151–160 of 161 posts
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Software snobbery. "Cost and developer time are non-factors" Bro, do you even startup?
Don't quote and cut half of his sentence off. You tried to change the meaning substantially. His point was that learning PHP properly with all the shenanigans takes at least as much as time as learning a well thought out environment.
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If Symfony is so amazing, why does nobody use it? I mean nobody in the almost literal sense. Stack Overflow serves as a rough barometer of popularity and either Symfony users have no questions, use another support platform, or they don't make up a significant population. The #1 problem with the PHP community is it's complete anarchy and filled with people that should not be developing web apps, or at least should not…
You'd be very incorrect if you thought no one was using Symfony2. I am specifically talking about Symfony2, by the way. A great number of frameworks and CMSs are using Symfony2 components. Two popular ones are the http-kernel and http-foundation components. Drupal is integrating several Symfony2 components. Composer, the PHP package manager that has taken the community by storm, is using Symfony components. eZ publis…
Nobody uses Drupal, or eZ Publish or Joomla. They just don't. There's good reasons for this, notably these are some really obnoxious platforms to build for, but that aside their impact on the PHP world at large is inconsequential.
PHP, by and large, consists of people slamming together applications from the ground up the same way they built them in the 1990s. It shouldn't be this way, and people should fix it through education and outreach, but I really don't see that happening on the scale that's required.
Also, if you think even a quarter of the PHP devs out there even know what a unit testing framework is, you're more of an optimist than I am.
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Don't quote and cut half of his sentence off. You tried to change the meaning substantially. His point was that learning PHP properly with all the shenanigans takes at least as much as time as learning a well thought out environment.
His definition of properly is nothing but an ever moving goal post of software snobbery.
It's not snobbery. It's called doing your job like a professional. This is harder in PHP than it is in other languages.
The only language more cantankerous and difficult than PHP is C. Learning PHP properly is hard. There are hundreds of little things you will have to be very careful about because they are easy to get wrong and the cost of failure can be enormous.
If you can't see this, you're basically a PHP snob. You're holding your pet language to a different standard than others.
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Most of the arguments are biased opinions and can't really be defended. But... if you don't like wordpress, why not assess projects such as Symfony2 or Drupal?
Maybe. But the fact is PHP as a language is messy, albeit some frameworks have made it better (i.e Laravel). I'm assessing Wordpress because of it's praise by many people when it's not well built (have you looked at the codebase?). Just look at the author and history of PHP, the author hates computer science, and it was derived from Perl as a templating engine, not something I'd hold as quality. Nonetheless framework…
PHP is like Perl blended with C and a whole lot of confusion.
Frameworks have made it "better" like ketchup improves the quality of prison food, but it's still terrible on the whole.
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You get what you pay for in the PHP world. You can hire some kid out of high-school to slap together some application in a weekend and pay them in beer, sure, but what will you get? The maintenance costs on this abomination will quickly consume any up-front savings. Secondly, the reason some programmers are more expensive than others is because they're more efficient. Who would you rather have? Six PHP programmers th…
You're mixing technologies (PHP vs Ruby / Python) with types of programmers (inexperienced vs experienced). Wielding a master's sword does not a swordmaster make. Surely you've seen enough RoR and Django projects to know that. Some people will say that something not written in a strongly typed language is not well engineered. If it's not compiled, it's not efficient. This is just programming snobbery. For what it's w…
Remember, both PHP and JavaScript were serious tar-pits ten years ago.
JavaScript has made enormous strides in that time, the cultural shift is unbelievable. People went from writing absolutely terrible client-side code, to using frameworks (Moo, Scriptaculous at first, later jQuery, RequireJS) to using it server-side for serious applications. It's gone from complete anarchy to highly civilized. There's some things JavaScript does very well now, and in an elegant way mostly free of quirky tradition and/or obnoxious anachronisms.
