Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS • Hacker News Board

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#41

Post by shitlord » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:29 PM UTC

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #17

> Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS Most companies/clients, particularly outside of the SV/SF bubble, value a working solution over technical elegance. They're not irrationally ideological about programming languages, and they don't want to pay $120,000/year or $125/hour to a developer with two years of experience. Given the supply of developers of various skill levels who can build working solutions…

> They're not irrationally ideological about programming languages, and they don't want to pay $120,000/year or $125/hour to a developer with two years of experience.

I worked for a typical megacorporation for a few months (in Maryland). This is consistent with what I've observed. the company's main goal is to do what's required as cheaply as possible.

That said, Rails is starting to become more popular among the enterprise crowd. The main reason for it is that developers are more productive with Rails (given that they are working on a nontrivial project and have prior experience).

> What percentage of Ruby on Rails developers who started their careers with Ruby on Rails are capable of building a moderately complex Ruby application without Rails?

I think the main problem is that a lot of people try to learn Rails before learning Ruby. We end up having a lot of people who are experienced with a particular framework (Rails, jQuery, whatever)... but they know basically nothing outside that framework.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#42

Post by lampe3 » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:29 PM UTC

endergen wrote: post #36

The workflow he lists for CGI/PHP is one where people work right off of the live server. This is no way to work when working on complex software. Typical PHP oriented hosting services are basically PaaS with MySQL and PHP good to go. Deployment, Staging, Package Management, etc are worth their weight in steps over the long run. Like a few people have mentioned, Boiler-Plate/Template projects are how many of us work a…

my thoughts too... working on the live server... Never do that!

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#43

Post by dpritchett » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:29 PM UTC

orblivion wrote: post #40

mikeryan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making the mistake of conflating PHP the language with Rails the Framework. I can do your app in Rails pretty damn quickly at this point (with one of my current skeleton frameworks I can add authentication administration and other nice features pretty much "for free" as well) But tell me I have to do it CodeIgniter or Laravel and I'd be completely lost for days.

The question then is, can you throw together a website in Ruby? Plus, have your non-technical folks be able to edit the templates?

Ruby is not a hypertext preprocessor. You don't have a simple web server and a templating language in-scope unless you find them and set them up.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#44

Post by pallandt » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:30 PM UTC

fleitz wrote: post #23

sanswork wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your first two lines are a bit unfair. In the first line you say it takes you an hour while mentioning in passing already knowing the language. In the second you say it takes 3 months because you have to learn the framework. Honestly if it takes you 3 months to understand rails well enough to do a CRUD app there is no way you're learning PHP well enough to do the same CRUD app in less time.

The problem is learning PHP actually makes you worse at PHP. The only possible way to program PHP is to be pretty much ignorant of everything in which case PHP will actually do kinda what you wanted. If you learned PHP then either it's not actually doing what you think it's doing, or some config variable changed and would have done what you thought except it didn't, but don't worry just add some code to change that c…

I think the big problem with PHP is the fact that you can find so many tutorials online still not having caught up with current practices, not just in terms of language updates or security, but in terms of software engineering. Not knowing any better and how to distinguish between quality learning material, newcomers will happily put into practice what they've learned on good 'authority' to be correct. Same applies for many books on PHP. There's one particular very prolific and popular author, whose PHP books are always revelled, yet if you read them, he's not actually teaching at a standard a lot higher than what you can find other places. You end up having to spend more time having to re-learn stuff and trying to forget bad approaches...one of the downsides of it being a language with a longer history that Ruby+Rails.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#45

Post by mmahemoff » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:30 PM UTC

drakaal wrote: post #5

PHP continues to thrive because of WordPress and PHPBB. There are so many sites running these two pieces of software that PHP will be a top language for years. PHP is also one of the easiest languages for Designers to learn. If you know HTML, adding a few bits of PHP is easy. Even if you dislike PHP, (I certainly do) you end up getting good at it because enough projects touch it that you kind of have to be good at it…

You're right, and it's kind of ironic that Node doesn't get to be the server-side language of choice for designers already dabbling in JavaScript. But in the absence of a one-click deployment for Node, we have HTML > CSS > client-side JS > PHP as the standard technology path for a designer who wants to Get Stuff Done.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#46

Post by Jormundir » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:31 PM UTC

gngeal wrote: post #24

mikeryan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making the mistake of conflating PHP the language with Rails the Framework. I can do your app in Rails pretty damn quickly at this point (with one of my current skeleton frameworks I can add authentication administration and other nice features pretty much "for free" as well) But tell me I have to do it CodeIgniter or Laravel and I'd be completely lost for days.

> You're making the mistake of conflating PHP the language with Rails the Framework. I've heard someone call PHP "the C web framework". I thought it was fitting, and in addition, it seemed that even as a C web framework, it was a failure.

PHP the C web framework? PHP a failure? Lol!

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#47

Post by bdcravens » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:31 PM UTC

webjprgm wrote: post #27

From knowing nothing to building a simple web app, PHP is faster. If you already know RoR and have your dev machine and deployment environment all set up, then it's not hard to get a Rails app working. Rails has a significant advantage with the use of gems (and bundler, etc.) for easily adding complex features. I still use PHP for my home projects most of the time because I haven't bothered to set up Rails on my VPS,…

I'd say you can get from zero to working app faster in Rails. You can get away with knowing no SQL, and not really grasping concepts like GET v. POST. A few scaffolds, Omniauth, and one of the Bootstrap gems, and you've got a decent app worthy of Show HN karma.

In PHP, you need to learn some HTML, some SQL, and general web concepts that Rails hides.

No, learning isn't bad. No, I don't think scaffolding is acceptable. I've used PHP since v3, and Rails for a couple of years, and many other languages since 1999, and I'm just trying to get into the beginner's head.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#48

Post by snowwrestler » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:33 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #31

Ssh into your favorite cheap-ass virtual host This assumes you've setup your keys properly, and have a grasp of this already. If you're assuming prior knowledge and configuration, would the same be true of setting up your Heroku toolchain?

You don't need keys to ssh.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#49

Post by localuser » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:35 PM UTC

For me no other framework or language can be compared the speed of deployment on php. If an idea I've got is simple and don't want to take weeks deving, LAMP is there to the rescue. For example I built (http://vinetuber.com) in 3 hrs. But for bigger projects, I django.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#50

Post by thatthatis » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 8:37 PM UTC

mscottmcbee wrote: post #2

I don't do much web development, just a product once every year or so to play around with an idea. Always in PHP. A few months ago I was asked by a close friend to help them with a not-so-serious site. I decided that I'd use Rails, because, hey, I've heard nothing but good about it from HN and the like. I was absolutely blown away by how much work it required to get started. That, and how painful it was to explain to…

3rd generation full stack web frameworks (django, rails, etc) are optimized for 6 month happiness, not 6 hour happiness

They take longer to get set up, but as your project grows the incremental work to "change one small thing" stays relatively constant, whereas coded from scratch php or lightweight frameworks tend to have complexity of a change that is exponential with the number of lines of code.

It's a question whether the investment is worth it for what you're trying to do. Sometimes, quite reasonably, the answer is no.

I've got my django routine to the point where it takes me about 30-45 minutes to spin up a new stack that I'd be happy to code on for years -- to me that's a relatively minor investment for huge rewards.