PHP is much better than what you think

http://fabien.potencier.org/article/64/php-is-much-better-than-what-you-think

by timmipetit • 14 years ago

248 334 14 years ago

fabien.potencier.org

johnwards• 14 years ago

Composer has been a game changer for me in the last couple of months. Getting setup on a big framework (Symfony2), or even a small framework (Silex) always felt like a bit of a pain.

webmonkeyuk• 14 years ago

Great post. The grammar in the post title has a bit to be desired though. "than what"?

j_col• 14 years ago

English is not his first language.

antihero4• 14 years ago

> PHP must have done something right, no?

Shitloads of people also believe in organised religion or naturopathy, doesn't mean that's a good thing.

> PHP is the best web platform... ever.

So because it's nearly caught up with other languages and you can install stuff easily if you have the prerequisite of knowing about composer? Bullshit.

I'm sure composer is great, but if your main argument is that PHP requires zero previous knowledge you can't really use that.

eitland• 14 years ago

Honest question: Do you have more than a months professional experience writing modern PHP?

While I love appreciate the Java ecosystem with amazing stuff like Play framework, Scala, Camel (several apache sub projects actually), Python micro frameworks etc there still is something magic about PHP. I still haven't made up my mind but there is something about really fast turnaround time, transparency, and shared nothing from the ground up. Maybe "Just Works" is the word. (Cheap hosting and next to zero installation just to be an argument but I guess Play is even better in this regard.)

(background: I am allowed to be opinionated on this (programming since I was a kid) professionally mostly Java but also PHP (greenfield, maintenance), and since this is also my hobby I have also scripted non-trivial python, tried rails back at 1.0 etc.)

talkingquickly4• 14 years ago

I'd argue PHP is, for any project of reasonable size, harder to get up and running than say Rails. For any serious development a PHP developer (some experience, did several years of PHP dev) will have to setup a local instance of Apache/ MySQL/ PHP and deal with making sure libraries installed on this dev server match libraries on the production server.

When it comes to deployment for both Rails (in this case) and PHP you can choose between pretty automated providers like Heroku/ PHPFog which make git deployment trivial or you have to deal with server set up and configuration.

So I'm not really sure these days that for anything except the smallest projects PHP just works any more than any other reasonably popular web language?

freshhawk8• 14 years ago

I have years of professional experience writing PHP.

It's much slower to develop in or get up and running than any other language I have experience with.

Now it was faster when I had no experience, absolutely. That's solved with a few hours of reading docs and playing around. Then the other language is likely faster turnaround, easier to setup, etc.

And besides I'm not even convinced that "easy to set up" is a metric you should be using when you are deciding on a language for a non-trivial project.

antihero4• 14 years ago

I started writing PHP about nine years ago, I'd say about five years of that was within a professional context. I can elaborate more if you like but whilst I understand PHP can be used in an effective way in the hands of someone that understands all the nuance, and I know that PHP enables people to start hammering stuff out with ease, it also enables people that don't know the nuances of the language to write utterly shit code that people like me have to deal with for ages on out. It's as if the low barrier to entry, shit, actually means that the door is wide open to cowboys who just abuse shit to go wrong.

Of course you can write decent PHP, but I've since switched to Python (which I really enjoy, but I'm not biased toward it, I can equally imagine people writing decent Ruby or whatever), but I'd never look back. It's an enabler of people who care little, not for the love of code, or the technical beauty of things, but an enabler of people who don't give a blind fuck about whoever is the next person to inherit their code. No, this is not necessarily a language flaw (because there are many of those, I don't have to elaborate), but what's lauded as the brilliance of PHP, especially lately, is an attitude that fucks people down the line. Look at osCommerce FFS.

I mean, perhaps now osCommerce is a decent product, but it wasn't in 2003, it was a godawful mess, and this is relevant now because there a bunch of hapless fucks that are tasked with maintaining a clusterfuck of hacks based on a version of software X that was made many years back because very little of the people who are developing in PHP give a blind fuck about the next dev to come along.

What's the point of talking about the latest generation of PHP nearly-catching-up-to-decent-interpreted-languages when the entire culture is based around godawful hackery, misuse, half-arsed ports of 4.3 codebases and developer laziness and insecure anti-patterns and other shit buzzwords I can't be fucked to mention but most likely apply to the majority of PHP code out there?

PHP. Never. Again.

Also Wordpress.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

"PHP is the best web platform ever", because it (finally) has a decent package manager. And don't mind that far fetched statement, the author will surely delete any rude comments.

Congrats, PHP has a package manager. This does nothing to shake my feeling that PHP's most ardent advocates have little hands-on experience with the more full-featured alternatives. You know, like the ones that also have decent package management without PHP's baggage and limitations.

edit: hell, calling PHP a "web platform" at all is insulting. Maybe if "web platform" is constrained to JSP/PHP/ASP style pages with no more complexity. Don't mind anything that requires websockets or anything other than... PHP style page rendering.

