

slurgfest wrote: post #249
debacle wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, this has been a while coming. There's so much PHP bashing that takes place now it's ridiculous. People take inefficiencies of the language from 5 years ago, tart them up as crimes against humanity, and then pretend that the only reason PHP is more popular than their language is because most people aren't smart enough to code in their language. Fabien, though I sometimes disagree with his technical choices…

A number of these critical articles point out problems from 5 years ago... which are also still problems today. I would have more sympathy if it were clearly evident that serious bugs were taken seriously rather than being ignored for a decade

Do you have an example of one of these serious bugs?

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#255

Post by lonnyk »

papsosouid wrote: post #212
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…

> 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

That is the argument. PHP is good b/c it allows a lot of people to be productive. C is probably a better written language then Ruby, but it doesn't matter b/c if you're doing web development you're not going to be as productive in C as you will be in Ruby.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#256

Post by papsosouid »

lonnyk wrote: post #255
papsosouid wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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 That is the argument. PHP is good b/c it allows a lot of people to be productive. C is probably a better written language then Ruby, but it doesn't matter b/c if you're doing web development you're not goi…

>That is the argument. PHP is good b/c it allows a lot of people to be productive

That isn't an argument, because every other scripting language also allows a lot of people to be productive. If A is equal to B in one respect, and far worse in dozens of other respects, pointing out the one way it is equal doesn't make an argument that A is good.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#257

Post by soulclap »

Xylakant wrote: post #132

One major problem I see in this article is that the stats that are cited as "proof" that PHP is the most widespread language are skewed. * The sample is not representative. It's the top 1 million according to alexa. * The percentage cited is "x percent of all pages that we can determine are..." which skews heavily in favor of PHP since PHP exposes it's version by default at least in older versions while other languag…

While Composer introduced a new package format, it can be used to retrieve PEAR packages, 'plain' zip files and even git, svn and hg repositories - and these can be integrated even if they don't contain a composer.json file, needing just a little extra configuration in your project. This is a huge step forward and very convenient.

http://getcomposer.org/doc/05-repositories.md

I don't know how Bundler handles this and it probably isn't even needed, as gems are just the standard in Ruby but PHP didn't really have a standard besides PEAR and Composer brings everything together.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#258

Post by edwinnathaniel »

Seldaek wrote: post #44
alexatkeplar wrote: post #25

If Fabpot seriously believes Composer is better than Bundler/apt/Maven, then he's crazy.

Have you used it at all? I'm not going to pretend it's better than Bundler, we took a lot of inspiration from it and we may have a few unique features compared to it, but that's it. apt is pretty different anyway since it does system level stuff. Maven I think is insane, it does way more than a package manager should do. That said when you look at Python for example, the package management landscape is a scattered me…

Maven is actually pretty sweet and good.

I know people have their own "perspective" when it comes to Maven: some said it's too big, too complicated, yadda-yadda. Some said it's the best tool out there.

The thing here is that you don't need to know Maven that much to use it. Especially if you were to use it with IDEs.

People typically use IDE to generate the absolute minimum Maven pom.xml file initially when they set up the project. From that point onward, if you're using mostly open-source library, the OSL website will give you snippet on how to add the JAR in Maven. All you have to do is to copy paste that snippet and you're done.

People who said that Maven is overly complicated typically tried to learn Maven from Zero to Expert rather than to "just use it".

It didn't take very long for me or many of my co-workers to become familiar and use Maven effectively from not-knowing to "yes, we can have Rails-like project structure/automation , deployment and packaging for multiple environment in place".

Sometime I'd argue that there's no point separating Bundler, Rake, and Gems. You need all 3 of them and that's what Maven does (and more but you don't have to know until you do...)

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#259

Post by TylerE »

ericingram wrote: post #236
anthonyb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - "shit" being the operative word there. The problem I've found is that there's a kind of anti Python paradox at work with PHP: Better than 95% of the PHP jobs out there are horrible scut work for companies that don't give a shit about quality or decent development, even though it costs them an arm and a leg maintaining their steaming legacy codebase. The 5% that you'd actually want to work for need to have a se…

> "Better than 95% of the PHP jobs out there are horrible scut work for companies that don't give a shit about quality or decent development" Show me your data? You couldn't be more wrong about the companies using PHP. The last startup I worked at in San Francisco, well funded and very successful, used PHP. I was approached by many well known names all using PHP, most of them exciting new companies working with edge…

and for every startup company using php, there are 100 shitty local ad agencies knocking out brochure-ware wordpress sites.

Re: PHP is much better than what you think

#260

Post by rbanffy »

> PHP is used by 77.9% of all the websites (...) PHP must have done something right, no?

My favorite answer to this is "because millions of lemmings cannot be wrong".

PHP is a horrible language. Like FORTRAN and COBOL. Like BASIC.

Let me be clear about this. It is a horrible language.

Having said that, a good programmer can make good programs even in the most horrible (and I'm deliberately excluding the deliberately horrible ones) language. It is possible to write elegant PHP just like it's possible to write concise Java. All it takes is lots of discipline. Something most programmers, sadly, lack.

PHP is immensely popular and its runtime is incredibly easy to deploy. I sometimes have small fights with Apache to enable some WSGI app (I never remember every detail I have to include in the configuration) but PHP is unusually easy to set up. That probably is a good explanation on why it's so popular on cheap hosting - because it's easy to manage. That also makes it a good choice for quick projects such as hotsites. I prefer to do those on Google's App Engine, but this is a question of taste, not of availability. In all fairness, those sites could be developed in ASP/VBScript and I wouldn't regard that as a mortal offense - they'll live for months under a single release lifecycle. Use whatever gets the job done for less. And programmers without discipline usually cost less.

Much like there are millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC we'll never get rid of, there are millions of lines of PHP that'll keep running for decades. PHP is a fact of life. I won't be using it for any new projects and would question the sanity of anyone willing to start a long life one with it, but each developer must choose which tools they want to spend their lives with.

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