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Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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

#121

Post by eropple »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #69
eropple wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were either of the first two started by "a sane engineer with a bit of experience"? Inertia is powerful.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Doesn't matter what your site is coded in if it isn't revenue positive/have funding/etc.

I'm not sure where you got that from my post.

Though, to be honest, I don't think that using Play (today) or Rails/Django (yesterday) is sufficiently less productive to merit the technical debt you almost certainly will incur starting with a PHP stack. (And I am an ex-PHP person, to the point of hacking around in PHP core...that's a few months I'd love to have back.)

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

#122

Post by xlevus »

paulyg wrote: post #101

Why does every PHP thread turn into a bashing session? It's not constructive to the conversation. I for one am excited about this. I'm only half way through the docs buy so far I like what I see compared to other PHP PaaS. Except no mbstring.

Have you tried mb_string?

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

#124

Post by wtetzner »

vecinu wrote: post #93
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’…

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…

Being able to successfully use something doesn't mean it was a good idea.

Even though it's common, I don't think referring to programming languages as tools is actually accurate. A programming language is more like a building material. And this is an important distinction.

Let's look at scenario.

Say Fred hired Bob to write a program for him. Bob decides to use PHP. After finishing his work, Bob moves on to other projects. A while later, Fred realizes he wants some changes made to his program. So he hires George. George can't make changes to the program in Haskell. He has to modify the PHP source.

The reason I bring this up is that the choice of programming language is important, and is not the same as the choice of tools (e.g. your text editor).

You can build a house out of paper mache, but chances are you'll end up regretting it.

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

tmzt wrote: post #97

I recently left a job that was focused on developing PHP with a very different philosophy from how I would approach it. I see PHP as a growing and evolving object-oriented programming language. I see it as a language to which design patterns can be applied, for which structured designs can be applied, and which has improved which each major release. I also am keenly aware that it has a legacy and a reputation of bein…

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by astrodust »

umsm wrote: post #45
TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress is garbage. Just because there are a lot of production sites built or using Wordpress doesn't mean it's good. Wordpress is popular because of it's community, use of PHP which allows you to host it on many providers, and a ton of themes and plugins. Wordpress is probably the worst spaghetti code I've ever seen (we'll, close).

Most of the arguments are biased opinions and can't really be defended. But... if you don't like wordpress, why not assess projects such as Symfony2 or Drupal?

Because Symfony2 and Drupal are just different flavors of garbage, and Drupal is significantly less pleasant to work with than WordPress, which is about as pleasant to work with as an angry bear.

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

#127

Post by astrodust »

jtreminio wrote: post #49
umsm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the arguments are biased opinions and can't really be defended. But... if you don't like wordpress, why not assess projects such as Symfony2 or Drupal?

Because quality projects like symphony Symfony 2 does not fit into his works view of php.

If Symfony is so amazing, why does nobody use it?

I mean nobody in the almost literal sense. Stack Overflow serves as a rough barometer of popularity and either Symfony users have no questions, use another support platform, or they don't make up a significant population.

The #1 problem with the PHP community is it's complete anarchy and filled with people that should not be developing web apps, or at least should not be developing the way they're going about it.

Maybe Symfony could fix that, but there's a lot of work to be done here.

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

#128

Post by astrodust »

vidarh wrote: post #88
pestaa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You put it very lightly. It is not pedantry or elitist hackers, it is computer science . A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all.

Engineering is not computer science. A sane engineer don't pick technology based on what is most theoretically pure, but based on what can deliver on the requirements on time and on budget. If you are building a simple CRUD style application, for example, there's likely nothing in your technical requirements that precludes PHP in any way. Then the question turns to ease of deployment and maintenance, operational cost…

For the question "I want to build a web application", PHP is not the answer. It is the worst in nearly every category you cite.

Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously.

What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting? If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of a few that are generally crappy.

Cost and developer time are non-factors since the time you'd need to learn PHP is probably higher than other languages that make more sense and aren't filled with anachronisms you will spend half your time working around.

You can train someone up in Ruby on Rails in two weeks. Django or Node would take about double that time, but only because the platforms aren't by default as feature complete and the tooling will vary from project to project.

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

#129

Post by astrodust »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #65
pestaa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You put it very lightly. It is not pedantry or elitist hackers, it is computer science . A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all.

Facebook. Wikipedia. Yahoo.

Facebook could write their stuff in COBOL and it wouldn't matter to anyone else. Remember MySpace? It was written in ColdFusion, so I guess ColdFusion is a great idea!

Wikipedia's Mediawiki software is awful, and serves as a great example of how not to build an application. It makes WordPress look like a precision engineered Swiss watch.

Yahoo uses PHP because, like Facebook, they could make FORTRAN work in production if they wanted to.

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

#130

Post by astrodust »

krapp wrote: post #112
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.

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

So you're a hipster, basically.

"Hating PHP? That's so mainstream. Personally, I'm hating on Haskell and NodeJS."

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