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Google App Engine finally supports PHP

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Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#61

Post by gngeal »

voidlogic wrote: post #45
gngeal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that Java is the most popular one, but C does all the hard work!

When people say C is the most popular, this is the metric they are often referring too: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Yeah, I know TIOBE - when I said "popular", I mostly meant "what most companies make the most fuss about". (As in "we must move out ERP system to Java! Quick!" :-)) C kind of seems to evade this kind of popularity nowadays, it seems to be forgotten by many, almost like a second level of machine code.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#62

Post by danbruc »

Killswitch wrote: post #55
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

  Python  15 in  5 years
  Ruby    36 in  7 years
  PHP    341 in 14 years
No one claimed that other languages are flawless. Besides that the biggest problem are not vulnerabilities in the languages; the biggest problem are vulnerabilities in products build using the languages and PHP makes it especially hard to write correct code because of its many quirks making it (almost) impossible to be aware of all edge and corner cases.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#63

Post by shocks »

dragonwriter wrote: post #49
dageshi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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. Even assuming that this is true (which its not, but we'll get to that later on) How does this matter? And, particularly, how is "sold as a service" an issue? > You don't need to be a programmer to use Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB a…

You comment is very condescending. You should not be trying to infer from the parent comment that dageshi is some kind of naive newby programmer who doesn't understand.

dageshi made some valid comments about the role PHP fills and you dismissed them and instead focused on calling him/her out for being a bad/poor programmer.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#64

Post by shocks »

sbarre wrote: post #37
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…

Hey this is like your 4th reply on this thread justifying the PHP hate, except I'm not sure you realize that you are backing up junk posts that have no substance beyond "PHP sucks!". If you feel that strongly about the problems, perhaps you should expand on them? All languages have pitfalls and problems, and the more popular the language, the more likely that people will succumb to those problems. We get it.

It's ironic that he responded to my comment with nothing but "PHP SUCKS LOL". :P

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#65

Post by danbruc »

shocks wrote: post #58
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…

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

I fully agree, JavaScript is definitely somewhat broken and I really think things like Node.js are a bad idea. I go even further, I would never use dynamically typed languages for a major project; I don't think avoiding some boilerplate code is worth giving up the compiletime checking possible in statically typed languages. There are already enough bugs in programs written in statically typed languages, no need to add more (read as don't detect at compiletime) by using dynamically typed languages.

I definitely don't want to imply dynamically typed languages are of little use - I am absolutely fine with using them for quick prototyping are non-critical code.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#66

Post by jakejake »

ppradhan wrote: post #21

ah... good old HN snobs tripping over each other in the comments section to give old PHP a much needed lashing.

Most of the rants against PHP don't have many specific technical reasons mentioned. Some do, but when you provide specific facts it's much easier to argue against them. So I think it's more convenient to stick with "PHP sucks."

My theory is that people ranting about PHP are mainly in three categories - the first being developers who have never used PHP. The second are people who used PHP back in 1998 and haven't never really checked out any any modern PHP frameworks. The rest are developers who inherit a horrible codebase written in PHP. So they're gripes are a combination of their own horribly-written codebase they're stuck maintaining along with PHP-specific complaints.

PHP definitely has its quirks but there is interesting work happening with the language and many frameworks. I do quite a bit of PHP coding at the moment but previously in my career I've been full time Java developer, C# developer and even now I write quite a lot of Objective C. I have hated things about every one of those platforms. Every one of them offers the opportunity to write horrible code. I think developers tend to be very judgmental and opinionated anyway, but PHP gets too much flak. If you're not using it then who cares, why should it bother you what other people are doing?

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#67

Post by danbruc »

shocks wrote: post #63
dragonwriter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Even assuming that this is true (which its not, but we'll get to that later on) How does this matter? And, particularly, how is "sold as a service" an issue? > You don't need to be a programmer to use Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB a…

You comment is very condescending. You should not be trying to infer from the parent comment that dageshi is some kind of naive newby programmer who doesn't understand. dageshi made some valid comments about the role PHP fills and you dismissed them and instead focused on calling him/her out for being a bad/poor programmer.

Besides the language of the comment all his points are valid.

It isn't inherently broken, if it were inherently broken nobody would be using it, which is quite obviously not the case.

The language is broken. JavaScript, too. Both are used because there are no alternatives. There are obviously alternatives for PHP but these seem to fall so far behind in ease of use that they don't gain enough traction. Therefore I argue we need a new language - easy to use as PHP but without all the flaws of it.

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.

I am no web developer and my knowledge of commonly used web frameworks and who uses what is really limited but it seems reasonable to assume this statement is wrong.

I did a quick search and the first hit was Django build on top of Python used by Instagram and Pinterest. [1] There may be more PHP based apps out there because it is so easy to use but it is definitely not true that no one uses alternatives.

You don't need to be a programmer to use Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB and the endless list of customer facing, customer usable PHP apps. You don't need to be a programmer to configure their environments and get them running. You don't need to be a programmer to extend them, you just need to find the right plugin/module to suit your needs.

When you use a product that only requires setup, configuration and throwing in some plug-ins it does not matter at all which language has been used to build that product. This statement is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

I cannot think of any other web based language that even comes close in this regard. Why is that? If these languages are so good, why is no one making any software with them that ordinary people and not programmers can actually use?

Again, my personal guess is that the ease of (ab)use of PHP outweighs - or at least seems to do so - the advantages of »better« languages.

[1] http://www.fiveq.com/blog/programming/building-django-good-c...

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#68

Post by salimmadjd »

RyanZAG wrote: post #4

I don't see this getting that much traction. Most existing PHP code is heavily dedicated to the use of SQL, and if you don't use the key-value datastore you give up a lot of the scaling advantages of appengine. Secondly, PHP devs and sites are used to very affordable hosting options, and GAE is horribly overpriced for the computing power you get. Thirdly, Google doesn't really seem to care about customers of their Ap…

Agreed with targeting bloggers to enterprise! I had similar comments as yours when the news first came out, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714729

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#70

Post by thenomad »

danbruc wrote: post #5

More potential for one of the worst languages to spread - let's have one minute of silence. And after that someone please start building an alternative keeping the good parts that made PHP successful and getting rid of the insane stuff.

So, serious question - what language is better for small limited-scope web coding right now?

I don't mean major, fully-fledged app stuff, I mean simple CMSes, on-page loops / conditionals, , etcetera.

I'm no hardcore uber-coder, but I know enough to know there are languages I prefer to use than PHP. Personally, I like Ruby. But for a bit of quick glue or a relatively simple bit of web coding, I simply can't figure out what you'd use instead of PHP - and I assume from the number of "PHP sucks" comments that there must be such simple options?

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