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From my understanding, if the day ever comes where the official PHP engine is switched to HHVM, it would catapult performance past Python and Ruby in pretty much all scenarios.
Versus native Python and Ruby, perhaps. Versus PyPy and Ruby Motion? Probably not.
The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners. If you change something when introducing HHVM to the masses, then you would have a game-breaker. If you can afford/achieve anything better than "drag'n'drop" your "index.php" there, and open your browser to "test if it works", do it. Except, of course, you have to maintain tons of legacy stuff already written in PHP…
Kinda wish they would drop backwards compatibility once in a while. I get why they don't but that's why PHP is just the most popular mediocre language. There should be scheduled non backwards compatible releases for every language (say every 10 years) that's the only way they can improve and not just get replaced when better ones come along.
PHP4 vs PHP5 - There was a lot of breakage at the time and was quite painful for many.
Universally, they were brittle and terribly insecure.
The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners. If you change something when introducing HHVM to the masses, then you would have a game-breaker. If you can afford/achieve anything better than "drag'n'drop" your "index.php" there, and open your browser to "test if it works", do it. Except, of course, you have to maintain tons of legacy stuff already written in PHP…
I can give you two more advantages. Lots of know-how available and lots of developers to pool from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Versus native Python and Ruby, perhaps. Versus PyPy and Ruby Motion? Probably not.
I think what the parent comment meant was that the "official" PHP would catapult past the "official" python & ruby.
The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners. If you change something when introducing HHVM to the masses, then you would have a game-breaker. If you can afford/achieve anything better than "drag'n'drop" your "index.php" there, and open your browser to "test if it works", do it. Except, of course, you have to maintain tons of legacy stuff already written in PHP…
Well, clearly the engineers working on Facebook's PHP (and several other large projects, from Yahoo! to Wordpress.com) aren't "begineers" neither looking for "cheap, hassle-free hosting".
I don't buy the "it's so crap, it's ONLY used because of cheap hosting" argument.
It's also a pragmatic language, with tons of libraries and features for web use.
So, it might be far from perfect, but than again, Javascript is far from perfect too, C++ is also flawed and Java has tons of bad decisions in its design (and culture). Still, those are some of the more widely used languages.
The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners. If you change something when introducing HHVM to the masses, then you would have a game-breaker. If you can afford/achieve anything better than "drag'n'drop" your "index.php" there, and open your browser to "test if it works", do it. Except, of course, you have to maintain tons of legacy stuff already written in PHP…
> The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners. Well, clearly the engineers working on Facebook's PHP (and several other large projects, from Yahoo! to Wordpress.com) aren't "begineers" neither looking for "cheap, hassle-free hosting". I don't buy the "it's so crap, it's ONLY used because of cheap hosting" argument. It's also a pragmatic language, with tons of…
On the libraries side: compare with javascript... all the NPM stuff and frameworks out there, and all the clientside-libraries in addition (think alone jQuery plugins). There is much crap in the JS-Land, but the sheer amount beats PHP clearly i'd say.
Or take the JVM: the VM is a masterpiece of engineering/programming and has a lot of libraries availably, not only for web stuff, and supports many languages on top of it.
Or, if you have some experience in the .NET world and know your visual studio, you can literally drag'n'drop your website together out of layouts and components.
So far you can't share PHP code seamlessly between server & client (-> JS), your runtime doesn't run quite everywhere and allows you to use the language you like (-> JVM) or is preinstalled on every windows system today and has an excellent visual development tool (-> .NET).
Yes, every language and ecosystem has it's flaws, but mostly they have also some single strengths that outweight the disadvantages. When you must nail down what PHP's is: I say incredible cheap hosting, and tons of legacy stuff (ironically often dropped on shitty cheap hosting platforms).
You may find more stuff pro/con for all the samples i mentioned above, but i hope you understand the core problem.
Kinda wish they would drop backwards compatibility once in a while. I get why they don't but that's why PHP is just the most popular mediocre language. There should be scheduled non backwards compatible releases for every language (say every 10 years) that's the only way they can improve and not just get replaced when better ones come along.
Python did that, and now everyone loves to hate it.
The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners. If you change something when introducing HHVM to the masses, then you would have a game-breaker. If you can afford/achieve anything better than "drag'n'drop" your "index.php" there, and open your browser to "test if it works", do it. Except, of course, you have to maintain tons of legacy stuff already written in PHP…
> The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners. Well, clearly the engineers working on Facebook's PHP (and several other large projects, from Yahoo! to Wordpress.com) aren't "begineers" neither looking for "cheap, hassle-free hosting". I don't buy the "it's so crap, it's ONLY used because of cheap hosting" argument. It's also a pragmatic language, with tons of…
Still, I wouldn't take a job in any of them. Javascript is crap, only used because it runs in the browser. C++ is pretty crap, only used because it has manual memory management. Java has its problems, but it has a decent design at least for the time; there is a terrible culture that I think adopted Java because it was popular rather than the other way around.
But yeah, in 2013 there are really much better languages than PHP available; if you want a similar-feeling replacement Python or Ruby are much saner, if you're willing to step further afield there are wonderful modern languages that push the boat a bit further (I'm in love with Scala at the moment).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners. Well, clearly the engineers working on Facebook's PHP (and several other large projects, from Yahoo! to Wordpress.com) aren't "begineers" neither looking for "cheap, hassle-free hosting". I don't buy the "it's so crap, it's ONLY used because of cheap hosting" argument. It's also a pragmatic language, with tons of…
> So, it might be far from perfect, but than again, Javascript is far from perfect too, C++ is also flawed and Java has tons of bad decisions in its design (and culture). Still, those are some of the more widely used languages. Still, I wouldn't take a job in any of them. Javascript is crap, only used because it runs in the browser. C++ is pretty crap, only used because it has manual memory management. Java has its p…