"... The fear of making the “wrong” choice actually makes the familiar, mastered FOO more attractive. ..."
An excuse for not learning something new.
PHP Addiction
281–290 of 320 posts
Re: PHP Addiction
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because, obviously, if I didn't like OS X, I just didn't understand it! No, you just plain don't understand how to use it, so there wasn't really any room left to discuss its relative merits. Whether or not you liked it is irrelevant given that your judgements were based on an acquired understanding of Linux, and a terse at best understanding of Mac OS X. Let's just take your git example: > More recently, I tried t…
For Git, I just followed some examples I found online. I don't remember the exact procedure, but it didn't work. After around an hour of trying I just gave up. In fact, I found it just as difficult as trying to install Git on the OpenSolaris servers, which is saying quite a bit. As for Java, I couldn't update despite using the Software Update menu. It worked on Windows, but OS X just hadn't gotten around to adding it…
> For Git, I just followed some examples I found online. I don't remember the exact procedure, but it didn't work. After around an hour of trying I just gave up. In fact, I found it just as difficult as trying to install Git on the OpenSolaris servers, which is saying quite a bit.
I installed git on a coworker's computer in a couple minutes today, so I don't know what to say.
> As for Java, I couldn't update despite using the Software Update menu. It worked on Windows, but OS X just hadn't gotten around to adding it. And, as is usually the case with Apple, there was no good way around it: since Apple hadn't update Java, I couldn't just install it myself. (Or, at least, there was no obvious way of doing this.)
It wasn't that Apple hadn't "added" it, there simply wasn't a port of that version of Java to Mac OS X, because they needed to port it. If someone external to Apple had produced a port (like, say, Sun), you could have installed it, exactly in the same way that we install Oracle Java today.
Someone did eventually produce a partial non-GUI port, and it later became the base of Oracle's officially supported Mac OS X Java: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/static/soylatte/
This has little to do with Mac OS X being somehow broken, and a lot to do with the fact that Sun only provided Java binaries for Solaris, Linux and Windows.
For Java 7 on, Oracle will be supporting Java for Mac OS X directly.
> I don't know exactly what my friend tried to install AucTeX and the rest of the LaTeX ecosystem, but he certainly did not find it easy. And this is somebody studying CS at a fairly good university: certainly not unintelligent or unfamiliar with tech.
I'm not sure what intelligence has to do with it. It sounds like he just didn't know what he was doing, and ignorance has little to do with intelligence.
If he'd approached Linux and had never read up on "yum" or "apt", I imagine he'd be equally stymied.
> Over all, your descriptions make OS X seem worse than Linux in the very areas it supposedly excels in!
I don't see how, but I imagine we're talking at cross-purposes at this point.
Re: PHP Addiction
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, what's "wrong" with PHP is that other things that are better have come along since. The problem is, no, nothing else has. Node.js is awesome and fun, but far harder to set up for basic webpage serving. Python is awesome, but also has a huge learning curve to learn how to serve basic webpages with. And... I can't think of anything else. Perl? ASP? Java is a huge pain to set up and maintain. What other language o…
> The problem is, no, nothing else has. Myself and an army of other ex-PHP developers disagree. > What other language out there is better than PHP for getting simple webpages up and running quickly? This discussion is not just about "getting simple webpages up and running quickly". In fact, it's pretty clear people are talking about developing web applications, and not slapping together a quick and dirty page or two.…
I think I trust ex-PHP developers' opinions about as much as ex-girlfriends' opinions.
Re: PHP Addiction
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is, no, nothing else has. Myself and an army of other ex-PHP developers disagree. > What other language out there is better than PHP for getting simple webpages up and running quickly? This discussion is not just about "getting simple webpages up and running quickly". In fact, it's pretty clear people are talking about developing web applications, and not slapping together a quick and dirty page or two.…
Don't take it personally, but I've seen a lot of confirmation bias from ex-PHP developers. Often from developers who may, thanks to language Y, write more elegant code on the line / function level, but still create the same architectural mess as they did before in PHP. (Rails doesn't save you from creating a mess, neither does the broad separation of concerns of any MVC framework.). There are thousands of ex-PHP deve…
> Don't take it personally, but I've seen a lot of confirmation bias from ex-PHP developers.
> Often from developers who may, thanks to language Y, write more elegant code on the line / function level, but still create the same architectural mess as they did before in PHP.
That's a longer-winded version of "You Can Write FORTRAN in Any Language". Certainly nothing exclusive or even particularly unique to PHP or PHP programmers.
