Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Taking PHP Seriously

slack.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 673 posts

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#101

Post by throwaway729 »

badminton1 wrote: post #79
swalsh wrote: post #16

I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…

> "The next guy to join the company will clean up your shit" Is that acting in the best interest of your employer? or ripping your employer off? I think more like the latter. Imagine if other professions behaved like this, like finance or legal people. But suddenly because you are an "engineer" this is acceptable? If I was your boss I would fire you immediately. The world of difference between balancing trade-offs in…

> But suddenly because you are an "engineer" this is acceptable?

No, it's acceptable precisely because you aren't an engineer.

We software engineers in the US are not bound by a formal code of ethics like more traditional engineering disciplines. We're not required to invest a certain amount of effort in the security or accessibility or maintainability implications of our work. And, most importantly, we are not legally responsible -- independent of our employers -- for defects in our product that arise from incompetence or otherwise failing to follow best practices.

So, you're wrong and your parent is right. He's not independently responsible for his work, and he has no formal ethical obligations prior to his employment contract.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#102

Post by brlewis »

nostrademons wrote: post #94
swalsh wrote: post #16

I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…

You can have the same mentality in many languages that suck less than PHP, though. Python, for example, tends to get out of your way and just let you write your algorithm. Go, as well. Or various JVM languages, particularly Java 8 and Kotlin. The one thing you want to avoid are communities that argue about "the best" way to do things. Even then, you can use the fruits of their labors, as long as they're willing to pa…

I do think certain languages are more conducive to the "just write it quick" mindset. I find it easier to enter this mindset when I write a bash script.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#103

Post by wyager »

JohnnyConatus wrote: post #38
swalsh wrote: post #16

I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…

But what about all of the successful Haskell startups? /s

There are a number of successful startups and very large companies using Haskell. It's understandable why it isn't a common choice, of course; the potential employee base is fairly small.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#104

Post by bkanber »

Tehnix wrote: post #74

I find the virtues quite uncompelling, take for example >First, state. Every web request starts from a completely blank slate. Except for, you know, when you don't want to reinitialize everything everytime someone makes a new request. There are tons of things that you only need to run once. >I claim that PHP’s simpler “think; edit; reload the page” cycle makes developers more productive. Over the course of a long and…

> Except for, you know, when you don't want to reinitialize everything everytime someone makes a new request. There are tons of things that you only need to run once.

I mean, you're not reinitializing it, and it's not exactly slow. And when your application starts scaling across many instances, many zones, many servers, you can have more faith that each request runs independently and there are no runaway processes to worry about on a single one of your random servers somewhere.

> where I'd almost have to visit every branch of code when I alter something because of it's many weird behaviours

I'm not really sure what you mean by that. Write a method, write tests for that method. Just because PHP has weird type coercion issues doesn't mean you can't be diligent about the types that you use. And of course tools like PhpStorm understand docblocks, annotations and PHP types and classes and basically does the same thing that a compiler does, it'll show you big honking type errors if you ask it to, it'll even stop you from committing broken code if you use that option.

> Sure, a lot of people have done a lot of quite cool projects in PHP, but I would much more benefit that to the lower barrier to entry

I don't know about that. Low barrier to entry gets you a lot of crummy projects. In my experience PHP is a lot easier to manage and maintain in production, and that's a huge advantage to companies and products with small teams.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#105

Post by tracker1 »

smsm42 wrote: post #43
kuschku wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what's the catch? About 2-3 orders of magnitude in performance. That’s the catch. And it’s the reason why even with PHP you use things as opcaches, cache database results in external daemons, you use process pools with fastcgi instead of actually creating new processes, etc. And hacking those things on top of PHP make your program even worse to reason about than just using a daemonized system with actor framewor…

Unless you're writing in pure hand-optimized assembly language, 3 orders of magnitude in performance is way more than you could claim. PHP web requests commonly execute in hundreds of ms (of course, here I generalize mercilessly, but that covers most of cases I know of and that's what most sites aim for). So you say your non-PHP requests which would do the same thing would finish in hundreds of microseconds? I have v…

The system now used to serve GoDaddy's Website Builder content is written in node, deployed to clusters behind load balancers, and from there connecting to Cassandra clusters for the data... iirc, the average turn around time for a given request (including dynamic ones) is less than 12ms from the node server receiving the request to delivering the response, under a load of many millions of requests per second to the system.

Disclosure, I worked at GD in Website Builder when this was being developed, but haven't been there for over 2 years now.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#106

Post by tonyarkles »

I've been doing consulting for several years now, as well as a MSc thesis that involved me looking at a number of open source codebases. I am generally in the "PHP is garbage" camp, but I keep hearing people say that nice codebases in PHP are possible. I've never seen one, but I am perpetually open to the idea that they exist.

Does anyone have a good example of an open-source PHP project that will enlighten me?

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#107

Post by throwaway729 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #97
badminton1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The next guy to join the company will clean up your shit" Is that acting in the best interest of your employer? or ripping your employer off? I think more like the latter. Imagine if other professions behaved like this, like finance or legal people. But suddenly because you are an "engineer" this is acceptable? If I was your boss I would fire you immediately. The world of difference between balancing trade-offs in…

I was unaware finance people didn't operate like this.

Finance has a bad rep, but there are actually lots of rules and regs surrounding ethics in finance and a practitioner can easily end up with massive fines or in jail for failing to follow those rules. Even if his boss told him to do it.

Those rules may not be the right ones and they may not be enforced well enough, but there's at least some nominal level of assumed professional responsibility.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#108

Post by bitwalker »

callesgg wrote: post #12

That example of "Surprise type conversions" is crazy. Did not know that. While i do not think PHP is a perfect programing language. There is one think i LOVE about PHP, it is that the PHP "community's" default way of documenting code behavior is to make a small example. When i read most other languages documentation i read it. Then i need to make a small test to verify that i understood it. All those tests takes a lo…

In my experience code examples as documentation are far more common than actual documentation (e.g. guides, user manuals), but perhaps I just haven't worked in a language where the opposite is true.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#109

Post by nsx147 »

swalsh wrote: post #16

I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…

I like to call myself a "biztech" entrepreneur and these are the reasons I stick with PHP. Specifically using Yii2 I've been able to whip up MVP's and simply just focus on getting traction. In my experience that is all that matters for a startup.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#110

Post by wyager »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #98
swalsh wrote: post #16

I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…

I'll offer an alternate hypothesis. Some companies are succeeding in spite of php. There are many, many users of php, and we'd expect that there would be considerable variance, with some users doing awful (no traction, buggy sites, etc) and some hitting home runs (facebook). Because it's such a popular language, it will have users across this entire spectrum. It's easy to cherry-pick the winners and miss all of the t…

Precisely. This is classic base rate fallacy. If tons of people use PHP because PHP devs are cheap, there are bound to be a ton of successes despite the fact that it's a horrible technology in many respects.
Post reply on HN