What do hackers think of PHP?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181513

by amrithk • 18 years ago

41 87 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Just interested to know, what do people in this forum think about PHP as a backend language for a website?

jdroid• 18 years ago

I use PHP for basic stuff where I don't care much about performance or anyone else maintaining it. It's installed on pretty much every web host and it's easy enough to whip stuff up in. I haven't done a big web site in a long time, but I can't imagine using anything other than Python for it.

amrithk3• 18 years ago

Thats interesting. What is it about Phyton that makes it attractive?

Jesin• 18 years ago

It's incredibly clean and simple.

simonw4• 18 years ago

It's a significantly better programming language; I don't think you'll be able to find anyone who knows both PHP and Python and will disagree with that statement. PHP is a very simple language with built-in features for web application development. Python is an advanced, multi-paradigm general purpose language that has evolved over more than a decade.

Here are a few Python language features that I seriously miss when I'm working in PHP:

- Modules and namespaces! This is the feature that initially drove me away from PHP.

- List comprehensions (let you construct a new list based on an old list in a one-liner)

- Built in iterator support (easy "for item in collection" support for many different types of collection)

- First class functions and closures (so you can treat your functions as data)

Those are just four off the top of my head. If you haven't looked at Python before (but already know how to program) I suggest taking a look at http://diveintopython.org/ which is a free online book.

norbert2• 18 years ago

Not to take a stand, just FYI: PHP5 has built-in iterator support now and PHP 5.3 includes namespace support as well (TBR this month).

rbanffy2• 18 years ago

Zope, Grok, Plone and Django, mostly.

Python is a very good language: easy to learn, powerful and fast enough (provided you understand how to make its various frameworks scale).

thaumaturgy• 18 years ago

Ruby and Python seem to be the current preferred languages.

I've used PHP for a while -- a few years -- and haven't developed a particular loathing for it. That's saying something, since I'm disgusted by most of the tools I'm forced to use.

It's certainly capable enough and isn't hard to use. It's also more ubiquitous, and therefore arguably more portable, than Ruby or Python, although dealing with differences between PHP versions is a pretty royal pain.

Pretty much any reasonably skilled programmer can do a job in PHP without too much trouble. You'll get more cred for using Python or Ruby though.

pistoriusp2• 18 years ago

Also, Python and Ruby developers earn a bit more.

Here are the average salaries for permanent jobs over the last 3 months according to http://itjobwatch.co.uk:

Python: £45,282

Django: £42,326

RoR: £41,204

Ruby: £39,897

PHP: £33,004

sanswork3• 18 years ago

There are also a lot fewer Python, Ruby and Django jobs than PHP jobs there so you would expect to see more low/entry level PHP jobs in there pulling the average down.

etal• 18 years ago

Python seems to have a slightly bigger following in the sciences, at least in my limited experience. That could be pulling salaries up a bit.

jrockway2• 18 years ago

Lisp: £47,422

Perl: £44,300 (£45,500 if you count "CPAN" as Perl)

generalk• 18 years ago

I currently do a lot of work in PHP, and although it isn't my favorite language to work with (braindead built-in library, for one), it's hard to argue with the results we get.

For the good of your soul, use a framework. We currently like Zend Framework, but I've heard good things about CakePHP and Symfony. If you stick with the framework and follow a sane MVC strategy you'll fix most of the problems you'll have using PHP as an HTML templating language.

noodle• 18 years ago

i prefer codeigniter as a good php framework.

benchmarks: http://tinyurl.com/5dcjzd

jdavid2• 18 years ago

when i was looking at CI, it looked pretty neat, but it was based strongly on the mysql strategy.

god• 18 years ago

We build quite big systems (many years of manpower) on top of Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP and we are very happy and successful with it.

