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PHP needs a vision

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Re: PHP needs a vision

#151

Post by nnq »

laurent123456 wrote: post #78
taylorbuley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nice side affect of this is that PHP can suit both novice and experienced programmers. Newbies don't have to learn OO before they write Hello World.

That's also a problem because anyone with a day experience in PHP can claim to be PHP developer, and often companies can't really tell the difference between an experienced and non-experienced programmer. If they can do PHP, they can build our website and we end up with horrible unmaintainable code. I think that's why PHP has such a bad reputation.

...naah, any kid can learn Brainfuck in a weekend ..."real" programmers don't even need a 100% Turing complete language to get the job done: choose Malbolge instead! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge)

Re: PHP needs a vision

#152

Post by memla »

davidlumley wrote: post #110
twodayslate wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or facebook. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2356432130

Facebook _doesn't_ run PHP. A large portion of it is coded in PHP, but it runs C++ through HipHop[1]. Facebook may as well be written in anything that compiles down to C++. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP

Actually, the difference between compiled C++ code, and the newest version of PHP with APC/Xcache is not that drastic, but facebook needs to squeeze out every bit of performance so they can to cut down on the number of servers.

For what it's worth, PHP 5.4(without APC) performed better than both Python and Ruby on that language shootout page: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programs-a...

Re: PHP needs a vision

#153

Post by nnq »

Corrado wrote: post #139
nnq wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and thanks to this, you end up with a "beast" like Magento, written by "experienced" programmers, and then you have novices tasked with writing themes and components for it, but it doesn't work that way because the "beast" is not "black boxed" well enough for the novices to ignore it. (I keep quoting "experienced" here because the example Magento is just "Java written in PHP" and I'd fire anyone turning up this…

Having had the unfortunate experience to work with Magento recently, I completely agree with your evaluation. My reoccurring thoughts were exactly "this is Java written in PHP!".

Then please spread the word and stop clients/managers from choosing it! Let's stop others from falling into the "look, it even has ebay integration!" trap!

Re: PHP needs a vision

#154

Post by dirktheman »

phatbyte wrote: post #148

Personally I think PHP has a bad rap for two reasons: First: Community like HN and such, have lot of good and smart people, however, lots of us are what I like to call "tech hipster", they like to always brag about how they prefer some new-shiny language/framework whatever, as if that means they know more than the average developer. Like an hipster when it comes to some underground-indie-band. It's pretty fun to see…

Nice analogy with the indie/mainstream pop, and I couldn't agree more with the techno-hipster with their 'cool' underground languages. PHP is still the bread and butter of the web, wether you like it or not.

I can really recommend the Laravel framework, it's quite elegant!

Re: PHP needs a vision

#155

Post by jtreminio »

rplnt wrote: post #142
kjackson2012 wrote: post #51

I come from a C++ background, and early last year tried my hand at web development. After hearing about all the stuff about how PHP was an "old", kludgey language, I tried to learn python, and go the webpy. It was doable, but I kept running into issues all the time. I gave up and switched to PHP, and I have to say that it was a much easier experience. For the most part, everything just worked. Regardless of how kludg…

> everything just worked. That's the scariest thing about the language. The php will run whatever you write in the script; assuming things, hiding errors, etc..

It sounds like you've never properly programmed in php a day in your life. Stop spouting nonsense. If you're going to develop in php, you do so in strict mode with all errors turned on. Doing otherwise makes you part of the problem.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#156

Post by jasonlotito »

krichman wrote: post #136
icelancer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's very evident in the fact that no one uses it, too. PHP sucks.

If number of users was equivalent to quality you would be correct. But it isn't. Under your argument, Wal-Mart is a purveyor of family heirlooms.

The number of users is not equivalent to quality. It's an indication of quality.

As for quality...

No, Wal-Mart isn't a purveyor of items with the qualities of being expensive, extremely limited, and old.

Quality is a subjective word, defined by different aspects. Just as I can, with justification, define Apple as a purveyor of low-quality hardware, I can say equally it sells high-quality software.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#157

Post by mercurial »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #100
venomsnake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with php is that is scales terribly with the size of the codebase. Try to move away from the comfort zone of the language and the size of the project and it changes a lot.

The opposite, actually. PHP's shared-nothing architecture makes scaling a breeze. Just add more hardware.

I believe you misread parent. The size of the codebase has little to do with the resources needed by the software.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#158

Post by TylerE »

jtreminio wrote: post #155
rplnt wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything just worked. That's the scariest thing about the language. The php will run whatever you write in the script; assuming things, hiding errors, etc..

It sounds like you've never properly programmed in php a day in your life. Stop spouting nonsense. If you're going to develop in php, you do so in strict mode with all errors turned on. Doing otherwise makes you part of the problem.

I'll accept this argument when PHP starts shipping with sane defaults. It's only quite recently that register globals got turned off in the default config.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#159

Post by shaldengeki »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #144
shaldengeki wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel as though we ought to hold our comments to higher standards than "expresses a strong negative opinion with no supporting evidence or reasoning". Maybe that's just me? It certainly feels strange that this sort of comment is being defended when the same comment with PHP replaced by Python/Ruby/(Java/Coffee)script/Haskell/C/C++ would be universally reviled.

I don't think that the supporting evidence needs to be explicitly stated. Those of us who have used PHP before inherently know why he posted what he posted. The evidence and reasoning is in our past experience with the language, and it's much stronger than a "citation" of some blog post or anything of that sort. It's quite telling that we don't see comments like that for other languages that often, if ever. Aside fro…

I hardly think that you and he speak for "those of us who have used PHP before", and to pretend that you do seems awfully arrogant on your part. I definitely don't share your sentiments, that's for sure!

Even if you did speak for everyone who'd used PHP before, I don't think this comment is in any way useful or productive - are we all just supposed to take it on faith that every person who has a strong negative opinion on something speaks for everyone who's familiar with the topic? It seems to me that this is precisely against the spirit of HN (and reasoned discussion in general). So yes, I think that if you're going to make a comment like "PHP needs to die" and want to contribute something meaningful to the discussion, you're expected to elaborate on why you think that way. It's surprising to me that you're even trying to say otherwise.

I'm not sure what to make of your assertion that the existence of a vocal group of PHP haters indicates that "PHP needs to die". I'll admit the language has its warts, but the hatred directed at PHP on HN seems way out of proportion to any other programming community I've been to, and out of proportion to the actual deficiencies with the language. And I don't really think that it makes sense to call PHP a "cancer" or to say that the existence of PHP is a problem; it's not as if we shun and shame programmers when they try to migrate from PHP to other languages, and it's not as if PHP paradigms are "infiltrating" other languages.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#160

Post by jtreminio »

TylerE wrote: post #158
jtreminio wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you've never properly programmed in php a day in your life. Stop spouting nonsense. If you're going to develop in php, you do so in strict mode with all errors turned on. Doing otherwise makes you part of the problem.

I'll accept this argument when PHP starts shipping with sane defaults. It's only quite recently that register globals got turned off in the default config.

Global registers were deprecated in 5.3.0, and completely removed in 5.4.0

http://php.net/manual/en/security.globals.php

5.3.0 is 2 and a half years old.

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