Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#111

Post by eevee » Thu, May 16, 2013, 1:52 AM UTC

Osiris wrote: post #95

adambard wrote: post #84

I cannot possibly hope to express the reasons I dislike PHP better than this comprehensive article: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... An excerpt: > I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there. > You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’…

Really? I've heard all these ridiculous analogies but for some reason no one's every written up actual PHP examples to explain why this is true (Most of the examples in that link are weird things I've never seen anyone actually do). I've spent the last 8 months writing a fairly complex application as a REST API entirely in PHP and I can't say that I've ever run into any weird scenarios where I think to myself, "Damn,…

Weird things you've never seen anyone actually do? Test for equality, build data structures, handle error conditions?

There's lots of example code, inline, but much of the article is about missing/broken features and artifacts of the design that make it unfriendly to wetware.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#112

Post by krapp » Thu, May 16, 2013, 1:53 AM UTC

iguana wrote: post #108

chromatic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself factor in. ... except for "easy to deploy", which is a merit.

* Easy to deploy * Cheap to deploy * Easy to find programmers to help you * Affordable programmers * Code is easy to read for non-programmers who understand HTML * Ton of free code available to reuse Inconsistency, poorly thought out OO, lack of purity, and disdain by hipsters are a small price to pay for those merits.

... disdain by hipsters is a bonus in my book.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#113

Post by eevee » Thu, May 16, 2013, 1:56 AM UTC

iguana wrote: post #108

chromatic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself factor in. ... except for "easy to deploy", which is a merit.

* Easy to deploy * Cheap to deploy * Easy to find programmers to help you * Affordable programmers * Code is easy to read for non-programmers who understand HTML * Ton of free code available to reuse Inconsistency, poorly thought out OO, lack of purity, and disdain by hipsters are a small price to pay for those merits.

So you're saying that, as a programmer, it's in my best interests to learn something other than PHP so I'll be less affordable...?

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#114

Post by eevee » Thu, May 16, 2013, 2:01 AM UTC

adambard wrote: post #84

I cannot possibly hope to express the reasons I dislike PHP better than this comprehensive article: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... An excerpt: > I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there. > You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’…

I seriously only added this metaphor as an afterthought, after pulling it out of my ass to explain all the furious typing to my partner. It's pretty funny that it's become the most famous part of the article.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#115

Post by eevee » Thu, May 16, 2013, 2:09 AM UTC

I wonder whether the target audience here is developers who want to build a new PHP application from scratch for GAE, or just people who want to install Wordpress? Using GAE adds a development/deployment step, but the lack of deployment fuss is the primary advantage PHP has over anything else.

I'm also slightly alarmed that the PHP examples use htmlspecialchars and nothing else. The Python documentation has a whole section on templating with an example autoescaping setup using Jinja2.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#116

Post by TheHydroImpulse » Thu, May 16, 2013, 2:10 AM UTC

jasonhanley wrote: post #109

yogo wrote: post #2

LOL at adding PHP support to app engine almost 5 years later. PHP gets a lot of bashing but you can't deny its popularity, as evidenced by the number of stars. https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...

PHP is a solid workhorse. Quick to prototype, and once a PHP app is up and running, it just works. Wikipedia, Facebook, MailChimp, WordPress, tons more -- they all load fast and are hardly ever down. You can argue all day about the fine details of programming languages, but PHP is popular for good reasons.

You attribute high availability to the infrastructure entirely, not just a front facing programming language. Facebook has a massive architecture and only it's front-end stuff (views, data retrieval) are done in PHP. Everything else are separate services written in Java (or some other JVM language) and communicate through Thrift. PHP isn't accredited with Facebook's high availability and Facebook doesn't even serve PHP, it serves compile C++ code that was compiled from PHP.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#117

Post by TheHydroImpulse » Thu, May 16, 2013, 2:12 AM UTC

eevee wrote: post #115

I wonder whether the target audience here is developers who want to build a new PHP application from scratch for GAE, or just people who want to install Wordpress? Using GAE adds a development/deployment step, but the lack of deployment fuss is the primary advantage PHP has over anything else. I'm also slightly alarmed that the PHP examples use htmlspecialchars and nothing else. The Python documentation has a whole s…

PHP as just started to get a package community going (Composer) but it's incredibly slow. Using external packages in PHP isn't as easy as with other platforms.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#118

Post by iguana » Thu, May 16, 2013, 2:12 AM UTC

eevee wrote: post #113

iguana wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Easy to deploy * Cheap to deploy * Easy to find programmers to help you * Affordable programmers * Code is easy to read for non-programmers who understand HTML * Ton of free code available to reuse Inconsistency, poorly thought out OO, lack of purity, and disdain by hipsters are a small price to pay for those merits.

So you're saying that, as a programmer, it's in my best interests to learn something other than PHP so I'll be less affordable...?

Depends on why you're a programmer. If you wish to optimize for compensation, by all means, learn as many different languages, platforms, and technologies as you can.

So I would say you should learn something in addition to PHP so that you bring more value where you go.

Put another way: don't be a PHP programmer. Be a programmer. Then, use the right tool for the job based on the constraints given to you. If that ends up being PHP, you'll still be paid more to do it.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#119

Post by eevee » Thu, May 16, 2013, 2:17 AM UTC

TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #117

eevee wrote: post #115

I wonder whether the target audience here is developers who want to build a new PHP application from scratch for GAE, or just people who want to install Wordpress? Using GAE adds a development/deployment step, but the lack of deployment fuss is the primary advantage PHP has over anything else. I'm also slightly alarmed that the PHP examples use htmlspecialchars and nothing else. The Python documentation has a whole s…

PHP as just started to get a package community going (Composer) but it's incredibly slow. Using external packages in PHP isn't as easy as with other platforms.

Surely Google could just preinstall something. The Python templating docs say GAE includes both Jinja2 and the Django template engine.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#120

Post by Osiris » Thu, May 16, 2013, 2:21 AM UTC

jrheard wrote: post #105

vecinu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been reiterated over and over again and is just a bunch of fluff. It doesn't explain why PHP is bad with examples and while I know there are a ton of sites that do, many people including myself have used PHP successfully in the past. I will refer you to an even better quote: 'Software engineers are becoming like "photographers". They spend so much time arguing over the right lens type, focal length, camera b…

> It doesn't explain why PHP is bad with examples The linked article specifically does explain why PHP is bad, and it does it by providing literally hundreds of specific examples. It's a really impressive essay.

The very first example about @fopen is full of weird stuff about INI file changes and stuff that are not on by default and if someone turns them on they should understand what they are doing.