We develop our own framework.

wenbert3• 18 years ago

I would recommend Zend Framework. I have had issues with Code Igniter. All the workarounds and unexpected stuff frustrated me - I think not only me but other users as well - that is why I think there is a fork: http://kohanaphp.org ... By the looks of it, I would recommend Kohana instead of Code Igniter. Either way, I am not so sure about the future of CI. That is why I choose Zend Framework.

slater• 18 years ago

that site seems to be under construction...?

neovive• 18 years ago

The proper link to the KohanaPHP project is: http://kohanaphp.com. I've been using Kohana for the past few months and it is major improvement over other PHP MVC frameworks. It utilizes the OOP functionality in PHP5 to make structured PHP web development much easier and elegant. If you are looking for a new PHP framework, you should definitely consider Kohana. You could even integrate with Zend Framework classes if needed.

andr• 18 years ago

PHP is my preference for web development. However, you can do anything with any language. The part that has the most influence on how easy or hard it is usually the framework, not the language.

On that note, I am tired of articles comparing PHP to Rails. It's like comparing a Honda to the metal used to build another car.

amrithk3• 18 years ago

Its been informative learning about your experiences. What do you mean by frameworks? Something like a backend scripting language, a templating tool (like Smarty or PHPTal), etc?

wenbert3• 18 years ago

I think he means MVC (Model-View-Controller) Frameworks. These things are so hot nowadays... If your site is structured well, then you wouldn't have to use templating engines like Smarty (god these things are so annoying)...

chuchurocka• 18 years ago

i've been using it for all of my websites for about 6 years. It's robust enough to do just about anything. it's just close enough to see C to be familiar and just different enough to slightly irk you. I'm getting to ready to roll out my first Ruby site though.

rbanffy2• 18 years ago

A hack, but not in a good way?

/me ducks

athloi• 18 years ago

I prefer Perl

bprater• 18 years ago

I'm not sure if this is a troll question. Elaborate on why you are asking. You are asking: "what do you think of pudding" instead of "hey, I'm having a dinner party and can't decide between apple pie and pudding, help me!"

amrithk3• 18 years ago

Well, we have used PHP extensively until now. We have gotten more disciplined in designing code, compartmentalizing it into classes, documenting the code etc.

However, I recently read an article on YC about how many startups go through a phase debating about which language an application should be built on. We did not give this much thought as we saw a few prominent websites like facebook use PHP and we thought PHP seemed to be a pretty scalable language. Plus, with support for OOP (as of PHP 5), PHP seemed to be a pretty good choice.

I am interested in evaluating if we made the right decision

simonw4• 18 years ago

It's a fine backend language for a small to medium sized website, but you need to be aware that at a certain size (in terms of complexity of the application you are building) you'll often find yourself fighting against the language. That's not to say you can't build large applications in PHP, just that you need a great deal of discipline to do so. You'll either need to adopt one of the MVC frameworks (Symfony for example) or roll your own. A lot of the features in the framework you chose will be workarounds for limitations in PHP itself (such as its lack of decent namespacing and poorly designed database access primitives).

sanswork3• 18 years ago

Out of curiosity could you give an example of a language where this isn't the case? As far as requiring a framework of sorts when dealing with large sized/complex websites?

simonw4• 18 years ago

No, but if you're using Python or Ruby at least you won't need framework features that work around problems with your core language.

My point about using a framework wasn't to knock PHP; it was more a piece of advice - "if you do use it, you'll need to be aware of this".

ssharp• 18 years ago

Yeah, it's perfect for your little side projects that will never grow or have lots of traffic. You know, like Facebook.

simonw4• 18 years ago

Quoting myself: "That's not to say you can't build large applications in PHP, just that you need a great deal of discipline to do so."

thorax• 18 years ago

We do a lot of work in PHP, but wouldn't even consider it if it wasn't for clean MVC frameworks like Code Igniter.

To be honest, it doesn't feel much like PHP on the average bit of coding. It feels like a "real" language most of the time because of the framework. They have one of the best user guides I've ever run into (click Table of Contents at top): http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/

JoelSutherland• 18 years ago

I can second this. We use PHP along with a modern framework and love it. Deployment is easy and PHP is so widespread that you can count on a script existing to handle almost any little problem you face.

