81–90 of 102 posts
PHP is popular because of it's simplicity, low cost (like zero) of entry and because of Wordpress. But the pay rate for PHP developers is miniscule because every Pakistani and Indian is a PHP expert for $1/hr. Try to post a $20 professional website job on Elancer - and in 10 minutes you'll get 20 lancers eating each other for your "business". So "thriving" is to be taken with a grain of salt.
For the sake of comparing, here's how I make a throwaway app super quickly in Ruby, almost equivalently to a PHP deploy:
$ ssh server
$ kenji init project # [1]
$ cd project
$ tmux # launch a background session, edit some code
$ bundle exec rackup # in a pane next to my code
[1]: This is a Ruby web-app microframework. https://github.com/kballenegger/kenji
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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…
Thank you dearly for this. What's your opinion on SSI?
What I like about it is clean separation, a few command for common things, and if SSI doesn't directly support what you want you just hand it off to another program.
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> 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 may have some rather serious flaws but it is far from a failure and runs on a huge majority of the web.
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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?
Because the vast majority of PHP programmers began their programming journey by trying to post from a form built with static html, and worked their way down. In my experience (YMMV), they tend to lack the general programming concepts and practices that programmers who come from a CS/general computing (instead of web design) background are more likely to have, making it more difficult for the PHP programmer to move in…
I have a bone to pick with your last contention. At what load does the PHP runtime begin to become the performance bottleneck, particularly with APC enabled? As far as I know, Facebook is about the only application with enough load to test the limits of the PHP interpreter itself. I was under the impression that PHP itself is actually quite performant...
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The question then is, can you throw together a website in Ruby? Plus, have your non-technical folks be able to edit the templates?
By the time your "non-technical folks" are editing templates, you have a problem regardless of your language/framework. If you only have enough knowledge to "add an image" stay out of my HTML!
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I know the author emphasizing a point, but the steps that he's described end with two vastly different results: 1 - A php script on a server with a script with some code on it. vs 2 - A full featured MVC framework, complete with version control, database integration, easy deployment, which is easy for other developer to jump into, etc etc How can these two options be equated?
A lot (a majority?) of websites aren't made by people that need those things. A lot of people just want to get their ideas up on a page so they can show their friends. The thing I walked away with from the article was that PHP is still active in part because it has such a low entry point for those people, where as Rails does not. Like you said, they're very different entities, but a lot of people can't tell or don't…
Because the vast majority of PHP programmers began their programming journey by trying to post from a form built with static html, and worked their way down. In my experience (YMMV), they tend to lack the general programming concepts and practices that programmers who come from a CS/general computing (instead of web design) background are more likely to have, making it more difficult for the PHP programmer to move in…
I have a bone to pick with your last contention. At what load does the PHP runtime begin to become the performance bottleneck, particularly with APC enabled? As far as I know, Facebook is about the only application with enough load to test the limits of the PHP interpreter itself. I was under the impression that PHP itself is actually quite performant...
having to execute the whole application from the entry point on every page hit is just awful. APC will only save you the loading from the disk and compiling part, not the whole execution chain.
with node and others the application is just sitting there, listening to a port, and fires the right callbacks when a request comes in. the application startup cost is paid once. not on every request.
there are people who have tried to reproduce it in php by having php running and serving multiple requests in a similar manner. This is really treacherous since php didn't even pretend to free memory under any circumstances ever, until about php 5.3.
since moving over to writing servers, i just feel that the php model of executing the script when a url is hit is just fundamentally wrong.
PHP is popular because of it's simplicity, low cost (like zero) of entry and because of Wordpress. But the pay rate for PHP developers is miniscule because every Pakistani and Indian is a PHP expert for $1/hr. Try to post a $20 professional website job on Elancer - and in 10 minutes you'll get 20 lancers eating each other for your "business". So "thriving" is to be taken with a grain of salt.