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Google App Engine finally supports PHP

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Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#71

Post by pornel »

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…

Most PHP flaws that people moan about are shallow. Inconsistent naming of functions and parameter order, syntax warts — those are annoying, but ultimately don't matter.

What matters is that PHP has got big things right. Deployment is trivial. One process per request happens to mitigate leaks and (over)shared state. Failures affect one client at most, and scalability bottleneck is pushed down to the database.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#72

Post by sbarre »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #46
sbarre wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except his two-line post didn't actually say anything other than a long-winded version of "PHP sucks!" and that gets really old really fast...

Those two sentences say a lot more to those of us who have used PHP extensively. This is especially true for those of us who have had to maintain relatively old PHP applications developed by numerous (often inexperienced) developers over the course of many years. And it says even more to those of us who also have had many years of experience with other, better tools.

Sound like you need to hate the players, and not the game...

Sorry if that's cliche, but your justification sounds more like it is rooted in your experience with badly developed programs, not so much a bad language.

I've been working with PHP for a long time. I've worked with other languages as well, but for the last 10 years career-wise PHP has been my bread and butter. And I've seen plenty of bad PHP as well, I absolutely don't deny that. As one of the most popular and most accessible languages out there, it's inevitable that lots of beginners will produce low quality code.

But I've also seen plenty of very good PHP code.

I've worked on quite a few large-scale PHP projects that were delivered on time and on budget, have maintained good performance under extremely high loads, and have had no security issues over years of time in production environments (including banking and automotive).

Want to know why? Because we wrote the applications properly, we tested them well, and we knew what we were doing.

I'm sure equivalent teams can do just as well with Java or .NET (or whatever else), but our stack expertise is with PHP, so that's what we choose because that's what we are best with.

Any tool in the hands of a bad craftsman will produce shoddy results. And as I said before, PHP's popularity is certainly a dual-edged sword, but I believe the good outweighs the bad...

So unless you can name some magical framework or language that can prevent mediocre or inexperienced developers from making mistakes or producing bad code, I think you're being narrow-minded and unfair in your criticisms..

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#73

Post by sbarre »

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…

> 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. Now why should we make the situation even worse by using tools that are not as good as possible while we are completely aware of the flaws (and good things) in our current tools?

The above has much less to do with PHP and more to do with the lack of experience of the developers, I would say..

"Tools as good as possible" is an extremely subjective thing, and there is no magical tool or framework that works perfectly in all hands.

Developers should choose the tools that are best suited to the job at hand, and "best suited" doesn't just mean the functionality and features, it also encompasses developer proficiency.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#74

Post by Joeboy »

thenomad wrote: post #70
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 ou…

> I mean simple CMSes, on-page loops / conditionals, , etcetera.

Serious return question - who has requirements like that? In my experience CMSes are never simple, and I can't think what kind of site has the latter requirements, but only has those requirements and won't ever need any more functionality.

Personally I'd maybe use something like Django + the Flatpages app for a "simple CMS", and a tiny wsgi app for adding simple logic to a web page. Not, to be honest, because they're a perfect fit for those particular tasks but because I'd get to use a sensible language (python) that will remain sensible for the majority of other tasks (including non-web based ones).

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#75

Post by Joeboy »

sbarre wrote: post #72
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two sentences say a lot more to those of us who have used PHP extensively. This is especially true for those of us who have had to maintain relatively old PHP applications developed by numerous (often inexperienced) developers over the course of many years. And it says even more to those of us who also have had many years of experience with other, better tools.

Sound like you need to hate the players, and not the game... Sorry if that's cliche, but your justification sounds more like it is rooted in your experience with badly developed programs, not so much a bad language. I've been working with PHP for a long time. I've worked with other languages as well, but for the last 10 years career-wise PHP has been my bread and butter. And I've seen plenty of bad PHP as well, I abs…

> Sound like you need to hate the players, and not the game...

Hating the players seems like a reasonable reason to avoid the game.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#76

Post by amish »

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…

tl;dr flamers > "PHP Sucks!" php developers > no. really. trust us. it doesn't.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#77

Post by thenomad »

Joeboy wrote: post #74
thenomad wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

> I mean simple CMSes, on-page loops / conditionals, , etcetera. Serious return question - who has requirements like that? In my experience CMSes are never simple, and I can't think what kind of site has the latter requirements, but only has those requirements and won't ever need any more functionality. Personally I'd maybe use something like Django + the Flatpages app for a "simple CMS", and a tiny wsgi app for addi…

In my case, I use simple, quick code a lot for landing pages for clients and advertising in general, as well as for websites that are mostly static but occasionally need dynamic elements - most of my web series web pages end up either like this or built in Wordpress.

Anything that's either focused on content or sales and either doesn't have a programmatic backend or hands off to another site will probably fall into the "not a full-fledged webapp" category.

If I'm running an A/B test on a landing page, for example, I just need logging code and a conditional to choose what variants to display on-page.

There's a lot of conditionals based on input conditions, too - "Hello, Hacker News reader!", redirects depending on country of origin, that sort of thing.

I'll also use simple snippets of PHP or Javascript on sites that are already using Wordpress, but there you're locked into PHP from the outset, of course.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#78

Post by krapp »

amish wrote: post #76
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…

tl;dr flamers > "PHP Sucks!" php developers > no. really. trust us. it doesn't.

well, it doesn't entirely suck...

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#79

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> You comment is very condescending.

I am asking serious questions. If that seems condescending to you, well, I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

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

I was neither inferring nor "try to infer" that. I was questioning specific comments and pointing to specific examples of why I thought the generalizations being made were incorrect.

> dageshi made some valid comments about the role PHP fills

What were made were sweeping generalities about the superiority of PHP being evidenced by it being used in areas that Python and other languages are not, that evidenced unclear and apparently inconsistent standards as well as failure to consider Python and other non-PHP products that do, in fact, exist in the roles in which it was asserted that PHP was the only language actually being used.

> you dismissed them and instead focused on calling him/her out for being a bad/poor programmer.

Nowhere in my comment did I call anyone a bad/poor programmer. I don't mind reasonable criticism of things that I write, but I'd prefer if you didn't invent things that I never wrote and then criticize me for writing them.

Re: Google App Engine finally supports PHP

#80

Post by jrockway »

sambe wrote: post #14
jrockway wrote: post #8

Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally. Python?

Google uses a lot of Python, I thought. They started unladen-swallow.

My point is that Python is not some crazy language only used by Google. It's Python.
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