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Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

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Re: Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

#21

Post by martswite »

stratos2 wrote: post #11

Oh good yet more comments about why PHP is trash and how your intelligence and social status are dictated by what language you are using. I almost don't click on posts about programming languages any more. Yet here i am, commenting..

I primarily develop using PHP. I read the first few lines of this article, got to this 'PHP is easy to learn. Golang is as easy as PHP!' and basically read, 'Hey thicko PHP guy, you could probably learn to use this language, cos its simple enough for your addled brain'.

The immediate feeling of condescension turned me off.

Re: Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

#24

Post by erangalp »

thirsteh wrote: post #20
erangalp wrote: post #15

No offense to the writer, but it seems to me he doesn't really understand web development. In 99.9% of web applications, the bottleneck for scaling is the database and not the language. Web application processes are generally not CPU intensive and are short lived, something PHP handles very nicely. On the other hand, PHP has a huge list of existing resources, libraries and excellent documentation and community. Look…

It powers YouTube, among other things: http://code.google.com/p/vitess/ Go documentation is very good, the standard library is extensive, and it has a very active community, but it does lack certain libraries that web developers might find attractive, e.g. a comprehensive ORM. Insinuating PHP is better because it's deployed in more places is silly.

Stop reading between the lines, I didn't say PHP was better as a language. What I was saying was that trying to convert PHP developers into Go programmers with those kind of arguments shows a basic lack of understanding of how web applications work, or what is the real strength of PHP.

Re: Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

#25

Post by tszming »

Most of the benefits he explained in the post also apply to Java (e.g. easy to use, GC, type system & concurrency).

IMHO, if a programmer only know PHP and want to explore, I would suggest Java/Scala/Python/Ruby as the next language instead of Go.

Re: Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

#26

Post by thirsteh »

erangalp wrote: post #24
thirsteh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It powers YouTube, among other things: http://code.google.com/p/vitess/ Go documentation is very good, the standard library is extensive, and it has a very active community, but it does lack certain libraries that web developers might find attractive, e.g. a comprehensive ORM. Insinuating PHP is better because it's deployed in more places is silly.

Stop reading between the lines, I didn't say PHP was better as a language. What I was saying was that trying to convert PHP developers into Go programmers with those kind of arguments shows a basic lack of understanding of how web applications work, or what is the real strength of PHP.

Most web developers who read Hacker News don't host their stuff with a hosting provider that doesn't even provide shell. With Go you just need to be able to execute a binary.

You sounded a lot like Go hasn't proved it's viable for "web scale." It has. Is it as widely deployed? Of course not, it's new.

I'm not sure what strength of PHP you're referring to--I'm assuming the ubiquity with shared hosting providers--but it's not even that great of a language to interface with databases, which was your example before.

Not arguing for Go particularly, just arguing against PHP. Its ubiquity is basically all it has going for it, but yes, that's a big deal.

Re: Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

#27

Post by luriel »

tszming wrote: post #25

Most of the benefits he explained in the post also apply to Java (e.g. easy to use, GC, type system & concurrency). IMHO, if a programmer only know PHP and want to explore, I would suggest Java/Scala/Python/Ruby as the next language instead of Go.

Java and Go's type systems are very different, Go's is much more lightweight, had implicit interfaces (aka "static duck typing") and has an improved form of composition instead of inheritance.

And concurrency in Go compared to Java is like day and night.

Then there is the simplicity and clarity of the standard libraries, and so on.

Re: Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

#29

Post by luriel »

thirsteh wrote: post #26
erangalp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop reading between the lines, I didn't say PHP was better as a language. What I was saying was that trying to convert PHP developers into Go programmers with those kind of arguments shows a basic lack of understanding of how web applications work, or what is the real strength of PHP.

Most web developers who read Hacker News don't host their stuff with a hosting provider that doesn't even provide shell. With Go you just need to be able to execute a binary. You sounded a lot like Go hasn't proved it's viable for "web scale." It has. Is it as widely deployed? Of course not, it's new. I'm not sure what strength of PHP you're referring to--I'm assuming the ubiquity with shared hosting providers--but i…

> You sounded a lot like Go hasn't proved it's viable for "web scale." It has. Is it as widely deployed? Of course not, it's new.

This depends on what is your definition of "widely deployed":

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go

Re: Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

#30

Post by malsme »

alttag wrote: post #2

Maybe I missed it, but the things that would convince me are a) a large, strong community, b) extensive documentation, and c) code examples in the article. Seeing no references to any of these, I don't find the article terribly persuasive.

Also, hosting. Reason I like PHP for personal projects is the hosting is so much more ubiquitous.
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