Re: PHP Addiction
#285>the first question that comes up is what to use instead, and they’re met with a barrage of difficult choices and wildly different opinions and recommendations. The real answer is "it doesn't matter". Of course python people will try to convince you to use python, and ruby people will try to convince you to use ruby. But both groups will agree that either language is far better than PHP. And as someone who likes neit…
The choice does matter. A lot. When I started with ruby, I had to decide between 1.8, or 1.9, or jruby, or several other choices. Then I had to pick sinatra or rails or merb or whatever. mongrel or passenger or thin or unicorn. It didn't really seem like the choice would matter, but then you run into some tiny annoyance, do a bit of research and find out that some other framework doesn't have that problem. So you swi…
Very funny :)
Re: PHP Addiction
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is, no, nothing else has. Myself and an army of other ex-PHP developers disagree. > What other language out there is better than PHP for getting simple webpages up and running quickly? This discussion is not just about "getting simple webpages up and running quickly". In fact, it's pretty clear people are talking about developing web applications, and not slapping together a quick and dirty page or two.…
Don't take it personally, but I've seen a lot of confirmation bias from ex-PHP developers. Often from developers who may, thanks to language Y, write more elegant code on the line / function level, but still create the same architectural mess as they did before in PHP. (Rails doesn't save you from creating a mess, neither does the broad separation of concerns of any MVC framework.). There are thousands of ex-PHP deve…
There is no shortage of people complaining about RoR today. [1][2]
Also, does the word "ghetto" ring any bells?
Not that I think Python solves all the problems well either. I'm a fan of Lua, personally, but only because it's a much cleaner language design, and it's faster, and it's easier to set up, and it's easier to write Node.js-style code that's easier to read, and... well, I guess there are a few reasons.
[1] http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.309321....
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoni...
Re: PHP Addiction
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, what's "wrong" with PHP is that other things that are better have come along since. The problem is, no, nothing else has. Node.js is awesome and fun, but far harder to set up for basic webpage serving. Python is awesome, but also has a huge learning curve to learn how to serve basic webpages with. And... I can't think of anything else. Perl? ASP? Java is a huge pain to set up and maintain. What other language o…
Nope, you are purely defining "better" as "how easy it is for someone completely ignorant to start making stuff".
Yes, and it's a standard redefinition of better in CS that you seem unaware of. Go and read the canonical "Worse is better" paper.
Re: PHP Addiction
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wrote a well thought out response. I owe you a response in kind. People have a tendency to overrate their rational capacity to reason out a viable decision. While you listed a few solid critiques, the situation is infinitely more complex. And by infinitely , I do mean exactly that. As in, beyond your capacity to reason it out. In the end, the only right decision is a decision which withstands the test of time. Bo…
The first half of your post is basically a long-winded appeal to popularity. Yes, most people on the web use PHP and Apache. Most people on the web also need nothing more than a WordPress installation and their online needs are met. Does that mean WordPress is the best tool out there? You should stop confusing popularity with quality, because the two rarely overlap. > C10K is not a problem and never was. Somebody bet…
>The first half of your post is basically a long-winded appeal to popularity.
No it's not. We're not talking about music --how popular Bieber is vs Bach, for example. So he didnt just say "tons of people use PHP", he said "tons of people use PHP and it solves their problems giving results".
This is not an "argument by popularity", its an argument by number of empirical verifications. Which is supposedly what engineering and science is all about.
On the other hand your arguments are appeals to "logic", "theory", etc, eg idealism and elitism in the face of actual results. "That's (eg python) is how a language should be, and not like php" etc. All the while forgetting to take no account practical, verified, php benefits.
>Yes, most people on the web use PHP and Apache. Most people on the web also need nothing more than a WordPress installation and their online needs are met. Does that mean WordPress is the best tool out there?
OIf it meets their needs and has them happy, of course! Anything else would be dellusional to say.
Re: PHP Addiction
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a longtime fan of Linux and have used it as my desktop of choice for years, but apparently you and I have a different idea of what "beautiful" is. That screenshot is a ghastly smattering of black, grey, and red, with no unified look or feel. Sublime Text is really good looking in its own right, but that overall desktop doesn't look appealing to me. Granted, I use Gnome Shell for my desktop of choice, and find tha…
Do you even notice the "beauty" after spending a week with it?
No, but the opposite is true. I curse on top of my voice every time I have to use Windows (which is disgustingly ugly in my opinion).
Re: PHP Addiction
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you want to provide an application that anyone can run and easily deploy on their own server with as little configuration as possible? Oh. I hate PHP as much as anyone (of course), but that's what it does.
That's the thing right? With PHP you need a server or you can't do anything. With Django, Sinatra, Rails, Flask, (Node?, Meteor?) you have all that for development as part of the application. To deploy you just push to a free heroku instance and you are fine until you get big. Much, much easier than setting up your own Apache+PHP. And much, much cheaper than buying hosting.
So many people point to Heroku as the comparator to the wide availability of PHP.
Unfortunately Heroku is down right now. The wide-availability of choice, it's ubiquity, is why many PHP sites are still running right now - they are not reliant on a single point of failure.
There are many thousands of hosts, spread across the world, offering Cpanel accounts so I'm not tied down to the meteorological events in North Virginia.
If an act of God happens in Michigan right now, I can switch my site very quickly from there to a freshly minted Cpanel accout in California (thanks regular Cpanel backups!), or London or Manchester (Possibly not Newcastle right now, though). I'm really spoilt for choice here.
What are the alternatives to Heroku that don't have the same failing that are running right now that are comparable in getting an app up and running equivalent to PHP time?