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Taking PHP Seriously

slack.engineering

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Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#91

Post by jack9 »

kuschku wrote: post #19
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…

> So what's the catch? About 2-3 orders of magnitude in performance. That’s the catch. And it’s the reason why even with PHP you use things as opcaches, cache database results in external daemons, you use process pools with fastcgi instead of actually creating new processes, etc. And hacking those things on top of PHP make your program even worse to reason about than just using a daemonized system with actor framewor…

> About 2-3 orders of magnitude in performance

Compared to the other offerings, it's on par or faster (Python and Ruby really have a lot to be desired). You're talking about an actor framework, which is more performant at a cost of using that model and the myriad of issues with managing a more complicated system. The market favors simplicity and less sophisticated developers, in most projects.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#92

Post by tracker1 »

pcwalton wrote: post #61
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…

> You wouldn't need much of a GC when the process is killed every time Yes, you do. You'd be surprised how easily memory balloons out of control unless you regularly run a GC. Log minor collections sometime in Java or JS engines if you don't believe me… Even worse, if you don't run GC regularly, you will suffer terrible locality as execution continually grows the heap (not to mention the overhead of continually reque…

Sorry, but GP is right here... you really don't need GC if the entire process ends and the memory is completely freed at the end of the request.

Not that I feel cgi is the most efficient way to handle requests... but not needing the complexity of GC could be one advantage of that approach...

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#93

Post by LyalinDotCom »

Many amazing products have been built with PHP, Python, .NET, Node.js, etc. etc.

The reality is these (above) and many other good languages/frameworks exist out there for building web apps today. we live in the time with a ton of choice, and the rest is in our hands.

I for one love the new .NET Core, but I am a little biased being a long-time .NET developer and a Microsoft employee as of late.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#94

Post by nostrademons »

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…

You can have the same mentality in many languages that suck less than PHP, though. Python, for example, tends to get out of your way and just let you write your algorithm. Go, as well. Or various JVM languages, particularly Java 8 and Kotlin.

The one thing you want to avoid are communities that argue about "the best" way to do things. Even then, you can use the fruits of their labors, as long as they're willing to package it up in something that gets out of your way and lets you get work done. You just need to take the language but not the community.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#95

Post by lj3 »

greenhatman wrote: post #34
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…

Love this comment. I'm a PHP dev. I do care about my code though. I think you can write niceish code, even with a shitty language.

In your opinion, what does that look like for PHP? Most of the projects I've seen tend to go overboard on the java-like OOP declarations.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#96

Post by hueving »

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…

This sounds like to me you are mistaking the popularity of PHP with the proficiency of the developers. PHP has been around a long time and is used by lots of people. Even if PHP projects only have a 1% success rate and haskell projects have a 20% success rate, guess which one will have more "successful projects".

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#97

Post by BoorishBears »

badminton1 wrote: post #79
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…

> "The next guy to join the company will clean up your shit" Is that acting in the best interest of your employer? or ripping your employer off? I think more like the latter. Imagine if other professions behaved like this, like finance or legal people. But suddenly because you are an "engineer" this is acceptable? If I was your boss I would fire you immediately. The world of difference between balancing trade-offs in…

I was unaware finance people didn't operate like this.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#98

Post by brian-armstrong »

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 tremendous losers who picked php and got nothing for it.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#99

Post by badminton1 »

piotrkubisa wrote: post #83
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 can sign below your post as experience of PHP developer who "fights" each day with bad code written by PHP devs. There are a lot of frameworks like Laravel, Symfony or Zend which introduces a lot of conventions (folder structure, naming, PSR autoloading built-in functions, resources) but it is so often skipped to "get shit done". I would complain on many aspects of daily PHP-development like not using tools like th…

People that have that mentality, is like:

- You sit in a dining table with 50 different utensils. White wine glass, red wine glass, water cup, salad fork, dinner fork, dinner knife, teaspoon, soup spoon, bread plate with knife...

- When the food is served, you take the food, drop it on the floor, eat it with your face (not even using your hands).

"get shit done"... use spoon as a knife and knife as a fork, or try to sniff your food through your nose instead of eating it.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#100

Post by weberc2 »

berntb wrote: post #63
ken47 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or because it had first mover advantage in its cohort.

It didn't really, AFAIK (not a PHP guy, but old) it got traction because it was easier to get started with than the alternatives. That said, all environments will be one of three: 1 Have warts. 2 Not be used. 3 Be in denial and claim to be perfect. The GP had a point, perfection is the enemy of good. Something delivered is better than nothing.

What do you consider its cohort to be? PHP was the first language on my radar that didn't depend on CGI.
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