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Google App Engine finally supports PHP

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Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#51

Post by PommeDeTerre »

Killswitch wrote: post #38
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's good for people to be extremely vocal about technologies riddled with serious flaws. It's unfortunate, but ultimately beneficial, even when they have to do this repeatedly. It doesn't matter if we're talking about PHP or JavaScript, or a web framework like Ruby on Rails, or various NoSQL databases, or even certain operating systems. Even if people have used such technologies with some degree of success in th…

Except nobody jumps in for a karma train of circle jerking each other about flaws in Python, Ruby or anything else.. Just PHP... Because it's the new cool hip thing to do.. Bash PHP... If you don't, then you won't get high fives from the rest of your hipster friends. I've been writing PHP for 12 years... I've learned that its got flaws... Just like anything else... I've gotten over it... Why? Because I actually enjoy…

Python and Ruby aren't riddled with security holes. Python and Ruby offer quite sensible language features. Python and Ruby have relatively clean, comprehensible standard libraries. Python and Ruby make it easy for developers to rapidly create complex systems, while still retaining a high degree of safety and security. Python and Ruby are getting better with age, rather than stagnating or gaining features in an ugly, tacked-on fashion. Python and Ruby generally have more experienced, professional communities behind them.

Simply put, they don't suffer from the many inherent problems that PHP suffers from. That means they won't catch anywhere near as much flak.

And your description of anyone pointing out PHP's flaws as being a "hipster" or doing it because it's a "new cool hip thing to do" is absurd. Many of us who speak out the loudest against PHP have been doing so since the late 1990s, and many of us are now well over 50 years old. We're about as far from "hipsters" as you can get, in just about every respect.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#52

Post by justin66 »

dageshi wrote: post #41
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such flaws should be pointed out whenever possible by however many people feel like pointing them out. I think that the skilled members of any community or industry have a duty to stand against technology that is inherently broken. This is quite distant from being "childish". In fact, it's a sign of maturity when one can unemotionally analyze a given tool and deem it to be of an insufficient quality for practical use…

It isn't inherently broken, if it were inherently broken nobody would be using it, which is quite obviously not the case. From my point of view, ruby, python all the rest are inherently broken because nobody makes any damned products from them which aren't used by other programmers or sold as a service. You don't need to be a programmer to use Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB and the endless list of customer facing,…

> if it were inherently broken nobody would be using it

Is there some field of human endeavor where you've observed this statement to always hold true?

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#53

Post by sethrin »

Kiro wrote: post #36

I am no hardcore programmer and PHP is perfect for me. Tbh I haven't encountered one single bad thing about it during my 5 years programming, although I understand there are major flaws in it. What I'm saying is that for most people PHP works completely fine and is as good as anything.

This is true. But it's HN so if you say that, you have to dress it up a bit, throw in some jargon and name-drop some computer scientists -- "Turing-complete" counts for both categories, and is even somewhat relevant to the topic.

It's also not true. "Infinite are the arguments of sages," I hear, or something to that effect, but the distinguishing mark of expertise is not being able to offer an unqualified endorsement of any position.

The element of your comment that I find most concerning is that, after five years of using a programming language, I feel that you should be aware of its major flaws. Probably the minor flaws too. You should be aware of how it differs from other equivalent tools. And, if you don't know that, then the content of your post should not be "PHP is good," but "Why is PHP considered to be bad?"

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#54

Post by Kiro »

sethrin wrote: post #53
Kiro wrote: post #36

I am no hardcore programmer and PHP is perfect for me. Tbh I haven't encountered one single bad thing about it during my 5 years programming, although I understand there are major flaws in it. What I'm saying is that for most people PHP works completely fine and is as good as anything.

This is true. But it's HN so if you say that, you have to dress it up a bit, throw in some jargon and name-drop some computer scientists -- "Turing-complete" counts for both categories, and is even somewhat relevant to the topic. It's also not true. "Infinite are the arguments of sages," I hear, or something to that effect, but the distinguishing mark of expertise is not being able to offer an unqualified endorsement…

I do know the major flaws, it's just that they have never been a problem when I code stuff. I don't find myself thinking "oh, PHP is so bad" or that I can't do what I want because the language is flawed. I've used RoR, Django, Node.js but for the stuff I do (as I said, I'm no hardcore programmer) PHP simply works better or at least as good for me.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#55

Post by Killswitch »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #51
Killswitch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except nobody jumps in for a karma train of circle jerking each other about flaws in Python, Ruby or anything else.. Just PHP... Because it's the new cool hip thing to do.. Bash PHP... If you don't, then you won't get high fives from the rest of your hipster friends. I've been writing PHP for 12 years... I've learned that its got flaws... Just like anything else... I've gotten over it... Why? Because I actually enjoy…

Python and Ruby aren't riddled with security holes. Python and Ruby offer quite sensible language features. Python and Ruby have relatively clean, comprehensible standard libraries. Python and Ruby make it easy for developers to rapidly create complex systems, while still retaining a high degree of safety and security. Python and Ruby are getting better with age, rather than stagnating or gaining features in an ugly,…

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-10210...