Granted there are times that its inconsistent library and lack of language features can become annoying. If we're discussing languages alone, PHP is certainly lacking.

With projects like mod_rails on the horizon and programmers trending away from PHP hopefully we soon won't need to choose between a solid language and super-simple deployment process.

norbert2• 18 years ago

I build absolutely everything on the top of PHP and the WACT framework. The latter ensures that my code stays maintainable and well-organized. It also emphasizes the use of design patterns. I'd never switch to anything else when it comes to web development and I'd have left the industry if there was no WACT. That's why I became one of its core contributors.

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

PHP is the lazy man language. Sure, its messy and has bad convention. It gives you bad habits unless you use a framework...

But then of course we should all take a step back and realize that Facebook is built on PHP, haha.

kogir• 18 years ago

PHP is the VBScript of the open source world. It's available on almost every web host, and it seems to be what beginners learn first. While I'm sure it's possible to write things in a safe and mantainable way, most code examples you see will be from beginners and will have problems with the OWASP top 10. You can't look to the built in libraries for inspiration beacuse they're usually poorly designed. Just because there have been success stories in a language (cold fusion and myspace, php and facebook) doesn't mean it's right for you. It took me one website and only 1000 lines of code to decide against PHP. If you've used it longer and like it, it's probably fine.

fish• 18 years ago

Code samples: http://www.aspvphp.com/

swombat2• 18 years ago

PHP is a brilliant language for small to medium-small sites.

Since most medium-small sites have an irrepressible tendency to grow into medium and even large sites, I'd stay away from PHP for anything other than a quick and simple site.

Ruby and Python are much more sustainable in the medium term and even the long term, and just as quick to throw applications together. Sure, they won't last forever, and eventually you may have to rewrite critical bits in another language, but in the meantime it works to release something quickly and keep improving it for a few years.

Daniel

brooksbp2• 18 years ago

As a language for developing applications, PHP really isn't that bad. It has pretty damn good support for OOP (at least within recent releases). It lacks in concurrency support and other random things like namespaces (for which swombat advised against large-sized sites).

As a language for scaling... not too shabby. Many people who bash PHP for inability to scale really don't know jack shit about what they're talking about. Chances are, their app is slow because of all the O(n^2) loops... and they need to go take a class or two on algorithms, networking, and/or distributed systems.

I used to work with PHP a lot... eventually moved to Python simply because it was more succinct. Our teams are extremely small, and we needed a more expressive language; needed to get more done in less time. The rest speaks for itself...

We actually have moved from 100% PHP to: python for web apps, decent amount of Io & Ruby for utilities/monitoring and such, and working on a load balancer in Erlang... much more powerful development. And we really haven't run into many major stability problems...

malbiniak• 18 years ago

@RoR "but does it scale?" cough twitter cough

brooksbp2• 18 years ago

RoR is an architecture. Kind of ironic because I claim that Ruby, as a language, has better support for scaling in the networking/dist.systems view than PHP. Yet, I would like to claim that PHP scales better than RoR in the web app domain. Though, it takes deep knowledge of RoR internals to make a correct judgement; which, very few have.

wehriam• 18 years ago

Are you speaking in terms of traffic? Several very large sites run on PHP (Facebook comes to mind) while few run on Ruby (I think Twitter tops the list).

alex_c• 18 years ago

I think Twitter tops the list

http://rails100.pbwiki.com/

swombat2• 18 years ago

No, by size I meant complexity.

Daniel

subwindow• 18 years ago

I used PHP heavily for a few years (~70% PHP, 20% perl, 10% Java), and enjoyed it for awhile. However, it seems like it is impossible to create clean and well-divided code in PHP. This weighed on me heavily, as I had two 10,000 line projects that I was the sole maintainer for. Even if you managed to create well-structured code, it was always very... ugly (too many unnecessary symbols $, ->, etc). It wasn't much fun to work in every day.

