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Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

hammerprinciple.com

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Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#31

Post by dexen »

lucb1e wrote: post #27

http://hammerprinciple.com/therighttool/items/php Jesus christ guys. It were probably others than visitors from HN (most here are a little more thoughtful and less trolling), but if there is nothing but negativism on the PHP page (I can't find a single positive point) then why in the world are we all using it? Why does almost everyone know the language? Why is it one of the biggest languages on the planet? I don't tr…

Particularly ironic is PHP ranking high for ``This language is likely to be a passing fad''. Given its 17 years of history and recent the recent progress with versions 5.3 and newer... whoever voted on this position either wasn't aware of PHP's actual situation and outlook, or was just being thinking wishful.

-- EDIT --

> Why does almost everyone know the language?

If anything, it is that almost everyone can dabble in PHP and ^C^V some code. IMHO real knowledge of PHP and its ecosystem seem to be quite rare -- judging by reading some published code, which was as generic and un-PHP as possible, and by comments attached to the official docs.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#32

Post by lucb1e »

skylan_q wrote: post #29
lucb1e wrote: post #27

http://hammerprinciple.com/therighttool/items/php Jesus christ guys. It were probably others than visitors from HN (most here are a little more thoughtful and less trolling), but if there is nothing but negativism on the PHP page (I can't find a single positive point) then why in the world are we all using it? Why does almost everyone know the language? Why is it one of the biggest languages on the planet? I don't tr…

I use plenty of javscript and PHP at work. They are poorly designed languages, IMO. (I am not an expert, but I'm familiar with many languages and I always read up on such topics) >Jesus christ guys. Despite the poor design considerations and wanting to kill off some of these languages, (or-rehaul them and not being able to) many of us still have to use them day-to-day. This is one of those things that convinces me th…

Regardless whether PHP is a poorly designed language, or if it has some sense of "design" at all, the website should have listed good uses of PHP. There are plenty.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#34

Post by TinyBig »

I love the idea behind this. The issue is that the questions are not MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECE_principle). Perhaps counterintuitive, but fewer questions would actually lead to a richer dataset were they MECE.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#35

Post by bencoder »

gbog wrote: post #26

Strange, I had no problem understanding the symmetric rankings, barely noticed it before reading the many negative comments hee.

Same, no problems at all. Was surprised at the negative comments but after checking again I can understand the ambiguity of ranking low for a negative item. I often have that problem with English speaking, but this made sense to me.

I'd say it ranks low on "the presentation is difficult for programmers to understand".

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#36

Post by marcosdumay »

davedx wrote: post #2

C#: "If my code in this language successfully compiles, there is a good chance my code is correct." Gave me a good chuckle, but now I can't work out if I'm supposed to take this site seriously? And all of the PHP statements were negative, of course... /goes back to his PHP programming

It's crowdsourced, so you shouldn't comply about the site, but its audience.

Anyway, I agree that if my C# code compiles, it does probably work. Just like Java, C# makes it hard to shoot yourself on the foot (and also to shoot at all, like somebody already said here).

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#38

Post by davidw »

lucb1e wrote: post #27

http://hammerprinciple.com/therighttool/items/php Jesus christ guys. It were probably others than visitors from HN (most here are a little more thoughtful and less trolling), but if there is nothing but negativism on the PHP page (I can't find a single positive point) then why in the world are we all using it? Why does almost everyone know the language? Why is it one of the biggest languages on the planet? I don't tr…

My take on why PHP is popular: web programming back in the late 90ies was not easy, and the tools available looked something like this:

* Perl CGI's, and, later on, mod_perl. Worked pretty well, and Perl is a serious language, but things got big and clunky, especially with mod_perl. CGI's are kind of slow.

* Various proprietary Tcl solutions. These were very cutting edge in many ways, but were open sourced far too late.

* Java towards the very end of the decade. Then, as now, it was a fairly heavy-duty solution; not suitable for, say, adding a dynamic time or something like that to an otherwise static page.

* PHP. Fairly easy to install compared to the alternatives, and reasonably easy to get started with. You did not need to understand classes, OO, and how to compile things just to get a dynamic web page up and running.

In short, PHP "scales down" in terms of programmer effort to get started, giving people at the margin the ability to do something they otherwise would not have. Granted, that something might have been quite ugly, but at least you could get started.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#39

Post by Too »

D

- Most similar to: F# - Most disimilar to: C

Is this really correct? The impression i've got of D is that it started as "Take C, remove everything that sucks and add other nice features". It surely looks more like C / C++ than some functional langage too me.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#40

Post by sparkie »

Too wrote: post #39

D - Most similar to: F# - Most disimilar to: C Is this really correct? The impression i've got of D is that it started as "Take C, remove everything that sucks and add other nice features". It surely looks more like C / C++ than some functional langage too me.

The "Most similar to" feature is not necessarily a reflection of the language's features, but of how closely they rank in the questions (which are largely subjective, and lack technical depth.)

You're correct though, in terms of features, D is closer to C++, C#, Java.

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