PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/php-sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter.html

by tony_le_montana • 14 years ago

158 106 14 years ago

codinghorror.com

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

If you showed me things like this in Ruby or Java I would go just as crazy.

Yes, PHP has its issues (so do all languages). But, if you are a good developer, you can write good code.

Many people writing PHP apps aren't good developers.

polemic4• 14 years ago

Note that this is a response to:

EDIT: refer https://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/18957165652253491... - Jeff's 4 year old response is still valid.

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Jeff gets it right - the language is poorly designed, but it hasn't stopped PHP powering many of the biggest most important sites on the internet today. Banging on about the language's flaws [again] is not very interesting. What would be fascinating would be an attempt to understand why PHP remains so dominant despite the well-known flaws.

Seriously - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php throws up so many pearls of WTF that you wonder how PHP could possibly be so important. And yet!

Time to stop the PHP bashing. It's like comp.lang.js complaining about the flaws of jQuery (and, indeed, any JS library) and expounding the many and various reasons you should never use a third party library. The reality is: when the keyboard meets the road, stuff has to get done, and these are the tools that seem to work.

bigiain• 14 years ago

Note that Jeff's blogpost is almost 4 years old. Posting this to HN might have been a response to the veekun.com article, but that's not what it was written for…

polemic4• 14 years ago

Thanks, noted.

cageface10• 14 years ago

This is the wrong way to think about it. Just because people can hop on one leg across the finish line doesn't mean that's a smart way to run a race.

Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP? I think not.

Javascript is different because we're stuck with it for historical reasons but there are so many better choices on the back end that there is absolutely no excuse to start new work in PHP. Similar negligence would be considered unprofessional in any other engineering discipline.

rimantas2• 14 years ago

  > Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen
  > PHP? I think not.

Can you elaborate, why you think so? PHP worked OK for Facebook and Wikipedia.

tolliator2• 14 years ago

What in the world does language in which the site was made in has to do with success? They were never acquired for technology - in fact, go read about their setup on HA, it's very standard stuff.

If you build a product that gets traction and solid user base with some viral aspect in step 2, you will sell - even if your app/site were made in QBasic.

polemic4• 14 years ago

You're missing the point.

PHP works. A priori arguments from faults in the language don't explain its success. Replaying that old record doesn't add anything to What We Already Know.

Also: I didn't say that Javascript is different - I'm talking about the curmudgeons in comp.lang.js who argue that the practical benefits of using a JS library are outweighed by their flaws. This is clearly dis-proven by their popularity and demonstrable economic benefit. As for PHP, this remains true.

knieveltech2• 14 years ago

"there are so many better choices"

This is absolutely true, assuming you're working on a blue-sky project or some niche purpose-built app. For the rest of the web, other available languages are (currently) missing one or more of the following:

- A wide selection of CMS's to choose from

- A wide selection of CRM's to choose from

- A wide selection of development frameworks to choose from

- commodity hosting environments ready to roll with little or no server configuration required

Declaring the choice of PHP over some other back-end language negligent in all cases is misguided.

JohnnyFlash3• 14 years ago

I would have thought Instagram would have been popular no matter what they used. People liked the product and functionality. They don't give two hoots about what is powering it.

smokinn• 14 years ago

Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP? I think not.

Why not? You do realize the "team", facebook, that acquired them (worth many multiples of them at the time of acquisition) is a PHP-based company right?

ErrantX3• 14 years ago

Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP?

They absolutely would.

Building an actual application is a hard problem; a lot harder than the kinks of individual programming languages. Whichever tools you choose it is never going to be an easy ride.

Anyone who has written, deployed or maintained a large scale application of the sort listed there knows this.

It's the step after ranting about how bad X language is.

rmc• 14 years ago

Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP? I think not.

Instagram was only succesful (i.e. bought) because they had something (lotsa users' photo habits) that someone with lotsa money (facebook) wanted.

bradleyland2• 14 years ago

> Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP? I think not.

I chuckled a little bit when I read this.

I like video games, so I'll make a video game analogy. I'm playing a lot of BF3 right now, so let's run with that. A website called Symthic publishes a list of damage and ballistics information [1] for all the weapons in BF3. They also publishes TTK (time-to-kill) information [2] for all the weapons. With these two pieces of information, it is possible to empirically determine the "best" weapons in the game for a given scenario; that is close-quarters, mid-range, or long-range engagements. Yet I can equip the perfect weapon for a given scenario and still go 2/12 [kills/deaths] -- or worse -- in a round.