Can we stop with the "PHP is everywhere so it must be good meme"? PHP's availability makes it convenient; it doesn't make it good. I said it before and I'll say it again despite its painful obviousness. If you want to write a random script and upload it to some $2/month hosting, PHP is great. If you're going to build a real webapp that is going to have developers working on it and real users hitting it, you're going to be on a VPS or colo or on your own metal and have all sorts of choices that... have package management and aren't PHP. And if we're talking about throwaway quickie scripts, who really cares anyway?

illumen5• 14 years ago

Facebook.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

I very specifically didn't say that PHP couldn't be used to build real products, but that still doesn't (at least on it's own) make it good or make it the best.

tijs• 14 years ago

And just because a big site uses it the language does not become good either, see the availability argument. I think most PHP programmers would not recognize what's running at Facebook as PHP with all the customization they have done.

davidlumley• 14 years ago

I keep hearing people mention Facebook as a reason why PHP is a great development language but they compile it down to C++ using their HipHop compiler, and from what I understand they develop Facebook _in spite of_ PHP ( http://www.quora.com/Do-Facebook-engineers-enjoy-programming... )

tikhonj8• 14 years ago

Yes. And now Facebook is spending a ton of resource and man-hours programming around this. They had to write their own compiler!

Also, I think they are trying to move away from PHP as quickly as possible without rewriting the entire site. The new projects and tools are not in PHP; moreover, I think most of the new people they hire never have to use PHP at all.

Finally, just because they managed to use PHP to run a bit site does not mean it is the best web language, or even a good web language. It just means it's adequate.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

To put my comments in another light, let me postulate this. If I started a project in python, Go, ruby, C# or even something that ran on the JVM, I could give reasons for why I would choose it for something non-trivial. Outside of "I can hire cheap devs" and "I can run it on el-cheapo hosting", I can't think of a good reason to specifically pick PHP.

illumen5• 14 years ago

Reducing the cost of your project is a pretty good reason to choose something. Which template language would you choose for those other platforms? One of 200 half-baked templating languages, or something more complete like php?

PHP has better documentation than all of those platforms, so that could be another reason. It has more advanced, popular, and featureful Content Management Systems than all of those platforms.

InclinedPlane9• 14 years ago

Shorten that. "I can hire devs". If you're just a small shop hiring a rails dev, let alone a Go dev, might be effectively impossible. Which is a very big deal for a company that relies on external contractors for a lot of their development, which is a fairly substantial group of small companies.

Kudos6• 14 years ago

When I first started looking for work here in Dublin, Ireland a few years ago, I saw tens of PHP web stack jobs, 1 RoR job and no Python jobs. While the tides have turned slightly, PHP web stack jobs here still far outnumber Ruby and Python equivalents, especially at the entry level.

Some developers like PHP because they can get easily work doing it. Businesses likes PHP because they can more easily hire people.

Arguments about PHP's ugly and stupid syntax are moot, it has been enabling companies to get shit done with developers at different skill levels for years.

aidos2• 14 years ago

It's a bit of a Catch22 as well. We switched to using PHP for our agency client work because it was easier to hire developers. Not only that, but clients actually ask for it by name (and we lost a number of jobs because we didn't want to use PHP). The cycle continues.

anonymous• 14 years ago

How many of those jobs are for maintaining old PHP codebases written way back when, though? Basically, what is the ratio of "PHP the sexy web framework" to "PHP the new COBOL"-type of jobs. I can't imagine it's even close to 1.

anthonyb4• 14 years ago

Yeah - "shit" being the operative word there. The problem I've found is that there's a kind of anti Python paradox at work with PHP:

Better than 95% of the PHP jobs out there are horrible scut work for companies that don't give a shit about quality or decent development, even though it costs them an arm and a leg maintaining their steaming legacy codebase.

The 5% that you'd actually want to work for need to have a series of huge hurdles to keep out the 95% of PHP mouth breathers^W^Wdevelopers who can't really code.

notinfinland6• 14 years ago

What do you mean by "more full-featured alternatives". To me the main webdev languages look about the same when it comes to the major features that have a noticeable impact on a project. e.g: few projects are affected by the lack of closures

And all the talk about real this and real that. I don't think projects become more real when they're written in Ruby or Clojure. They're real when they work and are useful to the customers...

freshhawk8• 14 years ago

> To me the main webdev languages look about the same when it comes to the major features that have a noticeable impact on a project. e.g: few projects are affected by the lack of closures

Someone needs to read Paul Graham's essay about "the blub paradox"

I can tell you that the quality and ease of use of your web framework/libraries is highly affected by the lack of closures and other higher level language features. Even if you don't use them, your library developers have more tools and more flexibility.

InclinedPlane9• 14 years ago

Flawed and good are not mutually exclusive. I'm no fan of PHP but I have to give it props. It is a legitimate web platform. No other term is more accurate to describe a tool that is used to drive literally billions of dollars in business and to host content viewed by literally hundreds of millions of users every single day.

PHP is out there. Being put to serious work. If you truly believe that PHP is a terrible and horribly broken tool the most dangerous mistake you could make is imagining that PHP doesn't serve as the backbone of much of the web.

xd12• 14 years ago

"PHP's most ardent advocates have little hands-on experience..."

And from what I've been seeing, PHP's most ardent critics have little hands-on experience with PHP, itself.

Edit: see this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4198900 current rambling nonsense I'm having to contend with.

Edit edit: the voting is up and down, I can only assume that ~ 50% of this community just don't care about facts and would rather subscribe to witch hunts.

papsosouid9• 14 years ago

Yeah, sure seems like this guy has no clue about PHP alright: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

astrodust• 14 years ago

Malaria is everywhere. It's got to be awesome.

