21–30 of 160 posts
The article states that php doesn't have lambdas and method chaining, although it does. They aren't well done, as per usual, but it definitely has them. Honestly, we may be best off doing a CoffeeScript style pre-processor for PHP. Because PHP isn't going anywhere, no mattter how much we may prefer other languages, PHP's popularity is one of pure pragmatism, something the language purists don't seem to understand. Ge…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're being inflammatory. Rails has nowhere near the install base that PHP has, and furthermore, it's a framework, not a language, so the comparison is unequal. Further, setting up and installing Rails is nowhere near as frictionless as installing, for instance, CodeIgniter. Until that can be said, Rails is not a viable alternative. I'm all for a PHP alternative. I use it because it's ubiquitous, but I have no love…
If installing Rails (or Flask, or whatever) isn't trivial compared to the difficulty of writing the actual code, then either your project is a toy, or your web host needs to get its act together.
In fact, I'll go so far as to say that what you're saying is indicative of the kind of out-of-touch response that keeps any of the proposed alternatives from replacing PHP.
Rest assured that I would rather hire a good PHP developer than this guy to code in Ruby.
I'm convinced that PHP is just too big, too popular, and, as the author realizes and points out, too fast and utility-wise too well-equipped to die at this point in time. Whatever may be able to kill it off surely won't be Ruby, Perl nor Python.
PHP will likely be replaced, but not for a long time and it will take time. And there are still a lot of perl hackers out there too, none suffering (aside from having to use perl).
I won't argue that PHP is getting long in the tooth, has a somewhat unclear future, and some of the standard lib is hella inconsistent, but these points: then what PHP is lacking is lambdas and method chaining. Does the author know anything about PHP at all? As far as I can tell method chaining has been available as long as PHP supported OOP and Anonymous functions have been supported for several years since PHP 5.3…
The author doesn't know about any other languages either, it seems.
I stopped reading when he argued that PHP's assocative arrays was an advantage; hashes/dictionaries are in all the scripting languages. (Afaik, they come from AWK by the way of Perl, anyway -- they were created many years before PHP existed.)
Examples aplenty.
To me, the best thing about PHP is that it is so easy to deploy to pretty much any shared hosting on the planet, not to mention really easy to set up on your local machine (with WAMP/MAMP).
I love Rails, but on many occasions have built projects in PHP (using a decent framework like Kohana) just because I was putting this on my client's shared hosting account and didn't want to deal with having them get a new server, or just plain setting up Rails. Yeah yeah, I know there's passenger now, etc. -- still not as stupid easy as dropping a php file into a web directory (and assuming that Apache is set up with mod_php, or FastCGI or whatever -- which it always is).
The article states that php doesn't have lambdas and method chaining, although it does. They aren't well done, as per usual, but it definitely has them. Honestly, we may be best off doing a CoffeeScript style pre-processor for PHP. Because PHP isn't going anywhere, no mattter how much we may prefer other languages, PHP's popularity is one of pure pragmatism, something the language purists don't seem to understand. Ge…
>> Get me from 0 to "Hello, World" as fast as you can. That's how you build the next PHP. Well put.