Meanwhile PHP has only degraded. It's improved, technically, but the community is now hyper-fragmented. Best practices are routinely ignored. Frameworks don't inter-operate even on the most basic level. There's no leadership. There's opposition to even the most obvious improvements to PHP, like deprecating components that are doing nothing but holding PHP back. Killing off `mysql_query`, for example, is absolutely imperative, but it's going to be a bitter fight.
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I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone praise Wordpress code if they've had to work with it, apart from actual contributors to the WP core of course. Wordpress is popular almost entirely because it's easy to deploy and has a vast ecosystem of plugins and themes which mostly just work. You could probably build a competing CMS in, say Laravel 4, replace the plugin system with Composer packages or something si…
Using WordPress is not as brainless as you point it out to be. All software needs to be learned, and from my experience let me tell you WordPress is not always learnt well. WordPress is being pushed only because the majority of web developers can tinker with PHP only.
I think you're forgetting that most of the people who use Wordpress aren't web developers at all, and most of the 'web developers' who use Wordpress probably can't code much, either, because they won't need to. The ease of the Wordpress install is something they advertise. Once you ever have to touch the code, yes, it's a nightmare, even if you're inured to the horrors of php code. Most 'web development' jobs with Wordpress involve the install, setting up themes, maybe editing the css and installing plugins (because even that is still more arcane than some non-technical bloggers and people want to deal with.)
The "low bar for entry" for PHP comes up as an epithet now and again, but if you're trying to increase the adoption of your particular language, having an application the plebs can run isn't necessarily a bad thing. Does anything similar exist in the Python or Ruby worlds yet, for which someone wouldn't be expected to know how to use a terminal, or handle git?
It is, I think, almost entirely down to being less of a hassle than anything else out there, and especially less of a hassle than anything not written in PHP. Call it laziness if you will, and I wouldn't entirely disagree with you.
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Engineering is not computer science. A sane engineer don't pick technology based on what is most theoretically pure, but based on what can deliver on the requirements on time and on budget. If you are building a simple CRUD style application, for example, there's likely nothing in your technical requirements that precludes PHP in any way. Then the question turns to ease of deployment and maintenance, operational cost…
For the question "I want to build a web application", PHP is not the answer. It is the worst in nearly every category you cite. Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously. What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting? If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of…
If you think that, you don't have much real world experience.
> Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously.
Why do you need a deployment tool written in PHP for PHP applications? Are you serious? It's a ridiculous proposition to care that much about the language the deployment system is written in. What I care about is what benefits it brings me.
Where I am now we have our own deployment system, btw. - we operate a private multi-tenant cloud specifically tuned to the type of workloads our customers have, at a cost ~1/3 of what it'd cost us to host our current infrastructure somewhere like EC2 with equivalent redundancy and performance. That is including the development and maintenance costs for our in-house tools. As part of that we have a rapidly improving set of deployment tools. Handling deployment of PHP was pretty much the simplest part of that system.
> What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting?
Are you for real? I love Ruby. I'm working on a Ruby compiler as a hobby. But scaling PHP is trivial compared to RoR. I don't need optimization options for PHP - one of our clients processes restaurant bookings worth 50 million pounds a year via a setup that consumes ~30% of CPU resources on two frontend servers with a combined leasing cost of ~1000 GBP/year. The vast majority of their cost (their total yearly cost for their internet presence is about 3 orders of magnitude above the cost of the servers hosting the PHP code) for this system is marketing, support, power and bandwidth in that order. Cost of the frontends that PHP run on comes at the very bottom - it's a rounding error. If we needed more frontend capacity? We'd add another couple servers like that, and it's still be What costs us money on the hardware side is database servers and network infrastructure. Web frontends for typical simple web apps are cheap. Sure, there are exceptions (but as much as I love Ruby, RoR is certainly not going to save you scalability grief in the cases where scaling PHP becomes hard or costly).
> If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of a few that are generally crappy.
If you're not Facebook, there's no compelling reason to write your PHP engine as PHP is fast enough for pretty much anything you throw at it until you're in a situation where you have thousands of servers, where shaving a few percent off here and there starts creating large savings.