That PHP is so omni-present is not a good thing. It's an opportunity to disrupt web development. It's a lesson that we still haven't learned.

jknupp• 14 years ago

No, it's exactly as bad _of a language_ as everyone is saying it is. In addition, it filled a void that is no longer a void (dynamic HTML generation in a programmer-friendly way) and has rightfully been supplanted as the go-to language for new projects by a number of superior languages.

modarts• 14 years ago

Oh, not this shit again. This article shows everything that is so wrong about people who continue to defend PHP

/PHP developer for 6 years

skrebbel3• 14 years ago

I think you forgot to back up an argument there.

captain_spanner• 14 years ago

Granted, there has been a lot of PHP bashing lately and by and large, those who bash PHP the most - whether they are right or not - generally have little to no meaningful experience with it and are re-iterating whatever they've read about it. Fact.

However, this is just stockholm syndrome, plain and simple. Fabien is the author of Symfony.

halayli3• 14 years ago

I'd stay away from a language that has function names like array_keys or allows you to write array("a" => "green", "red", "blue");

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

I find PHP's arrays amusing. It's as if Rasmus couldn't decide whether they should be associative or indexed, so he made them both.

Although I suppose, strictly speaking, JavaScript has the same thing. (not intentionally, but you can make an array that is both if you really want to)

10098• 14 years ago

It's not a bad thing itself to make "arrays" work like that, except, you can't call them arrays then.

For example, Lua uses a similar approach ("tables") and works just fine. AFAIK, it does certain optimizations under the hood to make sure numerically indexed tables behave efficiently (like arrays). Maybe PHP does the same thing, but its terminology is confusing.

P.S.: I dream of a future where Lua is the primary tool for web development. It's perfect for that purpose as a language, but unfortunately, lacks the necessary ecosystem :(

rorrr3• 14 years ago

What's wrong with array_keys? It's extremely useful.

Java has keySet(), Ruby has hash.keys, etc.

Your second argument is even dumber. Yes, PHP lets you do lots of things, which improve the speed of development. If you don't like it, don't write it that way.

slurgfest13• 14 years ago

I wouldn't pick on the example, but you've made me curious: how does it improve the speed of development to have array("a" => "green", "red", "blue") ?

halayli3• 14 years ago

see, you don't get it. Arrays don't have keys. Reading this function name makes no sense.

wilmoore5• 14 years ago

> What's wrong with array_keys? It's extremely useful.

I don't think he was arguing about the utility. I think he meant that: array_keys($aHash); is less desirable than: aHash.keys. Also, if you you really look at the PHP example, the semantics really suck.

cheald2• 14 years ago

PHP is easy to deploy on. That's it. That's why it's popular. It's braindead easy to go from text editor to web URL, it's braindead easy to unzip someone else's project and run it. It requires virtually zero sysops experience to be able to use. You don't even have to worry about setting those +x bits like you used to in the good old cgi-bin days.

For those of us who aren't afraid of a little ops work, there are far better options, and I say that as developer that's been using PHP regularly for going on 13 years.

subigo• 14 years ago

"PHP is easy to deploy on. That's it. That's why it's popular. It's braindead easy to go from text editor to web URL, it's braindead easy to unzip someone else's project and run it. It requires virtually zero sysops experience to be able to use. You don't even have to worry about setting those +x bits like you used to in the good old cgi-bin days."

And that's exactly why PHP is the better choice for those of us who distribute software to non-technical users.

gouranga• 14 years ago

Spot on - you nailed it.

The end user counts here, big time. A lot of the products out there would have precisely zero traction if they required literally hours of piddling around.

If you compare it to JVM based commercial offerings, and I'll pick Crucible as an example here, it requires:

1. Find a working JVM that matches it.

2. Piddle around with PATH settings and JAVA_HOMEW.

3. Unzip it.

4. Lots of database configuration.

5. Frig around with ACLs.on disk so it can actually write to its home directory.

6. Frigging around getting it to run as a service using a JVM service wrapper or init script that you have to write yourself.

7. Extensive backup/restore scripting.

8. Hours of dredging through Atlassian's shitty web site.

9. Fuck around with Tomcat to persuade it to work behind a proxy.

10. Set up an IIS ARR or apache AJP/HTTP proxy in front so you can serve it on a decent URL or port.

This applies to anything with stateful that requires any intevention other than copying files. That includes Python, Ruby, .Net (which is less painful I will say), Java, Scala, Clojure, common LISP. You name it.

The only things that it doesn't occur on are: ASP, PHP.

Most stuff in PHP is:

1. Unzip.

2. SFTP it up

3. Change the connection info in config.php

4. Run install.php and follow instructions.

5. Done.

People don't care about nginx vs fastcgi vs apache vs this vs that. They just want it to work and PHP gives a viable and simple solution to that.

Draiken• 14 years ago

But it still doesn't make PHP a good programming language.

I am doomed to fix legacy PHP projects for the rest of my life, because they are so badly written they simply cannot be upgraded to newer versions of PHP.

Yes it's popular and I've even seen designer jobs asking for php knowledge (lol), but that just tells us why it's so hated!

The new PHP might be great, but all those numbers the article has don't tell us how many of those are using newer versions of PHP. I bet 80-90% of everything written in PHP is STILL <= 5.2

Why is PHP so big? anyone can use it. Why is it so bad? When people actually learn how to program, it simply lacks everything.

