PHP sucks? Go and tell to Facebook, wordpress, drupal, magento, etc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4179488

by napolux • 14 years ago

4 5 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

They actually make money using PHP. The language sucks? Well, it actually works fine for what it's intended too. :)

aiiane• 14 years ago

Good programmers can make good things with bad tools.

That doesn't mean the tools are good.

brokendisruptor• 14 years ago

Great business people deal with the environment they're working on and are successful.

Let's look beyond the programming language and ask "Is the thing we're working on useful? Truly useful to people?"

Because if it's not, then it doesn't matter if it's written in PHP or Assembly or VB6.

jgemedina• 14 years ago

totally second aiiane,

I personally think PHP is indeed a mess as a tool, it is sort of a bunch of unorganized stuff that works. I've used it myself though, but found out other stuff like rails for example are simpler and more powerful.

so when it comes to productivity and related stuff, you might question yourself about what tools to choose, which are better and which ones suck.

sambo• 14 years ago

facebook knows it sucks. they've deving a php jit with perf that sucks less, and a php subset with semantics that suck less. hiphop.

for better or worse, php is everywhere and easy to learn, and that's why sites run it.

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-...

dkhenry• 14 years ago

This is precisely the case. Most big sites would move away form PHP but they have so much technical inertia in it that it would be too costly so they instead extend it in new and novel ways. Facebook hit a wall with what they could make Facebook do so they essentially wrote a parser that translated it to C++. Other companies have one off C extensions still other companies just have lots of hardware to throw at it.

There is still a problem with the language, in that once you get to its limits ( which you reach quickly ) then you are stuck between re-architecting your system or basically ripping out the internals of the language and replacing them with your own bits.

tl;dr Friends don't let friends write projects in PHP

PHP sucks? Go and tell to Facebook, wordpress, drupal, magento, etc...

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