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Taking PHP Seriously

slack.engineering

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Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#501

Post by kogir »

staticelf wrote: post #459

I was kind of surprised to read this and started to think this was just a copy of a previous speech I've heard before. I was right it was: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/php-history but the author is the same person. It is a good speech and I've been developing in php for years, written a blog post ( http://sucky.ninja/leaving-php-is-too-expensive/ ) about it but I do no longer use php for my backends. I've whol…

You can deploy PHP to Azure App Services as easily as you can deploy a ASP.Net app.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#502

Post by cloverich »

pif wrote: post #433
increment_i wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Only engineers care about programming languages. Seriously. That's it. No one else cares about them. So what? Who else could care for something apart from those professionals using it? Maintenance is the biggest part of software development. A wrong technological choice can turn my nice job into my worst nightmare. Why shouldn't I care?

> So what?

I think the intention is: While they are important to us, languages are frequently distorted to the point that we believe that company success as a whole is dependent on it. Companies like Facebook flatly contradict that. I agree with you in spirit: Facebook would obviously prefer not PHP. But if the choice is: Learn something other than PHP or use language I know to test some idea, I think the latter is an obvious choice.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#503

Post by FranOntanaya »

One of the things to appreciate about PHP's ecosystem is how much you can be exposed to warnings, criticisms and cautionary tales. There's so much energy put into tearing it apart that if you aren't getting an education about coding pitfalls it's really your own fault.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#504

Post by y4mi »

lost953 wrote: post #378
ddw wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Developer happiness matters.

Not nearly so much as customer happiness does.

i think thats wrong. its mostly "not nearly as much as money does". and money is directly correlated to customer happiness

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#505

Post by weberc2 »

codedokode wrote: post #270
weberc2 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> True, but I'm not aware of any notable language that did it differently in the mid 1990's when PHP was rolled out. The OP's question wasn't scoped to the mid-90s. > PHP does not spawn a new OS process per request these days. It does spawn a new interpreter, but not a new OS process. Like I said, the same holds true even for an OS thread. Anyway, if it's not a new OS process, then some sort of GC is needed, contrary…

I don't think so. You either keep state between requests and therefore get problems like memory leaks (which often happen in large Ruby or NodeJS apps written by not very experienced developers) or you keep no state and have to do initialization on every request.

This is only true if your framework depends on global variables to manage request state. If your framework passes request state in as an argument to the request handler, then there is no state to reset. Don't use global variables and you don't have any of these problems.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#506

Post by oblio »

collyw wrote: post #391
lost953 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nearly so much as customer happiness does.

Decent developers don't want to work on shit code bases all day long. The application will suffer in the long run.

This looks like a lie. For the right amount of money, people will work for long periods of time on crap code bases.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#507

Post by continuational »

increment_i wrote: post #336
brian-armstrong wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 favour…

Only farmers care about tractors.

That's not a reason to use horses instead.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#508

Post by specialist »

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…

"They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much."

Painful to read. I've struggled with this my whole career.

Reminds me of Alistair Cockburn's seminal essay about methodologies.

Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development

http://bit.ly/1eDUNlE

Money quote:

"Problem 1. The people on the projects were not interested in learning our system.

Problem 2. They were successfully able to ignore us, and were still delivering software, anyway."

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#509

Post by jbergens »

ransom1538 wrote: post #496
ddw wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Performance? You need to update your act. PHP7 is 3x faster than python and now faster than Java 8 . The only people that can call php slow are masochistic c++ web hacks. https://blog.famzah.net/2016/02/09/cpp-vs-python-vs-perl-vs-...

Funny that people complain about js performance. In this benchmark it was 3 times as fast as php7 and about 7 times as fast as java 8. Have not checked the details of the benchmark yet.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#510

Post by staticelf »

kogir wrote: post #501
staticelf wrote: post #459

I was kind of surprised to read this and started to think this was just a copy of a previous speech I've heard before. I was right it was: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/php-history but the author is the same person. It is a good speech and I've been developing in php for years, written a blog post ( http://sucky.ninja/leaving-php-is-too-expensive/ ) about it but I do no longer use php for my backends. I've whol…

You can deploy PHP to Azure App Services as easily as you can deploy a ASP.Net app.

Yes I know but there is much more of an hassle when setting up the development environment. Even if it wasn't more of an hassle, why use php when the alternatives are as simple?

Even if php has it´s nice things it is still not that great of a language.

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