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Taking PHP Seriously

slack.engineering

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Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#331

Post by ryanlm »

tyingq wrote: post #21
Klathmon wrote: post #11

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…

>>Why are there no other "competitors" in this space? There are. Any language that supports either fastcgi, or runs as an apache plugin (or similar) functions in the "each request starts new" space. There's certainly others, but Python and Perl are both good examples. Starting new with each request does, of course, mean lots of re-work that shouldn't have to be done with each request. It does initially keep complexit…

Can you set up Python to have the same pattern as PHP? I've always had to proxy the web server to the Python process running HTTP.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#332

Post by agentgt »

It is not entirely clear if the author aka Slack chose PHP with these reasons in mind apriori or did they choose PHP first and are now justifying why their choice of PHP is not bad.

I'm going to guess they picked PHP because they knew PHP and not because of the nice reasons mentioned in the article. That is the article should be "why slack is sticking with PHP".

Almost all the major languages are actually (despite lots of HN debate and arguments) fairly good choice for developing not because the major languages are expressive/powerful but because they have very very mature tools (e.g. Java sucks but the JVM and its tools are very mature) and lots of people who know it.

Basically you could write a plethora of articles with "Taking MAJOR_BORING_LANGUAGE Seriously".

For example I'm responsible for choosing Java for my companies startup. Java historically is not a very productive language to pump something out but in recent years it has vastly improved... regardless I chose Java because thats what I knew at the time and I would pick it (or some other JVM language) again. And I could rattle off whole bunch of reasons why the JVM still kicks butt but the reality is I am biased because of my familiarity.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#333

Post by cakeinblue »

swalsh wrote: post #16

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…

After I use both php and ruby for the same employer over more than a year. I would rather say Ruby is more like a garbage language -- 1) twist syntax to allow people write the same function into different ways is not a cool feature, it is disaster feature which causes more for a team to sync. 2) Duck typing is not interface, don't kidding yourself. they are totally two different thing. 3) ruby attract a lot of master level people try to make the community better, however, the whole community filled with mediocre developers who cannot even understand Rail != Ruby, and also they believe ActiveRecord is the only persistence layer they can use, and stop learning write native database query script.

Finally, good luck with writing a unit test against an API not created by you because, you have to go through deep into the source code just for figuring out what data structure return and give.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#334

Post by chii »

edoceo wrote: post #314
chiefalchemist wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luck. Timing. Culture. Team. Etc. All have a greater impact than language. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand history.

Traction and Team. Luck is not a factor.

why is luck not a factor? I'd imagine it's the biggest factor that you can't control!

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#335

Post by mastazi »

cakeinblue wrote: post #333
swalsh wrote: post #16

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…

After I use both php and ruby for the same employer over more than a year. I would rather say Ruby is more like a garbage language -- 1) twist syntax to allow people write the same function into different ways is not a cool feature, it is disaster feature which causes more for a team to sync. 2) Duck typing is not interface, don't kidding yourself. they are totally two different thing. 3) ruby attract a lot of master…

I have worked on both (among many other languages) and I too prefer PHP, but I guess my opinion on Ruby is unfairly distorted by Rails, which I dislike a lot. I hear that Sinatra is nice, for example.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#336

Post by increment_i »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #98
swalsh wrote: post #16

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…

It would be an outlier company indeed who held an 'all hands on deck' meeting and said, "We're succeeding in spite of PHP everyone!"

Only engineers care about programming languages. Seriously. That's it. No one else cares about them. I work in a large public university alongside a revolving door of student interns who are always 19. In 10+ years of work, I've still yet to meet the person who talked about their favourite website or app, but lamented that it was written in Php or JavaScript or Go or Java. It's only us (the HN'ers) who fret about this.

Don't believe me? Imagine the look on everyone's faces at the tech publishing houses around 2009 when books about Objective-C sold a few hundred copies a year to doing tens of thousands per month when the iPhone rocked the world. This happened without a proper language hot stove on Hacker News, no?

People care about outcomes. People care about products. People care about being dazzled. People care about showing their friends this incredible thing they saw on the web/this new app.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#338

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #311
chiefalchemist wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But they might have failed with any other choice. Technology is overrated. Yeah, it matters, Yeah it helps. But the right foundation won't save a shite product.

But the wrong foundation can tank a good one.

That's true of all languages, though.

A truly good idea will generally find a way to succeed despite the technology it is built on, though. Look at Facebook, Slack, and countless others running PHP or Minecraft running Java and its apparently horrible code base (I've never seen it, so that is secondhand)

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#339

Post by mastazi »

NMDaniel wrote: post #272
ux-app wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and miss out on all the awesome aspects of the language/environment?

There are plenty of great server-side languages and environments. C#,Java,Scala,Python,Ruby,Haskell. If this was about JavaScript and Front-End I might've agreed with you (there are transpilers but interoperability with JS modules can be tricky), however in the realm of servers there's so much freedom.. so why choose PHP out of them all?

> plenty of great server-side languages and environments

Depending on the type of project, I would choose PHP over at least some of the languages you mentioned; I guess "great" is not a significant quality when making architectural choices.

Just to be clear: I was thinking about factors like performance, choice of servers, how easy it is to hire good developers, library ecosystem etc.

EDIT: obviously the "awesome aspects" mentioned by GP are a similarly unsubstantiated claim ;-)

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#340

Post by tluyben2 »

cakeinblue wrote: post #333
swalsh wrote: post #16

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…

After I use both php and ruby for the same employer over more than a year. I would rather say Ruby is more like a garbage language -- 1) twist syntax to allow people write the same function into different ways is not a cool feature, it is disaster feature which causes more for a team to sync. 2) Duck typing is not interface, don't kidding yourself. they are totally two different thing. 3) ruby attract a lot of master…

I agree with this as well, although this is about Rails. I still have a legacy project to maintain in Rails (a big project) but that is (hopefully) the last I see of it up close in my life time.
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