I'm using Ruby now and I would never go back.

Here's my rough order of language preference for server-side languages that I have experience in: Ruby > Python > C# > PHP > Perl > Visual Basic > Java > C

jdavid2• 18 years ago

i believe that every language has its perks, and PHP has quite a few. as far as back-ends go, there are a few types -xml/json webservices -low memory application servers(blogs, shopping sites, etc..) -high memory application servers(data mining, indexing, processing, game servers)

i think php is a great low memory solution, when you get into higher memory loads for the app to process, you do not want to reload everything back in to ram for each request. php is single threaded per request, and as such you don't have access to sockets, or other event based activities on the server side.

i agree with the statement in general, that you should go with what you know to be the most efficient language for the task.

ryanagraves• 18 years ago

I'll admit, I'm a rookie. I've spent a few months now learning and writing PHP...is my effort in vain? Should I ditch PHP and dive into Ruby with a Rails framework?

crowbar• 18 years ago

I don't think your effort's in vain. If you like it, keep at it. When you feel confident in your knowledge on the language, you can then choose to move on and experiment with other things. Same for any language, really.

Myself, I'm just now getting started into Ruby on Rails. I finally figured out a project to get me interested in learning the Rails part of it. I just need to get cracking.

davidw• 18 years ago

I have a lot of respect for PHP, for having made web programming accessible to people who otherwise would have struggled with something like Java.

However, I never want to use it again myself. I'm tired of digging through horrible code written by people without a clue.

giltotherescue2• 18 years ago

I maintain a site that receives over half a million pageviews per day, not including API requests of XML feeds. This site runs on 3 medium range commodity web servers and 2 database servers, and there's plenty of capacity left.

Don't let the scaling police and architecture astronauts fool you: with the right architecture in place (i.e. a framework like Cake or Zend) and a smart scaling strategy (opcode caching, object caching, page caching, etc), PHP is a great choice for web applications.

Sure PHP has a low barrier to entry, which can lead to poor coding practices, but that shouldn't be a reason for people to express an absolute hate for it. Rather, it's important to stress continual education regardless of which programming language you choose.

jrockway2• 18 years ago

Sure, it scales. But it isn't a very good language. (The word "blub" comes to mind.)

Here are features I like to have (in no particular order):

  * lexically-scoped variables (and closures)
  * lambdas
  * continuations
  * macros
  * an object system with a MOP (PHP and Java fail miserably here)
  * powerful regex engine (can be added via libraries, so not too critical)
  * extensive module library
  * flexibility (I want to write code my way, not the way someone else thinks I should write it; bye bye, Python.)

Things that are nice to have:

  * multiple dispatch OO
  * partial evaluation
  * laziness

PHP has none of these features. That's why I don't use it and don't recommend it. And oh yeah... PHP is a templating system too. I would rather get that as a library, not a core feature. (But I won't count that against them.)

So what language does have all these features? None :)

But, Lisp and Perl are good compromises. CL does everything except continuations and having a decent module library; Perl does everything except have pretty syntax and macros. Sadly neither of those languages has (by default) the "optional features", which is a shame. I ranted about this on my blog:

http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Syntax%20and%20features.pod

Anyway, PHP is junk in terms of a programming language. It's fine if you don't know how to program, don't know what abstraction is, and don't like using libraries.

wvenable• 18 years ago

Your list of features has nothing to do with getting things done. They are almost completely academic.

eru2• 18 years ago

Oh, Python is rather flexible. You can program in several styles - including something that smells like Functional Programming.

It's only on a tactical level that you see "There is one way to do it" in action.

antirez• 18 years ago

PHP is horrible but not because it lacks continuations or macros or partial evaluation.