No one is scratching their head after reading the above. The answer is obvious. Even given the best weapon, my skills (or lack thereof) relative to the other players in the game result in a net negative kill/death ratio.

Programming languages are no different. PHP may not scratch your itch, but if you collect a group of talented, motivated PHP programmers, you're likely to end up with a working product. The end-user doesn't really care if the application was written with PHP, Python, Ruby, Haskell, Lua, Scala, Java... They don't care. They care that it solves their problem. They care that it makes them feel good to use the product.

In today's development landscape, these goals can be achieved with a staggering number of languages. Some won't look as pretty on the back end, and some may not be as hip as another, but to focus on that aspect is to miss a large part of the point. If you want to build successful software, the tools you use should be mid-pack on your list of priorities.

1 - http://symthic.com/?s=bf3 2 - http://symthic.com/?s=bf3&sb=timetokill

steve-howard• 14 years ago

> there is absolutely no excuse to start new work in PHP.

I hate PHP myself, but as far as my personal projects go, PHP is perfect for cheap shared web hosting. Some fairly basic and crappy functionality to prevent users from stomping on each other's files is included. Something that can reasonably replace PHP in that role would be what it took to phase it out of my personal use, and what people choose for their own work affects their choices on all work.

ing33k• 14 years ago

90 % of end users wont be even knowing if they used Python/ Django or anything.

cheald2• 14 years ago

> What would be fascinating would be an attempt to understand why PHP remains so dominant despite the well-known flaws.

I've actually put a fair amount of thought into this. I've arrived at the conclusion that it's because it ships with the Big Three parts of any web app in a single package: Request/response handler, scripting engine, and template engine. To the novice, there is no distance between the query string in the URL and the parameters available in $_GET and the ability to write those parameters back to the page via <?php echo ?>. They're all wrapped up in a handy mod_php binary that runs in Apache, and you probably don't even have to do any extra work to get it to run. It Just Works. This has nothing to do with PHP as a language, but it has everything to do with PHP as a web-oriented product. PHP isn't for systems administration, or generalized scripting, or embedding in your game to serve as its scripting engine. It assumes it's web-facing, and that removes a lot of the friction that otherwise trips people up.

What this means is that it's trivial to deploy full-blown applications like Wordpress, phpBB, Joomla, Drupal, and a host of others. They are literally as simple as "unzip this file and go to http://yoursite.com/package. That's huge! As a Ruby web developer, I'm envious of that. I wish I could give people a zip, say "drop this here and unpack it and you're up and running".

PHP is the lowest-user-overhead "make things happen on webpages" language in use right now. This comes with all kinds of downsides which many of us are familiar with here, but PHP's success has nothing to do with the language itself, and everything to do with how easy it is to deploy a full PHP stack itself, and then any PHP application on top of that.

polemic4• 14 years ago

That's a really good analysis. I'm currently mostly using Python, but I've had a lot of PHP experience. Once everything is configured python is a dream, but if I just want to prototype a simple website, it just isn't worth it. Same for the average blog or small scale business site.

To me this signifies a significant hole in the market that competing products could fill. We've already seen that, to some degree, with platforms like AppEngine, but not so much with self-hosted solutions. Or do such things exist? If so, why are they not more prominent?

Another huge bonus for PHP is that a AMP stack is easy to run on Windows, Mac or Nix. The same cannot be said for Rails or Python.

tangue• 14 years ago

"building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language." Amen.

ngokevin• 14 years ago

Sure, Facebook and Wikipedia are built on PHP, and they serve to very many happy users. But are the developers very happy? PHP works, but for most cases, there are better solutions, and we should strive for better. Just because some sites were successful in doing it doesn't mean 'PHP sucks' isn't a valid argument.

JohnnyFlash3• 14 years ago

I'm fairly happy as a PHP developer. It pay's the bills... there are times when I am presented with a mess which makes me want to shoot myself in the face. However I am sure such messes can easily be created in other languages. PHP has a history of Spaghetti code and when I was learning it mashing mysql, php and html into the same file was 'the way to do it'.

Today though PHP development revolves much more about OOP frameworks like Symfony and a good application structure.

The thing that bugs me most is inconsistency in core functions. Is it functionname or function_name. Is it ($needle, $haystack) or ($haystack, $needle). However, it is a minor annoyance negated by a decent IDE.

nchuhoai• 14 years ago

>But the converse is also true: sufficiently talented coders >can write great applications in terrible languages, too. >It's a painful lesson, but an important one.

>Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it.

