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Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

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Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#11

Post by meowface »

Jemaclus wrote: post #5

As a PHP dev (8 years), I can honestly say PHP is an ugly language. But it gets the job done. And I'd say with 10K hours under your belt, you can do what you damn well please. Feel like spending another 10K hours in PHP? Go for it. Wanna learn C or Rust or Scala or Python or Ruby? Knock yourself out. I personally am a fan of diversity (master one skill set, then another, then another). Unless you're doing cutting-edg…

Agreed.

There's no point in rewriting any current projects in another language, but I think it would be wise to start new projects in languages that aren't PHP. Expand your horizons and all that.

Nowadays I only use PHP if I'm testing something briefly or just need a really simple script; kind of like the bash of the web.

Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#12

Post by meowface »

wushupork wrote: post #10

I'd love to hear Mark Zuckerberg reply to this.

I find it interesting that Facebook preferred rewriting the entire PHP interpreter to make code execute faster, rather than use another language.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, the very initial versions of Facebook were written mostly in Perl, so it's not like Zuckerberg was stuck with PHP since day 1.

Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#13

Post by joncalhoun »

meowface wrote: post #12
wushupork wrote: post #10

I'd love to hear Mark Zuckerberg reply to this.

I find it interesting that Facebook preferred rewriting the entire PHP interpreter to make code execute faster, rather than use another language. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the very initial versions of Facebook were written mostly in Perl, so it's not like Zuckerberg was stuck with PHP since day 1.

Why would they rewrite if their entire staff knew PHP already and there wasn't any guarantee that the new language would perform at their scale as is?

I'm not a fan of PHP but I don't think their issues could have been solved by simply porting over to another language.

Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#14

Post by bsaul »

I would recommend having a "back up" technology just in case. Try to go for a quite different language/technology that is more "hype" (objective-c, nodejs , f# , scala, haskell , golang, python, whatever). Nobody knows for sure what the next trend will be , so just cover yourself. You don't need to switch to that new tech full time, but just enough to be able to answer a few quizz question with it in interviews.

Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#15

Post by frevd »

I'm a C# veteran and have programmed for more than a decade. I started PHP last year for a project, and I must say 5.4 is quite rich in features (it's also very weird, agreed, but nothing beyond any control, the docs are great). It's astounding how much more productive you can be with PHP and its library, compared to ASP.Net for example. The libary is greatly grown (besides being impossible to remember it is the fastest way to use global functions for standard stuff and classes if you need custom implementation). You won't probably find any language more productive than that. If you're aiming for becomeing more well-paid as a specialist, web programming won't get you too far though, unless you have great back-end qualifications for special-purpose architecture. You could look into unity3d for a change (C# or Javascript). The only language that you must know in 3 years is Javascript. You should be proficient in it, since more and more moves into the client and cloud callbacks vs. serverside processing.

Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#16

Post by interstitial »

Never fear, some the nastiest, unmaintainable code I've ever seen is written in Rails. There is a conspiracy of silence among the Rails gurus that is utterly dishonest. Your self-doubt plays into their hands. Just watch, 10 years or less from now, all the mature programmers will confess what utter folly their "Rails Period" was now that they moved on to Programming Language Awesome 4.6

Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#17

Post by gexla »

10,000 house seems like an awful big investment for a plan B. Granted, much of that time will be paid for, but you would still need to spend a lot of time learning the plan B. That then leaves one skill on the side while you are using the other skill. Again, not the best investment.

As a solid PHP developer, if you aren't as solid on the front-end, then that's a great direction to go. An ace HTML / JS / CSS developer will have no problem finding work, especially as the front-end gets more complex and gets asked to do more. This would be a great enhancement to your tool-set rather than a replacement.

Otherwise, I would be looking at things which could bring in an alternative income. For example, you could build an add-on for Wordpress which you could sell while also boosting your profile in the Wordpress community. You may not want to do Wordpress work, but that could be another source if your other sources dried up.

There's lots of other things you could do also. The possibilities are endless. You should try to break out of your comfort zone of doing dev work to bring in other sources of income.

I can sense the fear, uncertainty and doubt in your post. You should embrace the chaos, kick your creativity into gear and try some different things. Chaos and change is good, it shakes things up and creates new opportunities.

Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#19

Post by rowanseymour »

I deeply regret choosing PHP for a dictionary website that I wrote 5 years ago. The trouble is that I've moved on as a developer. Mostly everything else I write now is Java or Groovy. I used to be ok with PHP's quirks but now I find my old PHP code so painful to look at that I generally don't and have pretty much given up development on that project with the vague hope of one day having a free month to rewrite it from scratch in something else.

Don't see your hours with PHP as a waste though. It's important as a developer to try different platforms and languages so you understand the pros and cons of different approaches.

Re: Ask HN: Please tell us how you started a project in PHP and are sorry for this.

#20

Post by rickboyce »

I started with PHP as a teenager, and ended up coding PHP professionally for about 6 years. I'm certainly not sorry for it (:

I haven't touched PHP in a few years (C# and Python for work now) and since really groking a other few languages I've come to the conclusion that, IMO, PHP manages to combine some of the worst aspects of dynamic and static typing to produce an ugly, confused language with gotchas that still haunt me.

But none of that matters - management, directors, clients, whoever care about results and productivity. They don't exist inside of the tech-hype bubble. People want a certain feature set, at a certain cost and within a certain time frame. They certainly won't rewrite their massive code base from PHP to start again in new-shingy-x, when they could be adding more value to an existing solution.

As much as I dislike PHP, I was amazingly productive in it. The systems I developed where way ahead of their competition just because I could iterate so rapidly. (It turns out I am even more productive in Python than I ever was in PHP, hindsight 'eh!)

You mentioned COBOL - there are a world of COBOL jobs out there (this is the first page that came up in Google http://www.jobsite.co.uk/cgi-bin/advsearch?search_type=quick... ) The fact that COBOL hasn't been cool for a few decades doesn't change the fact that there are masses of applications still running it across the world.

In your post you didn't say anything about disliking PHP, you said your scared of yours skills becoming redundant. Don't be - there will be vast amounts of PHP development going on in the world for decades to come, it isn't going anywhere just because the next big thing arrived. It just won't be cool and discussed at length on the internet anymore.

If you focus on being a skilled programmer instead of a coder who only works in PHP then you won't have trouble adapting your skillset. Make a point to really understand how what your developing works and why. When I picked up Java and C# after PHP I was productive in those languages within a few days - they are not that different at all. After a few months you will have learnt the idioms of those ecosystems and be well on your way to being fluent. A great programmer can produce great code in any language, a poor programmer will produce poor code in any language.

I do think it is really valuable to pick up a new language now and again, I always learn something that I take back to whatever I do day-to-day. It sounds like you work in web development at the moment, so maybe stick with something along those lines. Expert Javascript developers are so hard to find, I always find them the hardest to recruit for! It is a challenging language - everyone seems to 'know' it at some superficial level, but make an effort to really understand its idiosyncrasies.

Much more important than anything I've said above - developers have very personal, often very strong, opinions about programming languages. Take them all with a pinch of salt - programming languages don't matter nearly as much as we think they do. Play with a bunch of languages and then focus on a few the few that you really take to - quickly you will find something that you are passionate about enough to want to put your next 10,000 hours into.

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