I have been stuck with PHP for 4 years now and if at any point my boss lets me fix these projects, I'd run away from PHP as fast as possible...

simonbrown• 14 years ago

How many webapps are installed by non-technical users? I guess for scripts (Wordpress, phpbb, etc.), PHP is the best option for this reason, as they have thousands of installations, but most webapps only have a few.

iamgopal• 14 years ago

"homeopathy" arguments.

skrebbel3• 14 years ago

For reference's sake, this article is written by Fabien Potencier, the creator of the symfony framework. This guy's probably single-handedly responsible for lifting the PHP community to a higher level, by making great software (which, when he started, was pretty unique, with horrible hacks-upon-hacks like CakePHP being the norm), and by showing people how to do so.

code4pay• 14 years ago

yeah he has done an amazing job.

risratorn• 14 years ago

Indeed a good point, fabien is the catalyst in the current generation of PHP projects, just take a look at Symfony2, Symfony CMF, Silex, Composer, Doctrine, ... they all spawned in the trail of his work. I actually wonder how he gets so much work done.

old_sound• 14 years ago

I think Doctrine is not related to his work. The Symfony CMF, while part of the Symfony community, has been mainly pushed by companies like Liip AG

agumonkey• 14 years ago

The recent PHP releases are nice, but is there any plans about .. pardon me .. rewriting the core libs ? I guess they're close to zero. Even with a nice Object model, traits, closures and literals .. whenever I see old core functions poke it hurts. At the same time the world has moved: Scala, Go .. PHP still looks odd to me, even with his new found maturity.

jonwinstanley2• 14 years ago

A great part of Fabien's work is that he pushes people onto the latest releases. Symfony2 cannot be used without PHP5.3 which is great of keeping people's servers more up-to-date.

Frameworks such as CodeIgniter were guilty of keeping compatibility with PHP4 for far too long.

The world of PHP is a nicer place if you are on the latest version and are aware of the latest features such as namespaces etc.

scott_w2• 14 years ago

It's a double-edged sword however.

Users stuck on PHP 5.2 will miss out on potential security fixes to Symfony 2. This can potential compound an already bad situation.

I'm not saying Fabien didn't have good reasons, more playing Devil's Advocate.

Kiro2• 14 years ago

What's so horrible about CakePHP?

mikegirouard3• 14 years ago

Its legacy (who wants to still support PHP4?). AFAIK, it's no longer maintained; I believe all the core development is now taking place on the Lithium project: http://lithify.me/

skrebbel3• 14 years ago

Admittedly, I used it a long time ago. Back then, it was obviously never really used by any of its developers for things beyond the trivial "Blog Tutorial". For example, you couldn't reasonably put model-related code in your model classes, because the model data (coming in from the ORM as nested associative arrays) were structured subtly different depending on how it came in (i.e. on which ModelPeer the query originated). This effectively forced you to make fat controllers and useless models.

Additionally, I know of no framework that reinvented more wheels than CakePHP.

josegonzalez• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, CakePHP was a hack to get PHP working as it properly should. Our base object class was made so that PHP4's broken object model would work as expected. It has also gotten a lot better, but has also taken a different approach to application development than many of the other available PHP frameworks.

kapowaz2• 14 years ago

It's like he didn't actually read Jeff Atwood's article, or if he did, he entirely missed the point. It wasn't a rant about PHP; it was a rant about people ranting about PHP! So much heat; so little light.

jasonlotito8• 14 years ago

This wasn't a response to Jeff Atwood's article. It was a response to all the articles, with Atwood's being the "straw."

kapowaz2• 14 years ago

Really?

> Rants about PHP are everywhere, and they even come from smart guys. When Jeff Atwood wrote yet another rant about PHP…

That's not how it reads to me.

shuzchen• 14 years ago

I disagree, just because PHP has recently obtained features long available in other languages doesn't bring it close to being on the same level. All the other ecosystems are still light years ahead in terms of features, and contain fewer gotchas.

freshhawk8• 14 years ago

What? You mean that while PHP figured out library management the other language ecosystems weren't just sitting on their hands?

clown3• 14 years ago

Yeah, PHP isn't perfect, we all know it has its quirks and oddities, but isn't that part of learning a language? What separates a hobbyist and professional PHP dev is experience, and knowing the correct method around such quirks.

In the end, PHP gets the job done. I've yet to come across a problem in my 11 years that was due to a bug or a quirk that I couldn't overcome.

Whether you defend PHP or rant about it, I still think PHP deserves respect within the programming community. It would be nice to see the end of rants and defensive posts, and for everyone to agree it's down to personal taste and experience. If we (defenders) are doing it wrong, then let us find out for ourselves.

slurgfest13• 14 years ago

What doesn't "get the job done"?

alexatkeplar2• 14 years ago

If Fabpot seriously believes Composer is better than Bundler/apt/Maven, then he's crazy.

Seldaek2• 14 years ago

Have you used it at all? I'm not going to pretend it's better than Bundler, we took a lot of inspiration from it and we may have a few unique features compared to it, but that's it. apt is pretty different anyway since it does system level stuff. Maven I think is insane, it does way more than a package manager should do. That said when you look at Python for example, the package management landscape is a scattered mess, and there is a new "greater better" solution every couple years. I wouldn't call that a better situation than what we now have with Composer.

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

Maven is actually pretty sweet and good.

I know people have their own "perspective" when it comes to Maven: some said it's too big, too complicated, yadda-yadda. Some said it's the best tool out there.

The thing here is that you don't need to know Maven that much to use it. Especially if you were to use it with IDEs.

People typically use IDE to generate the absolute minimum Maven pom.xml file initially when they set up the project. From that point onward, if you're using mostly open-source library, the OSL website will give you snippet on how to add the JAR in Maven. All you have to do is to copy paste that snippet and you're done.