I'd say life is too short to write in terrible languages. Yes, PHP was once the language of choice and now that it glorious days are beginning to set, I don't think a little PHP bashing is too inappropriate.

Speaking of PHP popularity, are there any notable startups that launched recently (<1 year) that used PHP? Given the popularity of Rails, Django, Node etc. it feels completely dead. On that side note, let me get back to my Java Server Pages assignment in college (I'm not even kidding).

it• 14 years ago

The article claims that YouTube is written in PHP. As someone who worked there, I can tell you it's not. YouTube is written mostly in Python plus some Go. Some of it is a mess, but that's beside the point.

JohnnyFlash3• 14 years ago

You should have finished the paragraph

>> (Update: While YouTube was originally written in PHP, it migrated to Python fairly early on, per Matt Cutts and Guido van Rossum.)

evoxed3• 14 years ago

This was actually the reason why I started learning Python for web development. I can't remember how long ago it was, but I had spent months/years burying myself in PHP and hoping to see the light... after having a short affair with rails, Python was the language that called out to me from... eh, usenet probably. It seemed so simple and pleasant, yet with the performance to be powering the 'Tube.

sandwitch• 14 years ago

do i understand you correctly - you found it harder to learn PHP because its so unorganized and inconsistent ,

and found Python easier to understand and learn than PHP ...

anyone else here with similar experience ?

Ralith• 14 years ago

You chose python for its performance?

Well, I guess it's no Ruby.

harryf• 14 years ago

Youtube was first launched using PHP but ported to Python around the time this article was written, if I recall correctly. Having trouble finding a source - best I can do it second hand on Quora - http://screencast.com/t/NZD0KIHdF / http://www.quora.com/Is-YouTube-still-written-in-PHP/answer/...

ryannielsen• 14 years ago

Things that don't matter:

  - OS
  - Language
  - Compiler 
  - Runtime
  - Editor
  - Testing process
  - Deployment process
  - Bug management systems

The thing that does matter:

  - Building something successful that people want

Frankly, I don't care what language you used to build it. I don't care what shoddy infrastructure supports it. I don't care what hacks you put into place to scale that infrastructure. You know why? Because your customers don't care. They just care that the thing you built works.

So just build something successful that people want. And do it however you want.

pjmlp• 14 years ago

This is the right attitude.

If you want to do business that is how it is supposed to work. The customer won't care less how the product was developed, and if he cares, he will be defining the tools anyway.

cageface10• 14 years ago

These are two different questions:

1. Should I care what successful product X was written in?

2. What influence does my choice of language have on the success of my product.

Joeboy3• 14 years ago

That's absolutely right. I've established that there's a market for digging trenches for subterranean cables, and my decision to use teaspoons instead of pneumatic drills and mechanical diggers has no bearing whatsoever on my venture's prospects.

ryanwaggoner• 14 years ago

That would be a very valid analogy if no other trenches had been dug with teaspoons, but a high percentage have, including some of the largest and most successful.

guelo2• 14 years ago

But when starting a project you still have to make all those decisions. So knowing that PHP sucks is useful information.

philjackson• 14 years ago

Woe betide developers actually feeling good and having fun whilst developing this app. You won't attract skilled new developers with technical debt and a crusty old language.

astrodust• 14 years ago

While I agree with your priorities, I think it's misleading to say they "don't matter". They do matter. They just don't matter as much.

orblivion• 14 years ago

What exactly is the argument that we're having?

If somebody were arguing that a website loses value by virtue of having been made in PHP, all else being equal, you're right, but nobody's arguing that.

If somebody were arguing that PHP should fall off the face of the earth, you would be right to say that this is an awful argument because so many people are already used to PHP and are productive, and learning a new language takes time. And I think not many people are arguing this either.

The relevant argument is, for the sake of maximizing the potential to Build Something Successful that People Want, PHP should rarely be advocated, because better languages and platforms exist. If you come back to me by pointing to Facebook and Wikipedia, I would ask you to explain to me how, given the challenges leveled againste PHP as a language, it could possibly be a preferable language to Python or Ruby.

The only redeeming value of PHP that I can think of is the easy setup. And I don't think that would help Facebook or Wikipedia if they started today (I'll grant you that PHP may have been the right choice given a lack of web frameworks at the time they started, I actually don't know why they chose what they did).

So by this reasoning, unless there can be a list of benefits to PHP that would lead you to believe that it would help lead to Facebook's and Wikipedia's success if they started today, the rest of us are left with the conclusion that, based on these ridiculous deficiencies, there's no reason it could possibly help them and it would probably hamper them. But more importantly, it's a losing proposition to learn and use to start a new project, other than something that's starting small and needs to get off the ground really quick.

