251–260 of 673 posts
What goes around comes around. I'm editing my LinkedIn and dusting off the old O'Reillys...
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Session cookies were basically invented for transient statefulness over HTTP.
I'm not referring to per-user sorts of things. You can't cache those locally in a sane way in any language. I'm talking about what would usually be memoizable sorts of things.
The article points out that arguably the best part of PHP is the "shared nothing lifecycle". That each request starts new, and the process dies at the end of the request. It's by far my favorite part, and I completely agree that it makes "reasoning about" (boy do I hate that phrase...) your program much easier. Why are there no other "competitors" in this space? Why do most other languages go with the alternative rou…
You can do the exact same thing with any language that supports CGI. You can compile a Go binary, put it on an Apache server and you'll get the "shared nothing lifecycle" just like PHP.
I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…
I'll offer an alternate hypothesis. Some companies are succeeding in spite of php. There are many, many users of php, and we'd expect that there would be considerable variance, with some users doing awful (no traction, buggy sites, etc) and some hitting home runs (facebook). Because it's such a popular language, it will have users across this entire spectrum. It's easy to cherry-pick the winners and miss all of the t…
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The downside is literally exactly the same as the upside: you have to bootstrap from literally nothing for every single request. Think about how ActiveRecord in Rails reads from the DB schema to generate it's magic methods, etc. This is usually done on startup or at least cached in memory once it's loaded. This is something that you have to manage more carefully with a PHP app since you can't have anything initialize…
> Code paths, auto-loaders, database connections, config files, etc. All that has to happen over and over for each request. Do you most of those need to happen at all, ever? In my mind, auto-loader is a sign that nobody knows what's being loaded (if they did, they would just require it). Requires should be full pathed (because have you seen what happens when you search the include path). Mysql_pconnect has been doing…
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I've gone one step further and created a template: Some companies are succeeding in spite of [insert language]. There are many, many users of [insert language], and we'd expect that there would be considerable variance, with some users doing awful (no traction, buggy sites, etc) and some hitting home runs (facebook). Because it's such a popular language, it will have users across this entire spectrum. It's easy to ch…
I know you're making a parody, but I think I agree with your parody. I mean, essentially all you're saying is "startup success is largely uncorrelated with the programming language used to implement those startups' products". That seems like not at all an unreasonable position. (It's not, by the way, equivalent to the statement "choice of language doesn't matter".)
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I've gone one step further and created a template: Some companies are succeeding in spite of [insert language]. There are many, many users of [insert language], and we'd expect that there would be considerable variance, with some users doing awful (no traction, buggy sites, etc) and some hitting home runs (facebook). Because it's such a popular language, it will have users across this entire spectrum. It's easy to ch…
I know you're making a parody, but I think I agree with your parody. I mean, essentially all you're saying is "startup success is largely uncorrelated with the programming language used to implement those startups' products". That seems like not at all an unreasonable position. (It's not, by the way, equivalent to the statement "choice of language doesn't matter".)
Mind, I agree with you, but given the Holy Documents Handed Down By Our Lord and Savior, Paul Graham, HN... might not be the safest place to say it.
Edit: so, I'm clearly getting a lot of downs on this... maybe sarcasm in reference to PG was going a bit too far. Oh well. I'm not deleting or editing any of it, because that's sort of dishonest.
[0] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/php-history [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7054294
I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…
I don't like the term "garbage language". People use to praise languages like Ruby or Python which don't even have private fields or type hinting the PHP has. Ruby libraries use approaches like monkey-patching classes in other modules. And if we look at Javascript, it is even worse than Ruby. How do you call Javascript if PHP is "garbage"?
Theres a lot of raise ArgumentError.new unless foo.kind_of? Bar
Going on in my code these days.