PHP is horrible because it is like an higher level of C, with an horrible standard library where the same thing can be done in 5 different ways, without literals for the most basic data types like arrays, without the simplest meta-programming abilities (assuming you don't want to use eval of course), OOP in theory (with an horrible OOP system for a dynamic language) but with all the base types that are not, and so on.

giltotherescue2• 18 years ago

And here we have an architecture astronaut. Once you get out of academia and start programming in the real world, you'll realize that there are other considerations for determining which programming language to use besides a robust feature set.

So go write your program in Lisp, but don't complain when you discover how few developers out there are capable of maintaining such an application.

Is English, with its hundreds of rules and exceptions, the best spoken language to communicate in? Of course not. But it's ubiquitous, and that's all that matters.

landondyer• 18 years ago

I would add: A debugger that works, and an IDE that helps you get the job done (versus endless cycles of "print" debugging).

I'd rather use a moderately crappy language in a decent development environment than a wonderful language that was lacking tools support. It's not all about the language.

gm• 18 years ago

Hmmm... Interesting that, without cause, you gave such a defensive reply. I take it PHP has gotten a bad rap an not scalable? Any language can scale, if the implementation is designed correctly.

agotterer• 18 years ago

Everyone is going to put up an argument for different languages. There is no magical language that works for everything. It really depends what the project is.

With that said. I work on a PHP site that does 5-9 million page views a day. We have an in house MVC framework. We use MySQL, memcached and APC hosted on a handful of solaris zones. We have no issues scaling and have coding policies that our development team tries its best to follow. PHP is a proven language, it has been around a long time and has a huge community. It really comes down to preference and objective. I personally don't use any of the open source frameworks available. But there are plenty of decent ones that will work just fine for small to medium sized sites.

To anyone who says thats it's not a "real" language: do I care? It gets the same job done, it's proven to scale and it can turn a profit. Period.

mdasen• 18 years ago

PHP gives you more slack than any other language. . .

which is just enough rope to hang yourself with.

To be honest, part of it will depend on your style and part of it will depend on your discipline.

I'm a fan of Python. PHP is not my style. I like one way of doing things. I like namespaces. I don't like all the extra syntax that I feel is useless ({};$).

But that's just me personally. Many people hate python for those reasons - it's constraining.

Objectively, PHP allows you to do what you want easily. The only problem is that taking those shortcuts can come back to bite you later. If you appropriately use include(), make sure to template out design, and avoid some of those oh-so-irresistible hacky things, you'll be fine. Digg has done well with PHP.

The problem is that it's hard to know exactly where you're screwing up sometimes. For example, in python, every name used in a python source was defined either in that file or in one of the imports. That makes it trivial to figure out why that "I can't find that name" error is occurring. With PHP, that name could be meant to be included 10 files back. They simply all carry over.

So, is PHP bad? I personally think it is, but I'm a little conservative an authoritarian when it comes to programming rather than PHP's more loose style. Can PHP's style help you? Yes.

frankus• 18 years ago

Having dealt with a lot of really awful PHP in my programming career (including some of my earlier stuff), it tends to unfairly taint my view of the language.

It's not terrible, but I've found that the clunky syntax for slightly more advanced stuff (e.g. anonymous blocks) really discourages some labor-saving and repetition-avoiding coding practices that a language like Ruby encourages.

It's a really good fit for small-scale sites with well-defined requirements. But it requires some well-thought-out conventions to scale well, the sort of stuff you can't come up with unless you've done it wrong a couple of times yourself. Unless you borrow someone else's work by using one of the frameworks out there.

markbao• 18 years ago

It's strange that nobody has mentioned that Yahoo! uses PHP to power a lot of their software, and it obviously scales very well if you know what you're doing.

They also remarked that they are looking into using Symfony framework in their software.

ardit33• 18 years ago

I wouldn't consider Yahoo the pinacle of software engineering, or a hotbed for inovation. For a company of their size, they are not releasing any groundbreaking features, or anything too advanced, and they are obviously trailing google by a big margin.

Facebook and Digg are two other notable mention of php usage. Both are handling very high traffic loads ok (not spectacular), and I know that facebook is using a lot of C/C++ and some Java on the backend. The main reason that they are php is b/c it was the better choice for the founders, to do something quick at the time (2004-2005).