People who said that Maven is overly complicated typically tried to learn Maven from Zero to Expert rather than to "just use it".

It didn't take very long for me or many of my co-workers to become familiar and use Maven effectively from not-knowing to "yes, we can have Rails-like project structure/automation , deployment and packaging for multiple environment in place".

Sometime I'd argue that there's no point separating Bundler, Rake, and Gems. You need all 3 of them and that's what Maven does (and more but you don't have to know until you do...)

alexatkeplar2• 14 years ago

Yep I have used Composer and Packagist - http://packagist.org/packages/orderly/paypal-ipn-bundle is one of mine. And TBH I agree with you on Python - the packagement management scene there is a mess. Maven I think gets a bad rap - once you find out about http://mvnrepository.com/, it's actually smooth sailing.

alanbyrne• 14 years ago

I am so sick of this kind of talk.

What language do you like to code in? Really? That's great. Now shut up and go code in it.

What difference does it make to you that I use PHP, Ruby or original ASP?

My website achieves the result I desire. I chose the programming language I use because of reasons that made sense to me and my project, not because I want the approval of a bunch of hipster start-up kids.

clown3• 14 years ago

Mate, nail on the head.

The way I see it, is if the final item is as you've envisioned it, what difference does it make what it's written in?

freshhawk8• 14 years ago

> what difference does it make what it's written in

Tell me you believe that after you've both maintained a project for years as it evolves and had to hire a team to maintain and extend it.

And done this multiple times with different languages.

Damn, the language ecosystem and surrounding community are in the top 3 things that matter most.

cranklin• 14 years ago

agreed. Language is nothing but a tool. A good programmer will get the job done with any tool.

waxjar• 14 years ago

Even good craftsmen prefer top-notch tools over tools in bad shape.

I don't know if PHP is in a particularly bad shape nowadays, since I haven't touched it since 2005, but I do know that tools are just as important as the end result.

debacle11• 14 years ago

To be fair, this has been a while coming. There's so much PHP bashing that takes place now it's ridiculous. People take inefficiencies of the language from 5 years ago, tart them up as crimes against humanity, and then pretend that the only reason PHP is more popular than their language is because most people aren't smart enough to code in their language.

Fabien, though I sometimes disagree with his technical choices, is one of the brightest stars in PHP right now and he's just putting forward a somewhat modest defense of PHP.

slurgfest13• 14 years ago

A number of these critical articles point out problems from 5 years ago... which are also still problems today.

I would have more sympathy if it were clearly evident that serious bugs were taken seriously rather than being ignored for a decade

Shish2k7• 14 years ago

The difference it makes is that with PHP being so popular, it gets a lot of support from cheap web hosts (often being the /only/ language supported), and thus if you write software to be deployed, PHP is the only option, thus it gains popularity, thus nothing else gets supported.

I've been working with PHP for ~8 years, having it as my main source for income, and I'm /still/ finding new and interesting things to hate about it on an almost daily basis. I wish I could go and code in a better language, but that's not an option, because cheap shared hosts don't support any better language, because of people like you keeping the PHP ecosystem limping on.

radio4fan• 14 years ago

This comment completely describes my situation.

PHP is like javascript: I use it not because it's good, but because it's what's available.

People can bitch about PHP as much as they like, but my project for today is hosted on a server running PHP 5.2.4. I don't even have shell access; only FTP.

cabirum• 14 years ago

Every blog post about PHP mentions its 'easy to set up for non-technical people'.

I can't disagree more. PHP is as easy as any language should be. As if everyone implies the harder a language to use, the cooler it is.

In my understanding a smooth set up experience is a sign community cares about the thing. Extensive and up-to-date documentation means the community is large and not stagnating. A language easy to learn and use is a properly designed language. If the language is hard to understand and write code in, it should not exist at all.

tikhonj8• 14 years ago

Learning how to use a language is, essentially, an O(1) operation. The constant factor may be high, but it's just that--a constant. Moreover, it should not take you more than a couple of weeks to learn any language (save obviously impractical ones like Malbolge) well enough to use it for a web project. The policy at my school is that you should be able to pick up a new language well enough to use in a class over the weekend; I agree with this. Picking up a language to use for a web project should not take much longer.

A language that's more productive gives you an O(n) benefit where n is the amount of work you do. Assuming you do a nontrivial amount of work, this is always going to outweigh the amount of time it takes to learn even the most difficult of languages.

Now, in a perfect world, a language would be both easy to learn and productive. Unfortunately, in practice, the most productive languages are also the most difficult to learn. However, this doesn't mean they shouldn't exist--quite the contrary even; I think they are more important than languages easy to learn but less productive.

Assuming you'll be spending any significant amount of time programming, don't pick a language exclusively because it is easy to learn!

TillE• 14 years ago

> Moreover, it should not take you more than a couple of weeks to learn any language

This is why I find the "you can't find Ruby/Python/whatever developers" argument unconvincing. If you're a good software developer, you can learn new languages. You like learning new languages. It's only the crap developers who typecast themselves in one role throughout their career.

And while I don't believe in all the nonsense about ninja coders and only hiring the best of the best, really, the ability to learn a new imperative language is not a very high bar to clear.

piggity• 14 years ago

You can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.

tikhonj8• 14 years ago

Namespaces, closures and traits are "all the bells and whistles you might dream of in a modern web language"? Really? Now I understand why Lisp users are smug. And that's ignoring the basic syntax touted as a feature.