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-7252/...

Nope, no vulnerabilities in Ruby or Python, just PHP. Because PHP sucks, Ruby and Python and Erlang and Go and Java and C++ and blah blah blah blah blah are superior languages to PHP, blah blah blah.

Insert beating a dead horse image here.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#56

Post by Kiro »

danbruc wrote: post #42
Kiro wrote: post #36

I am no hardcore programmer and PHP is perfect for me. Tbh I haven't encountered one single bad thing about it during my 5 years programming, although I understand there are major flaws in it. What I'm saying is that for most people PHP works completely fine and is as good as anything.

Of course, you can build working stuff with PHP. It is good enough for weekend projects and prototyping stuff. Companies like Facebook have even proved that you can build huge things with it. Put that's not the point. It's not about bashing PHP for the sake of it. A large number of software projects is behind schedule and over budget. Why? Because developing software is hard and humans are bad at estimating effort. N…

I would still say that for most people these flaws are no game-changer. We simply don't code stuff advanced enough for it to matter.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#57

Post by shocks »

rbanffy wrote: post #35
shocks wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but it doesn't need to be pointed out by 100 people every single time the language comes up in conversation. PHP has its place. HNs typical "PHP LOL OMFG WTF SHIT" reaction is childish.

> PHP has its place. Agreed. It's possible to make good, elegant and fast PHP code. Unfortunately, most of it is not. I would never advise anyone to start a new project with it mostly because of its many design flaws. Also, the App Engine environment negates PHP's biggest advantage: ubiquity. You just cannot deploy a PHP App Engine application on most PHP hosting providers unless you deny your app the App Engine runt…

I agree with you here. I expected my comment to get many more downvotes from the anti-everything-except-lisp-go-ruby-other-hipster-languages HN parade.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#58

Post by shocks »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #33
shocks wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but it doesn't need to be pointed out by 100 people every single time the language comes up in conversation. PHP has its place. HNs typical "PHP LOL OMFG WTF SHIT" reaction is childish.

Such flaws should be pointed out whenever possible by however many people feel like pointing them out. I think that the skilled members of any community or industry have a duty to stand against technology that is inherently broken. This is quite distant from being "childish". In fact, it's a sign of maturity when one can unemotionally analyze a given tool and deem it to be of an insufficient quality for practical use…

I never said I could not or would not accept arguments against PHP. I fully accept that PHP is somewhat broken. I merely expressed that I'm tired of hearing "PHP SUCKS LOL" and watching many PHP articles get flagged, while other languages with as many problems (cough Javascript cough) get upvoted and the same people say nothing about the problems with these languages.

edit: clarity

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#59

Post by duskwuff »

mscarborough wrote: post #44
joeblau wrote: post #22

This move doesn't make much sense to me. Most of the websites built in PHP are huge CMS services like Weebly, Wordpress, Joomla, or old social networks like Facebook. I don't see any of these large services switching over to get hosted on Google. Plus PHP in general is disorganized and slow compared to more contemporary languages with well defined frameworks.

In addition to those hosted services, is all of the self-hosted Wordpress, Joomla, Zencart, etc. Plus all of the business and personal sites built on Zend, Symfony, Cake.

And most of those Wordpress/etc installs are going to be of applications which assume they're in a normal hosting environment, where they're running on Apache with a filesystem they can write to, connecting to a MySQL server, etc. How well will this translate to GAE? I'm not sure.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#60

Post by cglace »

wmil wrote: post #7
Joeri wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, what if it were the insane parts that made PHP successful? PHP is basically a shell script hooked up to a web server, with '$_REQUEST' flowing in one way, and 'echo' flowing out the other way. Its over-simplified architecture is exactly why beginners like it so much.

The simple architecture is actually what PHP got right. For comparison, if you were using mod_python with the default settings, you needed to restart apache whenever you changed a file. The insane part of PHP is the actual language. It's an overgrown template language. Half the functions are based on C, half the functions are based on Perl. There's no regularity or consistency.

Yeah, the standard libs lack consistency but that is annoying for about the first 1-2 months and then you get used to it.

However, a lot of modern PHP frameworks(Doctrine, Symfony2) are quite nice to work with.

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