A vanishingly small number of companies ever reach that scale - optimising for that in advance is lunacy, and most "cleaner" languages does not provide a better starting point in that respect. Ruby, for example, is far more costly to scale.
> Cost and developer time are non-factors since the time you'd need to learn PHP is probably higher than other languages that make more sense and aren't filled with anachronisms you will spend half your time working around.
Spoken as someone who doesn't know the market. I have a steady supply of qualified PHP staff. In fact, we have recruiters hounding us every day with cheap candidates that know PHP. Ruby? Rarely, if ever. Those who know Ruby well enough have an easy time finding better paid jobs.
> You can train someone up in Ruby on Rails in two weeks
Bullshit. You can get a senior developers that is already expensive to relative beginner level in that amount of time. Or you can hire a PHP developer that is already skilled at ~60% of the cost.
I've seen "RoR developers" with two weeks experience, and what they produce is not pretty, and certainly does not result in a good ROI compared to more pragmatic solutions. I'm all for using Ruby if/when you have a good team of Ruby developers, but you then also need to realize that you have an expensive team. It makes sense when your team is highly experienced and rapid turnaround is more important than keeping the cost down, or if your personal satisfaction is more important to you than the cost - both can be perfectly valid reasons. If I were to start a new company now, I'd pick Ruby myself. But I would do it because it is what I would prefer to work with, not out of any illusion it's currently a cheap choice.
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His definition of properly is nothing but an ever moving goal post of software snobbery.
"Unit tests? SQL escaping? What are you? A snob ?" It's not snobbery. It's called doing your job like a professional. This is harder in PHP than it is in other languages. The only language more cantankerous and difficult than PHP is C. Learning PHP properly is hard . There are hundreds of little things you will have to be very careful about because they are easy to get wrong and the cost of failure can be enormous. I…
I detest PHP from a language writers standpoint. Programming language design is a hobby of mine, and I am a real snob about programming languages from a personal preference point of view, and PHP certainly does not measure up.
But I don't let my pet ideas about what a programming language should be like stop me from doing my job, which is to ensure we have an environment and team where we can get projects in on time and on budget with a staff that is both skilled enough and cost effective enough to keep us profitable. Is it possible to do this with Ruby? Sure. But the dynamics are very different, and the potential customers tend to be quite different.
I've written web services in a number of languages, including C and C++, and been responsible for systems in a mix of PHP and Perl that handled ~$50 million worth of card payments and invoicing, and I've developed Ruby based systems and hybrid PHP - Ruby - C++ stacks. When I can justify picking Ruby, I do, because I love the language. But I refuse to pick Ruby just because I personally like it and it has a higher coolness factor in the face of economics where it doesn't make sense, such as when there's installed bases or teams that are already skilled at PHP. It'd be irresponsible.
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Facebook. Wikipedia. Yahoo.
pestaa's comment needs to be amended. It should read: "A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all in 2013 ." Facebook's former CTO has said that the only reason Facebook is still on PHP still today is legacy. It wouldn't be written in PHP if it were started today. PHP once was the right tool for the job, but those years have passed. We have many better option…
A sane engineer considers the full pictures before picking a solution rather than pick their pet languages just because it's nice and clean.
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His definition of properly is nothing but an ever moving goal post of software snobbery.
"Unit tests? SQL escaping? What are you? A snob ?" It's not snobbery. It's called doing your job like a professional. This is harder in PHP than it is in other languages. The only language more cantankerous and difficult than PHP is C. Learning PHP properly is hard . There are hundreds of little things you will have to be very careful about because they are easy to get wrong and the cost of failure can be enormous. I…
You don't have to use those things, but they are there if you want them, just like they are in other languages. Neither Python nor Ruby enforce unit test or parameterized SQL requirements.
I don't like the language itself, but I do like the myriad benefits it brings. The only pet language I hold to a different standard is Perl.