What I actually dream of in a web language (or any language, for that matter) is quite a bit more. I want to be able to get event-driven IO without writing event-driven code. I want to get parallelism for free or as easily as possible. I want to encourage smaller functions and reduced coupling. I want good, or at least decent, performance with no especial effort. I want a consistent and elegant underlying design rather than an ad-hoc collection of features somebody thought were useful.

Ultimately, I want a high-level, modern language that's concise, fast to write, easy to maintain and reasonably performant. And PHP is none of those things. Which is why it's no good.

notinfinland6• 14 years ago

Well, we can all dream, but what are you using now do get things done and make a living? I'm pretty sure Python and Ruby fail your criteria.

Using the "perfect language" is a luxury that I for one can't afford. I need something that I can use reasonably easy and that is sought by employers. The fact that is has event-driven IO and parallelism (what kind of parallelism do you need for web sites?) is nearly irrelevant.

tikhonj8• 14 years ago

Yes, Python and Ruby do fail my criteria. Which is why I don't advocate them either.

I'm currently using OCaml, but I would probably prefer to use Haskell. They are both far ahead of PHP.

Assuming your website is doing anything non-trivial, parallelism would certainly be useful. Just because it's a web project does not mean you're not doing something computationally intensive, after all. But even if you don't need it, it certainly doesn't hurt to have the option!

Event-driven IO allows you to maintain more connections on the same resources than a thread-based model. There is just less overhead per connection. That's going to be relevant for most web projects. If you could get this for free (that is, without having to rewrite your code like in Node.js), why wouldn't you want it?

Just because employers seek PHP does not make it a good language, or even not a bad language. It just becomes a necessary evil.

Besides, that depends entirely on the job market in your area. Where I am (near SF), PHP is not in very high demand where Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Objective-C are. I've also seen jobs using Haskell, Scala and (obviously) OCaml. This is obviously going to be different elsewhere, but my point is that it's all relative and not a function of any particular language's quality.

eren_bali• 14 years ago

They have maid a decent progress in 5.4 http://php.net/releases/5_4_0.php http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/php-5-4-is-here-what-y...

Shish2k7• 14 years ago

"Has made great progress and will continue making great progress" is another way of saying "got it wrong first time and is still getting it wrong now" :P

It took more than 10 years and almost 6 major versions of a supposedly quick and easy scripting language to have short array notation? Or binary numbers? Seriously? And this improves your faith that they know what they're doing?

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

This post reminds me of the infamous Chris Rock routine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4#t=130s

"I take care of my kids! I ain't never been to jail!"

tomelders2• 14 years ago

Hacker News really doesn't like PHP. There's a whole lot of blind prejudice in this thread

Arguments against PHP are as futile as arguments in support of PHP. It's a programming language. The only thing that matters is the person using it. I'm sure Ruby, Node and Go are super duper awesome in a lot of academic ways, but unless we're talking about awesome things that have been made with them, it's just blah blah blah boring opinions no one should care about.

hobin• 14 years ago

"The only thing that matters is the person using it."

Well, sure, I guess if you're really strange, you can be as efficient with Brainfuck as you can be with Python.

rplnt• 14 years ago

I don't think not liking language so broken as php is a blind prejudice. That language is garbage. His creator said so many times. You don't have to care about that, but don't act like it's not true.

revdinosaur• 14 years ago

It would be easier to "act like it's ... true" if that statement weren't so damn objectivist. It's a non-ideal language that runs most of the web. There's an incredible nuance to that truth that makes it difficult to say that it's "garbage" (useless? no. unworthy of your time, maybe. I don't know what that means) I just don't get how people have time to be such puritans about things that don't immediately pertain to them and need so badly to make a binary judgement.

Disclaimer: never touch the stuff myself.

scotty792• 14 years ago

> Hacker News really doesn't like PHP.

But Y?

    function Y($F) {
        $func =  function ($f) { return $f($f); };
        return $func(function ($f) use($F) {
                return $F(function ($x) use($f) {
                $ff = $f($f);
                return $ff($x);
            });
        });
    }

debacle11• 14 years ago

You can write that code in almost any language and it will look bad and be hard to mentally parse.

jasonlotito8• 14 years ago

Honestly, and with complete sincerity, that just means you're a bad programmer. It has nothing to do with the language. And trying to correlate the two is makes you look even worse.

ruok0101• 14 years ago

I would fire anyone who wrote code like this in a real app. Surely there can be another way to achieve the same result with a much cleaner and maintainable implementation. Code like this is written by prima donna programmers who have no respect that other people will someday have to read and maintain their code. I say this about any similarly-convoluted code, not just in PHP.

papsosouid9• 14 years ago

>Hacker News really doesn't like PHP. There's a whole lot of blind prejudice in this thread

PHP apologists make this claim every time PHP is mentioned here. And yet the threads are always full of these apologists, claiming PHP is awesome because facebook uses it, or because every cheap shitty webhost has it installed. Never making any actual argument that PHP is good, or rebuttal to the numerous arguments that PHP is bad. I'm sorry, but for a site that is supposed to have an intelligent, technically literate userbase, HN has far too many head in the sand PHP supporters, not too many PHP haters.

lonnyk4• 14 years ago

> And yet the threads are always full of these apologists, claiming PHP is awesome because facebook uses it, or because every cheap shitty webhost has it installed. Never making any actual argument that PHP is good

That is the argument. PHP is good b/c it allows a lot of people to be productive. C is probably a better written language then Ruby, but it doesn't matter b/c if you're doing web development you're not going to be as productive in C as you will be in Ruby.

sold• 14 years ago

> It's a programming language. The only thing that matters is the person using it.

