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Software in 2014

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Re: Software in 2014

#181

Post by dscrd »

xd wrote: post #5

"It’s a pity some people still build important apps in PHP..." Getting real tired of seeing these baseless statements from so called software professionals. Here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of features of modern day PHP: * yield * event * pthreads - yeap, real threads. * closures (including support for $this) * consistent hashing api * "finally" added to try-catch * empty() now supports expressions, rather than…

PHP certainly has features and it certainly is successful, and people are certainly doing stuff with it. It also certainly has severe and fundamental design flaws that are never going away.

It's distressing to say the least to many of us people who have studied programming languages a lot, that the quality of design and coherence in your programming language has almost no effect (or even negative correlation!) to how well it succeeds.

Re: Software in 2014

#182

Post by Tegran »

josteink wrote: post #103
xd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"haphazardly accumulated features" is not an explanation, it's a subjective point of view. "it's not very liked one due to it's flaws", PHP is very well liked, just not by everyone .. which goes for most things in life.

"haphazardly accumulated features" is not an explanation, it's a subjective point of view. If you really need it, here's a very good write-up which should cover that in an impressively detailed manner: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Here's one rebuttal to that:

http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal...

Re: Software in 2014

#183

Post by deeviant »

10098 wrote: post #180
weland wrote: post #62

I think this paints a rather meagre picture of software development in 2014: > More or less everything is expected to talk HTTP, and it’s really easy to make things talk HTTP. A lot of things that shouldn't talk HTTP are expected to just because there's an army of programmers who don't know better. Also, it's actually hard to make things talk HTTP, partly due to HTTP itself. However, much of this complexity is hidden…

> A lot of things that shouldn't talk HTTP are expected to just because there's an army of programmers who don't know better. Agree with this. Actually, I'd love it if Google released some kind of an RPC library for passing around protocol buffers between applications. It would be so much better than the crazy pseudo-REST mess we have.

Take a look at http://kentonv.github.io/capnproto/

Re: Software in 2014

#184

Post by ThomPete »

aaronem wrote: post #134
xd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone that works on Go at Google I'm shocked by your very much subjective view of PHP. Elitist much?

"Elitist?" I came into web development via the PHP tradesman's entrance, and until by the grace of God I found my way out into the wider world, I didn't even begin to suspect just how miserable I had it. If there's a tinge of elitism in the wider world's attitude toward PHP, I'll be the first to contend that it's justified.

Yeah I think you are more like an ex-smoker who after you managed to quit tells everyone who awful smoking is :)

Re: Software in 2014

#186

Post by dscrd »

qwerta wrote: post #110
stiff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests. -- Rasmus Lerdorf

I think this would apply to early Ruby On Rails. PHP libs and interpreter are actually fairly good.

Can you have a long-running process on PHP these days? I thought it still wasn't an option.

Re: Software in 2014

#187

Post by lucb1e »

> The de­vices are mem­ory-starved, CPU-starved, and bat­tery-starved.

If memory is your problem in 2014 and you're not creating some data analyzer application, you might be doing something wrong. If CPU is your problem and you're not creating a game, I think you're really doing something wrong. Battery drain is the only real bottleneck. Frankly I'm surprised how fast it went and how fast mobile devices are nowadays. My phone is roughly twice as powerful as my server, both in terms of CPU and memory (CPU performance comparison based on benchmarks).

> The browser APIs suck too. Sufficiently so that jQuery (or equivalent) is regarded as the lowest level that any sane person would program to; in effect, the new Web assembler.

Hi there! You just met an insane person.

> There’s no app store for your browser-based client with anything like the scale and size and polish of those for mobile apps.

We figured out how to do search quite a while ago. And they all do content search, the thing you were complaining about that app stores didn't have. What do you mean there is no way to search for web applications?

Also ChromeOS is doing this, but frankly I don't want it. Applications that just run machine code are way more powerful. I use Google Docs only because it works better for concurrent collaboration in documents, there is no other reason, and that is the only web application that I still use (tried some more, all sucked). I use vim and plaintext markdown editors anytime I can, or occasionally libreoffice when I really need imagery in documents.

> Browsers suck too · This is an unfashionable opinion, but I can’t see why it’s controversial.

That is something I completely agree with, though I quite like Javascript (as long as it's not OOP, JS just isn't made for that and you have to abuse all kinds of things) I hate the DOM. Why would this be controversial?

Re: Software in 2014

#188

Post by georgemcbay »

weland wrote: post #111
lsh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh my god, you're my new best friend. I was despairing of finding any opinion on HN that wasn't so mired in being too politically correct that it could have been written by a cold, dead fish with a robot brain powered by HAL. my extreme cynicism of HN comments has been temporarily rolled back. > A lot of things that shouldn't talk HTTP are expected to just because there's an army of programmers who don't know better.…

If we ever end up in the same part of the world, we should grab a beer :-). I share your worries.

I'm in San Diego and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re: Software in 2014

#189

Post by [deleted] »

xd wrote: post #32
enneff wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Part of the reason PHP is such a disgusting mess is because it is a raft of haphazardly accumulated features.

For someone that works on Go at Google I'm shocked by your very much subjective view of PHP. Elitist much?

[deleted]

Re: Software in 2014

#190

Post by sleazebreeze »

Lorenzo45 wrote: post #169

As someone who is just starting to learn Java and ObjC, am I going down the wrong path? I'm sure this guy is exaggerating to a degree, but I'm not sure how much.

Don't let an opinion piece posted to Hacker News do much to influence your choice of languages. Everyone has opinions and most of them are equally valid (or invalid).

If you want to write mobile apps, you're pretty much stuck writing in those languages or using a framework that does the cross-platform shenanigans for you. Or writing web apps exclusively that have mobile browser support.

Regardless, neither Java nor Obj-C is going away anytime soon, so it would not be a mistake to learn either or both.

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