Ruby on Rails was not even out, and Python didn't have great and simple frameworks with simple learning curve.

So, at the time the two sensible choices were Java or. Php. A great question would be: If facebook or digg had to redo everything from the beginning, would have still chosen php?

natrius• 18 years ago

You consider Facebook and Digg to be more relevant in regard to the pros and cons of scaling PHP than Yahoo? That's... wrong.

sanswork3• 18 years ago

Innovation and ground breaking features in web design have no relation to the language being used.

dimitry• 18 years ago

Y! handles more traffic than Facebook and Digg combined and it uses primarily PHP.

Why compare Y!'s stock performance to their underlying technology? Makes no sense.

lux• 18 years ago

PHP simply requires discipline, which unfortunately many people in the PHP world lack due to its initial target audience. Provided you find real hackers and not just designer-turned-coder types, PHP is totally workable.

Mind you, when you're getting into the more functional side of Ruby or Python, PHP starts to show its limits as a language. But it's still fast to code in and to do so well if you know what you're doing.

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

If it's the right tool for the job then use it.

Our app is nearly entirely client side, with a little server side PHP glue. Something like Rails would be overkill.

cardmagic• 18 years ago

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php

PHP's standard library is not object oriented

75 array functions

47 of them start with array_

28 do not

Out of the 28 that do not, you have such greats as: usort, sort, rsort, asort, arsort, krsort, uksort, uasort

Nuf said.

blader• 18 years ago

Go for the framework that lets you develop quicker. The truth is that there's no framework on earth that has solved the 'scaling' problem for you. Anyone who says '<framework x> doesn't scale' in all probability has never scaled anything.

Scaling isn't even a real, real problem you need to worry about until you're a top 1000 site at minimum, or > 10MM page views a day. At numbers past that, no framework is going to magically solve your database partitioning problems.

wenbert3• 18 years ago

Bottom line is: PHP can get the job done (cheap and fast) and scales pretty well. I have been using Zend Framework for almost a year now - with the release of 1.5, I recommend it above anything else (other PHP MVC Framework).

LKM• 18 years ago

Requries programmers with good security background.

rickmb• 18 years ago

PHP is without a doubt the worst structured language I've ever coded in. Probably the crappiest language after VBscript.

But I use it for anything web-based because it gives me guaranteed results, anytime, anywhere, on whatever scale on whatever budget. I just wouldn't use it for sites with complex business logic, but let's face it, most websites, even the big ones, are hardly rocket-science in that respect.

What I love most is the dynamic of the PHP community. For instance, when RoR arrived on the scene, the response wasn't to dis RoR or run scared, but more like "that's so cool, let's see if we can bring PHP to that level". And there is more sharing of knowledge and experience (and code) going on inside the PHP-community then any other developer community I know.

More then any development platform I know, PHP is alive and constantly developing, but still as easy to deploy and easy to learn as ever.

SwellJoe3• 18 years ago

"And there is more sharing of knowledge and experience (and code) going on inside the PHP-community then any other developer community I know."

There's somebody I'd like you to meet: http://perlmonks.org

jules2• 18 years ago

The only thing that's really good about PHP is the easy deployment. You just upload your files to your server and it works. The language is very crappy, so this easy deployment only outweighs the extra development effort up to a point. I'd recommend against it for sites that take more than two days of work. With services like Heroku, deployment with Rails may have become as easy as deployment with PHP.

0x44• 18 years ago

Actually, since mod_rails (Phusion Passenger) was released, that's a solved problem for RoR.

eru2• 18 years ago

From what I have heard: If you can stand PHP - you can make it work.

I just do not like to code in the language.

senthil_rajasek• 18 years ago

amrithk, what type of website are you thinking of building ? Your question gives me as little clue as, "what language should I use to write software???

What do hackers think of PHP?

Related Stories