Live data from Hacker News

Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

github.com

11–20 of 221 posts

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#11
tl;dr humerous Haskeller takes steaming dump, rejoices; one may think that one is not being productive, and yet one's actual productivity sky rockets, whereas in other languages (exception, LISP) one's actual productivity is less than one feels, especially in the case of PHP where delusion apparently reigns.

Seems to be a riff on the text editor comic graph where emacs morphs into dragon-eating-its-tail recursion as one approaches unreachable mastery [1]

[1] http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_fun.html

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#14

Decorators are more than simple syntactic sugar in Python ;) It seems overly critical, but still funny (the Haskell one is probably the most spot on) And after all, Facebook uses PHP and MySql

> Facebook uses PHP

This is the common rebuttal of PHP jokes - but pointing to a sole outlier is rarely a solid defense. Especially when they have created Hack[1] and HHVM[2]. So it's not entirely accurate to say they "use PHP."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#15
post #10

He wanted to make a cheap joke, but PHP should be the opposite: productivity is rather high, while self-assesment is low.

I think by "self-assessment" is meant something more like "self-regard", the whole being taken to mean that PHP programmers have a relatively high opinion of themselves, which is not justified by the code they generate.

I gather the author is perhaps not a native speaker of English, so perhaps this is a subtlety which has simply passed him by. As such, I've opened an issue on Github to suggest the replacement of the term. (Also another, to suggest the Javascript chart be updated to account for promises; I've somewhat less high hopes of that one, given that the author appears to be a disciple of the Haskell language family and to entertain the prejudices so commonly associated therewith, but who knows? It's worth a shot, in any case.)

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#18

Decorators are more than simple syntactic sugar in Python ;) It seems overly critical, but still funny (the Haskell one is probably the most spot on) And after all, Facebook uses PHP and MySql

> Facebook uses PHP This is the common rebuttal of PHP jokes - but pointing to a sole outlier is rarely a solid defense. Especially when they have created Hack[1] and HHVM[2]. So it's not entirely accurate to say they "use PHP." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine

Sure, they created those tools.

But they grew on PHP. Those tools came to be after "a lot of time"

And of course they're not the only site that uses PHP (see all the Wordpress installations, etc)

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#19

Decorators are more than simple syntactic sugar in Python ;) It seems overly critical, but still funny (the Haskell one is probably the most spot on) And after all, Facebook uses PHP and MySql

> Facebook uses PHP This is the common rebuttal of PHP jokes - but pointing to a sole outlier is rarely a solid defense. Especially when they have created Hack[1] and HHVM[2]. So it's not entirely accurate to say they "use PHP." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine

HHVM language is PHP,Hack is a spinoff of PHP.

So yeah,they basically use PHP.

HHVM is a different implementation,while Hack is a superset.

Now why,with the tons of money they have,they chosed to stick with it,I dont know. But it's 100% accurate to say they have some PHP code powering their website. But I bet they have as much java code deployed,and next to none haskell.

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#20

Decorators are more than simple syntactic sugar in Python ;) It seems overly critical, but still funny (the Haskell one is probably the most spot on) And after all, Facebook uses PHP and MySql

> Facebook uses PHP This is the common rebuttal of PHP jokes - but pointing to a sole outlier is rarely a solid defense. Especially when they have created Hack[1] and HHVM[2]. So it's not entirely accurate to say they "use PHP." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine

Facebook choosing to improve upon PHP is still, arguably, a (weak) argument for PHP as a language which is, at least, worth improving upon. Given their money and resources, they could have chosen to abandon it entirely, but they didn't. Maybe a more accurate form of this argument would be "Facebook still doesn't entirely hate PHP."

And even so, there are obviously plenty of sites, and even startups, using PHP, but facebook seems to be the goto for PHP advocacy in sort of the same way that a certain ranty blog post is for its detractors, neither of which really requires much effort to employ, or counter.

Post reply on HN