Is that unreasonable? Imagine everybody was "doing just fine" making successful websites in assembly? How about a realistic case study: Ok Cupid wrote their own webserver in C++. They still use it because it's not worth redoing their whole infrastructure. But if they started today, they would have used Apache. They don't advocate anybody, themselves included, to write a web server in C++ (edit: today), despite the fact that they're "doing just fine" with it.

So if somebody is criticized for using PHP, and their response is, "Yeah, I know, but it's what I know" that's perfectly fine, learning a new language takes time and it may not be worth it, it's not my place to make judgement calls like that for people. If their response is "Hey man, I'm plenty productive with this, to each his own" imagine if they said that about assembly. Yeah, I guess they could be wired in such a way that it's more productive for them, but it's got to be such an oddball case that it doesn't justify the existence of the language. Yes, part of me wants to live and let live. But I can't sit back and accept this subjectivist attitude toward languages, there's actual reasons a language is good or not.

dageshi• 14 years ago

I've always thought that php was the script equivalent of c, in as much as it'll run anywhere and any library that's ever been written will probably have a version that works in it.

Perhaps those two factors alone outweigh all the others?

Tichy• 14 years ago

What surprises me is that "they" can find talented programmers who are willing to code PHP.

greyfade• 14 years ago

They don't. They find a lot of "programmers" who can hammer out PHP.

The talented programmers who end up writing PHP don't do it because it was their first choice. It was probably their tenth. Or twentieth.

PHP is one of those tools that you can find a lot of people who know how to use it. Certainly not all of them are actually talented or even competent. But there's a lot of them.

I think the article's conclusion is misguided.

hk_kh• 14 years ago

If you think about it, there are two noticeable motives that put PHP where it is:

- The language has been made and (poorly?) designed around the web. While PHP is a language itself, it usually has no purpose outside the web, while Python and Ruby do not address the same problems the same way.

- Deployment is easy.

And yet, it seems all these articles fail at noticing these two simple things.

foolinator6• 14 years ago

Like it or hate it, PHP stack is easy to start coding webpages if all you know is HTML.

PHP is an easy to enter arena. Memorizing APIs is easier than Computer Science. But PHP works fine with CS concepts. But it also offers a shit ton of commands that allow for both styles to mingle (often times, not nicely).

I'm sick of "your language sucks" arguments. There's good in all of them.

guelo2• 14 years ago

The TIOBE index shows PHP's popularity began declining two years ago.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.html

kdizza• 14 years ago

Apparently Ruby peaked 3 years ago: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html

And I don't know what to make of Python: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Python.html

dasil003• 14 years ago

PHP is the textbook example of worse is better. It shows two important things:

1. The success of a programming language has nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with raw capability, ie. what does the language make dramatically easier.

2. Technical warts will not prevent great things from being done in a language. It's certainly true that Haskell will not allow you write as broken a piece of software as PHP, but in many cases you can write something just as elegant in PHP as you can in Haskell (laziness/pattern-matching/type-inference notwithstanding).

Now, personally I will do my best to ever write any PHP again, and if someone asks me my opinion I'll tell them that I believe using PHP exclusively will stunt your growth as a software craftsmen. But those are just opinions. I don't feel the need to go out and advocate against PHP because the software communities where I devote my attention are doing just fine. If somebody likes PHP then more power to them, it certainly won't prevent them from doing great things.

olavk• 14 years ago

Many both pro and con PHP articles are missing the point about PHP. PHP is a great success in spite of its obvious shortcomings because it supports iterative development. (Saying that language choice is less important for a project than other factors doesn't explain anything - all other things being equal, a language with fewer traps and idiosyncrasies would be the better choice.)

The killer feature of PHP is that you can FTP to the server and start adding arbitrary code to a static html file by adding a single tag. Other frameworks deliberately makes this more complicated with more overhead, because they want to promote a better architecture with separation of concerns and so on. Basically these frameworks have "encoded" the waterfall-method, because they assume you know from the start that you need a complex site. PHP supports iterative improvement from the simplest site (static HTML files on a server) to arbitrary complex code, without requiring major speedbumps where you have to rethink the whole app.

This also mirrors how many web developers have learnt to code - starts out with making html/css, then gradually learn php by inserting simple snippets of code to make banner rotate and so on. (The "right way" of course would be to take a pause for a few years to get a CS degree before adding the banner rotator.)

