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Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

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Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#21

Post by coldtea »

aaronem wrote: post #15
coldtea wrote: 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…

>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 read it this way too, and this is what I'm disagreing with. I've seen far more programmers for other languages having a high opinion of themselves than PHP guys, which are more workman-like.

The worst offender in this regard would be some Javascript guys (and their n-th rediscovery of the computer programming wheel).

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#22

Post by coldtea »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #12
coldtea wrote: post #10

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

Joke question: Is your self esteem low?

Joke answer: no. I'm not even a PHP programmer especially (though I've worked with the language in several occasions).

Cut my teeth decades ago, when the web was just starting, Perl was king, Python didn't have half of the stuff it has in 2.7, and AJAX wasn't even a thing.

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#24

Post by zxcdw »

gexla wrote: post #6

Poor PHP. It just keeps getting dumped on.

And rightly so. Frankly, I think the only reason PHP keeps floating on is the inertia it has. All the investment in tools, existing codebase and developer experience are what keep it going, not language merits.

And yes, this means, that whatever you invest in, be ready to abandon it and move forward, preferrably sooner rather than later. After all, langauges are nothing but tools. Don't take them personally.

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#25

Post by stared »

It seems that it interchanges "productive" with "writing clean code".

PHP is ugly but can be productive. Haskell is beautiful, but well, I know a lot of people encharmed by it, but no-one productive (i.e. delivering products quickly; it's not the same as solving pure, mathematical problems).

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#27

Post by coldtea »

frostmatthew wrote: post #14
raverbashing wrote: post #8

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

>This is the common rebuttal of PHP jokes - but pointing to a sole outlier is rarely a solid defense.

Sole outlier? Hardly. Half of the web is powered by PHP, including tons of websites with huge traffic and usage.

>Especially when they have created Hack[1] and HHVM[2]. So it's not entirely accurate to say they "use PHP."

Hack and HHVM do not show some inherent PHP issue that something like Ruby or Python would not have.

Hack is mostly an attempt to add type checking/hinting to PHP. The lack of type checking would be the same if they used Python or Ruby or Node+JS or whatever.

And HHVM is an attempt at a speedup, to work at Facebook like economies of scale. Considering that plain PHP is on par speedwise with Ruby and Python, that's again not something that would be saved using those other languages. Which is why Google tried to do Unladded Swallow (for Python), Dropbox does their own thing, RoR companies invest hard on speeding up Ruby/Rails, etc.

TL;DR: Hack and HHVM may be proofs of some lack in PHP for Facebook uses, but are not proofs of PHP lacking things compared to other similar languages like Python and Ruby.

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#28

Post by scrollaway »

krapp wrote: post #20
frostmatthew wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fa…

> Facebook choosing to improve upon PHP is still, arguably, a (weak) argument for PHP as a language which is, at least, worth improving upon.

Or you can look at it another way: Facebook regretted their decision and PHP potentially made the switch to a different platform so hard that they were forced to improve the language, rather than leave.

Don't forget that companies need to be able to justify the cost of moving from one platform to another. When you're employing people whose skillset is potentially limited, that's not always possible.

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#29

Post by coldtea »

balloot wrote: post #26

I am increasingly convinced that Haskell only exists so that people who know it can pat themselves on the back for being wonderful.

With the exception of pandoc, I don't recall seeing anything particularly impressive from the Haskell camp.

(Btw, this, actual stuff people use, is how I measure programming languages -- this metric takes into account communities, libraries, practical issues, etc all together, and ties them with practical results. It's my version of "let the market decide").

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