Ask HN: I can't stand PHP anymore. What else can I choose? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: I can't stand PHP anymore. What else can I choose?

#81

Post by abyssknight » Tue, Apr 28, 2009, 3:40 PM UTC

keefe wrote: post #80

abyssknight wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You started a flame war over vendor lock in? What about language lock in? DBMS lock in? Or even the forbidden OS lock in? I don't care what you use, it has lock in of some kind. Get over it. VS2008, C#/VB.NET, ASP,NET, MSSQL are great tools . That's all these things are: tools. The end product is always the same. If you build something with Ruby you can't go back and fix it with PHP. Lock in? Yep.

The point is you are locking yourself into a brand that has explicitly anti-competitive business practices, charges exorbitant rates for their licenses and not only shuns public standards but actively works to sabotage them! (ecmascript3 being the example I am thinking of the last) VS2008 is a tool, C# is a language. Locking yourself to C# (for all intents and purposes) locks you to development on a windows box using…

To each their own. I just think that you should use the right tool for the job, not the most popular one. If your opinion comes into play when selecting a tool, you're doing it wrong.

Sure, there's lock in and perhaps Microsoft is engaged in anti-competitive practices. They are a business, after all. But what is wrong with the tools? Visual Studio, C#, VB.NET, IIS? Point out some real issues like the current state of ASP.NET's AJAX toolkit or linq2sql's inability to do perform joins efficiently without an associated view.

I might be playing devil's advocate here, so please don't take me the wrong way. I just want people to look at their tool box more closely and make decisions on real, measurable things.

Disclaimer: I work on everything from ColdFusion, PHP and ASP.NET to Perl, cmd and shell scripts. I have no zealotry in me except for an extreme love of Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Macs and the opposite sex.

Re: Ask HN: I can't stand PHP anymore. What else can I choose?

#82

Post by keefe » Wed, May 06, 2009, 9:25 PM UTC

abyssknight wrote: post #81

keefe wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is you are locking yourself into a brand that has explicitly anti-competitive business practices, charges exorbitant rates for their licenses and not only shuns public standards but actively works to sabotage them! (ecmascript3 being the example I am thinking of the last) VS2008 is a tool, C# is a language. Locking yourself to C# (for all intents and purposes) locks you to development on a windows box using…

To each their own. I just think that you should use the right tool for the job, not the most popular one. If your opinion comes into play when selecting a tool, you're doing it wrong. Sure, there's lock in and perhaps Microsoft is engaged in anti-competitive practices. They are a business, after all. But what is wrong with the tools? Visual Studio, C#, VB.NET, IIS? Point out some real issues like the current state of…

That IS a real issue, vs the (relatively) open nature of Java and the absolute openness of tomcat, apache? I personally think that open source tools are inherently superior because it of the additional eyes on the code reducing screwups and deliberately bad code. One very serious issue is that their anti-competitive acts make them opposed to standards (e.g. their work on the EcmaScript3 standard and what would have been a great harmonization of AS4 and JS2!) and it's better to work with standards for obvious reasons... Being involved with open source, standards compliant tools gives you an awful lot of advantages.

Re: Ask HN: I can't stand PHP anymore. What else can I choose?

#83

Post by keefe » Wed, May 06, 2009, 9:29 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #71

keefe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used those but how can it be so much better than eclipse + all the commercial plugins? Closed source can never beat open source in the end...

I spend more time than I'd like in Eclipse these days, and am consistently underwhelmed. It just can't hang with the intellisense features of VS.NET. I spend entirely too much time in Eclipse hitting ctrl+space and getting nothing back. Often even when the thing I'm looking for is in the same file, let alone included thru an import. ReSharper will find references for things I haven't even imported. It really is that…

I don't see any compelling reason to switch off of Java for the VS stack... maybe if I end up needing to do consulting, I will learn these. I'd probably have to buy a windows license first :( One point I'd like to make is that eclipse is based on an open standard (OSGi) and having worked at a company that features an eclipse plugin, having the eclipse code open source is damn useful.

Re: Ask HN: I can't stand PHP anymore. What else can I choose?

#84

Post by jawngee » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 10:52 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #59

nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're fighting with PHP to create a webapp, PHP's best demain, then you're doing it the wrong way. I've been writing PHP apps for a few years now, and I contribute to multiple PHP webapp projects, and I'm never fighting the language. PHP is capable of doing just about anything that any other language can do; you just have to work with PHP and stop trying to make it act like Ruby or Python. PHP has an absolutely e…

If you're fighting with PHP to create a webapp, PHP's best domain, then you're doing it the wrong way. "Best" != "Good" Web apps are no different than any other kind of app, except they take HTTP requests as input and generate HTTP responses as output. PHP does have some features for speaking HTTP, but that's about it. For the rest of the app, you are on your own. Let's look at the components of a web app, and see wh…

Facebook isn't tiny.

Delicious isn't tiny.

Digg isn't tiny.

Shit, even my little startup, massify.com isn't tiny.

I think probably the reason that people don't write non-web applications in PHP is because that's not PHP's expressed purpose.

And re: catalyst, that sure is setting the web dev world on fire. /sarcasm

Re: Ask HN: I can't stand PHP anymore. What else can I choose?

#85

Post by jawngee » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 10:52 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #73

Maascamp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely read such grossly misinformed posts on HN. A shame you spent so long on it.

Then enlighten us, please. Exactly what is "grossly misinformed".

The entire thing mostly.