When an app grows beyond a certain level of complexity, changing to a better platform might improve quality, but then you have already made an investment in existing code.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

Thank you! Iterative development is key.

Out of any language I've ever used, PHP has most allowed me to just get stuff done fast. It certainly isn't elegant, but it works. And even as you grow and scale up, as long as you constantly refactor at critical moments, you can avoid spaghetti code just fine.

nl• 14 years ago

PHP is like English: a mutated fugly cockroach of a language that defies logical explanation, contains more exceptions to any syntax rule than the rule covers and yet its very ugliness is also its strength: you can always, always find someone who can work in it.

Don't underestimate how useful it is that anyone can come along and hate your codebase just as much as you do in a very short period of time.

NameNickHN• 14 years ago

I don't see why a couple of badly named functions can make a whole language crappy.

All those people bashing PHP suffer from some kind of superior complex. It's like bullies beating up the ugly nerdy kid that has glasses and pimples.

Or maybe it's just envy that something, that might not win the next language design contest can be so popular.

To all the PHP haters out there: hate away. I don't care. All the other PHP programmers making a living don't care. Mark Zuckerberg clearly doesn't care.

It's time to grow up, people.

FuzzyDunlop• 14 years ago

It does matter when you have to work on an existing PHP project that makes throwing yourself off a bridge seem an attractive proposition.

Yeah, it's not entirely the language that is to blame - the language didn't design and code the project after all - but its own design makes it too easy to create stuff that will really punish more seasoned developers later on.

That it powers some popular products or websites isn't entirely relevant, unless we're saying that Wordpress, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc. are popular because they were written in PHP.

LoneWolf• 14 years ago

After reading through the comments I have to leave my comment about PHP.

I have been developing in PHP, Java, and a little of C#, I also have done a few things with Python.

From my exprience it does not matter what language I'm using, it's just a matter of syntax and knowing the language.

My personal preference goes to PHP or Java, and while Python is nice I can't stand the whitespace thing, I like to be able to write my code without thinking about how it looks, only after its written I care about the look for later reading (in my case tell my IDE to make it pretty, by hand its boring but easy too).

While C# as a language is good for me, the msdn documentation sometimes seems rather lacking when compared to PHP or Java and in the case of Java the exceptions it thrown (btw if someone knows where there is a reference for the exceptions a method throws in C# please tell me, I can't find them in msdn).

Yes PHP has its frustrations and quirks, but it is possible to write well structured code for web applications and separating everything using MVC. Same applies to Java or C#, Python etc.

Don't like it? Stop caring about it.

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

When you say Wikipedia, Digg, Wordpress, Facebook, et all were all written in PHP, it doesn't mean a thing. All those use PHP simply because when they started PHP was the best thing available. Nowadays this is not a matter of "it gets the job done" anymore (e.g., Facebook paid $1b for a site that runs of Django).

debacle• 14 years ago

As someone who has written PHP for years, I would say it's starting to matter. The inability for PHP to adapt in a speedy fashion to new programming trends, the continuous implementation of features in a half-assed fashion (namespaces, anonymous functions, etc), and the unwillingness to even attempt to clean up the standard library have begun to marginalize PHP.

It's now easier and faster to get up and running with JavaScript or even Ruby, and these languages have more internal consistency than PHP, meaning that long-term they will see more skilled developers using them and thus will eventually have more and better libraries than PHP.

In addition, the JVM has reached a point where languages like Scala can compete, and apart from the initial cost, C#/.NET will actually save you money in the long term.

So, in short, while PHP is just fine as a language and I use and abuse it every day, I have a feeling that we will be seeing its twilight sooner rather than later, unless something like HPHP takes center stage, breaks backwards compatibility, and shakes up the ecosystem enough to revitalize the language.

howeyc• 14 years ago

"If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?"

The same reason that Excel vba sucks so badly but is powering so much of internal company "applications."

A lot of these sites are first started by a small group of people, looking to get something working ASAP. They do what is easiest, setup LAMP and get hacking. At the time, it's the quickest way to getting something workable.

Inevitably, you end up with a similar situation as you do when your BA takes it upon himself to create an indespensible excel vba spreadsheet. The cost of redoing it in something better is hard to justify, because atleast the current application works. Even though you know it has reached a point where having it as a real application would probably be best since so much of your company relies on its information and analysis.

So here we are, stuck with a shitload of crap written in PHP and Excel VBA, but it doesn't matter. Because all that crap works, and that's the goal. Not maintainability, elegance, programming cred, etc.