No! Please see "Beating the Averages" [http://paulgraham.com/avg.html] (skip to "The Blub paradox" for tldr)

It it true that a lot of discussion here is pointless evangelization and bashing, but the argument "programming language does not matter, only the programmer" is even worse. If that was true, there would be no difference between a C# programmer and a Visual Basic programmer. Languages would stay the same with no initiative to change. Yet they do change and evolve. Programming languages vary in power, even though they are Turing-complete.

freshhawk8• 14 years ago

> I'm sure Ruby, Node and Go are super duper awesome in a lot of academic ways

I find Hacker News loves PHP in comparison to most places developers hang out. Mostly because of the prevalence of the kind of anti-intellectualism on display in your comment.

Some of us have used PHP for years AND many other languages and have a basis for comparison.

gingerjoos• 14 years ago

IMO, more important than the language itself are the frameworks built on the language. Ruby might be _the best_ language ever, but without Rails it wouldn't have gotten famous. It wouldn't have mattered so much that Python is a beautiful language if Django sucked. If a good framework came out of the PHP community, we could forget that "PHP sucks". A good framework which prevented you from doing stupid things would be really great. Not sure if PHP has anything like that, at this moment.

I use PHP and Python(Django) - work and play.

andyzweb• 14 years ago

s/ruby/lisp/g

freshhawk8• 14 years ago

I actually think that the PHP language itself is the cause of this framework disparity.

Alot of those nice framework features rely on higher level language features that are missing from or atrocious to use in PHP.

einhverfr6• 14 years ago

I am not convinced. My argument is not that PHP sucks or that anything else. It is rather that PHP is lexically tied to corner-case development. In that case PHP is very good at some things but not really all that great for others.

PHP started out as being a pre-processor for SGML documents. All PHP code is contained inside SGML program instruction tags. PHP has never changed this, so however it has developed it is still, in essence an SGML preprocessor because even today, all PHP code is contained in SGML PI tags.

This means that your class files, etc. all begin with opening a PI tag....

Now that doesn't mean there aren't some really cool niches for PHP. Using something like PL/PHP and the native XML support in PostgreSQL, you could do some pretty cool stuff. Similarly for lightweight web development there is simply not a better language.

But when you are building a framework where logic may have to be used in non-SGML environments, PHP is a very poor choice. This means when you choose PHP you are limiting yourself to web environments only. Better choices where there is any possibility of escape from the web include Perl, Python, and Ruby.

dangrossman4• 14 years ago

I don't follow this argument at all. PHP cannot be used outside the web because each source file starts with <?php ? If I wrote a preprocessor for you so that your files wouldn't start with <?php, what would your argument be?

einhverfr6• 14 years ago

It would be a lot less of an argument then, and I would be willing to bet that the language would evolve into a far less web-centric area. But in part because of this, if you actually try to do anything outside the web (I have) in PHP, it's not all that pleasant.

Also on the PI tag issue, I would rather keep my PI tags limited to the view or template. it leads to a lot better clarity. and your object classes are no longer technically SGML fragments ;-) This has some nasty side effects if you have a leading space before your opening PI tag and you aren't outputting SGML....

Oh, as a side note, by 'escape from the web' I guess what I really mean is 'escape from SGML-world.' There's a lot of the web that's not SGML-driven and there's a lot of the non-web that is (XML, DocBook SGML, etc).

Bottom line, PHP is a decent tool for working with SGML but it is highly specialized for this. You run into weird things working in SGML mode but not in non-SGML output with things like leading spaces before opening PI tags if you move out of that. Since this is lexically part of the language, I just don't see it changing.

xd12• 14 years ago

You've heard of PHP SAPIs right? You can most defiantly use PHP outside of a "web environment". I have PHP daemons managing the sending of email and sms, and another used to manage incoming data that is fed into our local database. These have all ran for years (7+) with no issues.

einhverfr6• 14 years ago

I have used it for all kinds of things. However your code is still embedded in SGML output ;-)

gnuvince• 14 years ago

7 years? Really? Cause resource ids in PHP are not recycled, and I figure that at some point during those 7 years, you'd have opened enough connections, files and database handlers that you'd reach the limit of integers and PHP would just abort.

soc882• 14 years ago

Yes, the daemon. The actual interpreter is still thrown away every few requests, because it is leaking memory like hell.

belorn• 14 years ago

Easiest language to learn for non-technical people? I do not believe that comment was made by someone who has tried to teach a non-technical person on how to program PhP. To get started to write a simple thing like a blog, you need to explain concepts like: classes, inheritance, public/private members, global/local decelerations, and context to name a few. Add that with the X number of ways each thing can be done, and the what ways are "right", and what ways are "wrong", and it becomes a huge information load for the student even before getting started writing something simple.

josteink5• 14 years ago

People who argue for PHP as a language always brings up this one argument: "PHP gets things done". Great. It get things done. Quick and dirty, but it gets things done.

That is all fine and dandy, but what when you need things done proper? How does it stack up then?

Oh. You mean you have to consider input-data as actual text, not as some byte-streams which incidentally maps to the same character-set you used to write your code with?

