491–500 of 673 posts
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…
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> If you're programming in PHP, you're not running around talking about "convention over configuration" giving talks, or trying to make your code beautiful. It's a garbage language, and you know it. This is exactly right. The right philosophy for PHP is to embrace the garbage. When you're done with a request, and have spit out all the HTML to the client, the server is going to throw everything away. So don't build a…
If I wanted to embrace garbage every day I would have skipped college and went straight to being a bum. Life is too short to "embrace the garbage" every day.
PHP would have been better if it supported evented programming.
Would this count: http://kraken-php.com/
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…
Eh, you can do rapid prototyping-type garbage code in any language you are proficient in, as you can do the endless-architeture-meeting, special snowflake beautiful code, enterprise-level everything documented and automatically tested continuos integration and deployment to the most popular containerized/virtualized environment for a reasonable price of $millions in PHP or even bash or powershell. V1 is usually shit…
I started my career as a PHP developer. Any web project you prototype in C# could be prototyped in PHP in a small fraction of the time.
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…
> It's a garbage language, and you know it. But it allows you to get something up and running, so dang quick. PHP didn't succeed because of the "language" part. It succeeded because it was limited and focussed to just being a tool to write small web-apps in a short time. It did one thing and did it better than anything else of the same era (I built CGI apps in C, Perl and Python before discovering PHP). It was just f…
Some good programmers genuinely point out some of the pain points of php, but most programmers paint php as shit just to show off as a good programmer.
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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 favour…
But program managers and CTOs and other non-engineers at a company care about scalability, performance, technical debt and quality, right? Let's not pretend that these don't matter once you've gone past the "users actually care about our app" phase, because they do and they affect the bottom line of a company. And IMHO PHP falters in these regards.
https://blog.famzah.net/2016/02/09/cpp-vs-python-vs-perl-vs-...
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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…
Brian, do you have any examples of companies that failed using PHP that you think would have succeeded with another interpreted language, and what problems did they run into that gave you this judgment? Asking as I've developed in a slew of languages and never found the PHP-bashing credible. Most of the complaints seem to come from Rails people, but there are no shortage of MVC frameworks in PHP, including at least o…
Plenty of A rounds have been spent trying to make a sand castle taller.
This is not unique to php - I'm sure you can do it right - but it's more common to it.
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Yeah, but you also have to fork a whole process per request to do it. Process fork, CoW overhead every time you mutate a page, and a full OS thread per request. Oh, and let's not forget negotiating a new database connection per request. I think by the time you've added up all those overheads, you're not off to a scalable start. It's possible to work around the limitations, but it's not easy.
"fork" is not a major problem in PHP. In Drupal, every single request compiles a file "common.inc", of several thousands of lines of PHP code. That is what slows it down. It's remarkable that PHP still manages to do that in just 100ms. In Zend Framework it's slightly better because it includes an autoload option, which implies only PHP files that are actually used by athe request, get loaded. That way the overhead is…
http://php.net/manual/en/intro.opcache.php
https://blog.famzah.net/2016/02/09/cpp-vs-python-vs-perl-vs-...
Running a 2 year old framework on the Internet because the new versions include a non functional opcode cache kinda sucks.
My assumption is they already knew PHP before setting out on this (if not I'd be interested in hearing about that). What you know is a huge part of these decisions. I doubt many of the sites noted truly picked PHP after sitting down and doing a comparison of all the popular languages across the board. Their systems grew out of what they knew and there was no time to rewrite or maybe there wasn't a need either. If you…
> Regardless of their findings I wouldn't recommend anyone learn PHP if starting out. This is bad advice. If you are a new programmer starting out, first of all you should learn a few languages, not just one, but also, why would you not want to learn one of the most popular and prolific languages in the industry you are trying to enter? If you want to work in the web world, not knowing PHP will close lots of potentia…
Not knowing language X will obviously close doors but by learning language Y instead will open others. Insert whatever language you like.
I wouldn't recommend it to someone starting out because it's use is in a limited context. You could do scripting outside of a webserver in PHP but it's not done often. Since there are mature ecosystems for other languages that are also used inside and outside the webserver I'd recommend something along those lines. In my experience developers who develop systems and can learn and understand the varying pieces have more options than someone who is a PHP or Java or whatever context limited developer. Because of that I'd recommend a more versatile language and ecosystem when starting out.
But of course do what you like. I'm not trying to bad mouth PHP. I just don't think it's the best option for someone new to the field as it would limit them to a specific context.