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

Any critic of PHP who advocates other languages, like Ruby, Python or Java has to answer a question "Where are the apps?"

PHP has accomplished code reuse on the app level: applications like Wordpress and Drupal are world class and you just can't find installable web apps in other languages that have reached anywhere near the level of success. Occasionally you find an app in another language and generally it doesn't have the fit-and-finish that the successful PHP apps have.

Other languages, on the other hand, grow frameworks like cancer cells, and I wonder what disease they have that prevents these frameworks from being actually usable to build apps.

Pewpewarrows• 14 years ago

The only reason Wordpress and Drupal became successful is because PHP is present on basically every shared host you can find on the internet. They stayed successful by building a community of plugins and themes.

The actual internals of both are a complete mess, and trying to get them to do anything outside of trivial blog hosting and content management is a nightmare.

Just because you don't know of any Python/Ruby/Java "apps" doesn't mean they don't exist. Jenkins, Redmine, Trac, etc.

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

Note that all three examples of yours are software project management systems. That's a very narrow segment of the market.

You've also got to ask the question of why PHP is so widespread compared to the others.

hackermom• 14 years ago

Too much comp-sci attitude, too little coder attitude.

j45• 14 years ago

The religious wars over the interpretation of languages needs some serious self-reflection.

There is so much confusion between a language and a framework. Blindingly.

The religions of one language compare their experience, due to a framework, with another language without using a framework.

How does this make sense?

As a non day to day PHP developer:

- The Web, as a platform is relatively a baby, compared to platforms like PCs, going back to mainframes.

- I feel for too many devs, the relationship to production code that is more than a few years old seems foreign, especially to those who have joined the Web in the past 5 to 7 years.

- Most languages used on the web, were not designed for the Web, first. Instead, most languages have a framework to extend a language to the Web.

On Languages:

- Having seen sites built without a framework in many languages leads me to wonder: Why do we act horrified at old code? It seems reasonable that our old ways of thinking would improve, maybe even be expected for the level of intelligence on hn.

- Most languages now a days have capable Web frameworks. Instead of focusing on advocating for the use of a framework, we keep the discussion at a much more surface level, like which language.

- Language is merely syntax. Granted some languages are interpreted to be more eloquent/elegant/efficient than others. Yet the language we all speak, English is the most universal and in a way quite hacked up. Yet we don't take any upfront to bash fellow developers instead of supporting the use of frameworks today so in 5 years, the next batch of people who know lots don't look back and find less fault in todays perfection.

- I'm at a loss to try and argue one language is the way. It isn't. Nor is one framework. But if your language of choice is not natively made for the Web, make sure you use a framework. Add a beginner it might be one kind, advanced developers can likely pick something else.

- A mess can be made in every language. What's our point, really, when we can't see the forest while so obsessed with the trees?

On Code:

- All code older than a year starts to become legacy.

- I'm not sure if we really understand old code was often written with less foresight than we have today. It didn't make the tools obsolete, as much as old thinking obsolete.

- There will be new things coming out all the time, few last. As much as it's fun to go on a language witch hunt, we have our own skeletons waiting for us as our projects live on longer and longer.

- with the Web in it's infancy, is be surprised if 30% of developers have a relationship with 10 year old code at all let alone with code that still is in use on the Web. It's great that we can do things the new way, but we'll always have a growing history of code to maintain a relationship with.

- PHP might suck along with a lot of other languages, but I hope we consider whether the lens we live we see ourselves thought couldn't use some improvement.

On Frameworks:

- Every problem someone had with a language is more likely a problem with not having used a framework, instead of the language itself.

- For those learning coding, learn it from someone who had good habits and thought processes, those are the things that are the most important to have as the language de jour makes it's rounds. Having the transferable skills of decently evolving application design between languages and frameworks will forever leaving.

From where I see it, most languages now have capable frameworks, and all languages have capable developers. Please stop the witch hunts. The amount of vile filth spread about others preferences compared to your preferences based on 10 year old experience and hearsay of a particular language to this developer, is akin to believing and propagating a nasty stereotype about a particular culture or nationality without learning for yourself. It's not that much different than being that ignant.

Developers, let's continue discussing, but more importantly educating and spreading the wisdom of good practices in all the communities we participate in so there's more of us.

Let's spend less time talking trash about others based in hearsay, interpretation and preferences in language, and instead build stuff people want, because we really can make the world a better place with software.

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robwgibbons• 14 years ago

YouTube is actually written mostly in Python.

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