Oh. You mean I need to have locale-ware date, time and number-format handling?

Oh. You mean I need to actually validate these input-data and sanitize them for SQL injections and all that before sending off to the database?

Etc etc.

When you need things not just "done", but done proper, how well does PHP stack up then?

It is my opinion (as in opposed to fact) that when you add that one tiny, but oh so important clause, all arguments for PHP being the one language which gets things done falls apart.

Or am I being too simplistic?

InclinedPlane9• 14 years ago

I'll play devil's advocate here.

Define "proper"? Does meeting a business need, bringing in money, putting food on the table, and paying the rent mean "proper"? If not, why not?

PHP has a plethora of flaws, but it's still a serious tool and used to build creations of significant value, that can't be ignored. As far as quality, what platform do you use to guarantee quality? I've heard many stories about terribly broken code bases in every language that's out there, from C to Ruby and Python to Java.

josteink5• 14 years ago

By "proper" I mean building a piece of software which has a clean and maintainable implementation, logical semantics, proper encapsulation, and last but not least, which is solid.

That is, should be able to withstand real world challenges and input-data without crashing, failing, silently failing, creating corrupted data or any combination of those things.

Granted, it's been quite a while since I've done PHP, and it that sense the initial point of the article stand true, but when I need something done in PHP, I always find myself spending more time ensuring basic truths which a proper language should guarantee for me are actually true, than I spend writing code doing something.

I find PHP silently failing all the time making debugging code hard. And it makes it hard to do things proper, because you may have failure-modes which you should have been able to catch, but which PHP "kindly" shields you from.

Hope that clears things up.

dangrossman4• 14 years ago

Have you written a production app for PHP in the last 5 years? It handles (out of the box) multibyte encodings, locale-aware number and date formatting, parameterized prepared statements for your SQL, etc as well as most any language.

josteink5• 14 years ago

I'll be intellectually honest and admit that, no, I haven't really touched PHP for anything near a production app in the last 5 years.

But to be absolutely clear: before PHP used to be the only language I wielded for money. I have enough lines of PHP on my back to claim the right to an opinion.

That said, last time I looked into PHP, modus operandi seemed to being focusing on making things easy, not making it easy to do things right.

AFAIK this one quote from "PHP is a fractal of bad design" still holds true and that if you ignore all the other obvious things (wildly inconsistent BCL, etc), it is probably the core reason why I can never bring myself to like anything PHP:

PHP is built to keep chugging along at all costs. When faced with either doing something nonsensical or aborting with an error, it will do something nonsensical. Anything is better than nothing.

AFAIK that's still true, and I find it hard to have confidence in any code written on top of something based on that core tenet.

Edit: Experience clarification

Seldaek2• 14 years ago

I think with the proper tools (and I don't mean using the bare language, but enough libraries that give you nicer abstractions), it can be used for doing things properly just fine. Heck we do a living out of building custom apps for customers that range from financial world to data-oriented startups. You just have to know what you are doing, like with any language really.

- The mbstring ext gives you more or less decent transcoding support. I never had huge issues since it's generally ISO-8859-15 or UTF-8 I'm dealing with, but you may have a point. I can't answer conclusively.

- date handling overall is really great in PHP, I don't know about it in details in every language, but I know in some it's a massive pain. See http://php.net/DateTime and http://php.net/manual/en/intldateformatter.format.php for locale aware formatting.

- SQL injection is handled by the PDO db connectors just fine, and all libraries abstracting this basically take care of it. Unless you follow 10 years old tutorials it's pretty hard to have SQL injection leaks.

Etc etc.

The key is just this: know your tools.

debacle11• 14 years ago

You're being some what ignorant. Modern PHP platforms support locales, utf8, and SQL injection prevention out of the box, and the libraries to do so are vast, varied, and decoupled.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

I'll admit, the new-ish built-in web server in PHP is fantastic and it definitely makes me want to use PHP more often. Configuring Apache, setting up virtual hosts, fixing directory permissions, etc. was horrible.

Composer also looks cool, and I'm going to give it a try. I never understood PEAR/PECL/etc and was never quite able to get them to work properly.

tysons• 14 years ago

PHP is ugly? So are knives and forks but i still prefer to eat with them.

robryan• 14 years ago

I think at this stage it would be tempting to give some kind of penalty to PHP good/bad posts. Pretty much everyone who cares one way or the other has taken a position and there is a minimal amount of people actually moving one way or the other.

Anyone who frequents Hacker News is well aware of the options out there for web development. If some people decide that they like PHP for any number of reasons and produce awesome stuff in it great. If some decide they hate PHP and go produce awesome stuff in another language then that is great to.

One thing is for sure we have seen a lot more of "this is all the reasons that PHP is bad" than "PHP killed my startup" posts.

slurgfest13• 14 years ago

There are almost no "X killed my startup posts" at all. Indeed, there are very few "killed my startup posts" of any kind. So that means nothing about PHP. It means that people don't see a lot of benefit in publicly advertising failure and then flagellating themselves for their own choice of tools. People don't do that, they just quietly switch.

People do hear about the problems with PHP, when they are mentioned. It's good to have specifics available rather than just delivering some general subjective statement, which is why we get one article after another highlighting various screwups in the project itself.

You can use any Turing complete language to write programs. That sets an upper bound on how difficult it can be to do virtually anything. But this is hardly a defense of PHP. There are also principles of good engineering beyond "write something which seems to work for now in any way possible".

LnxPrgr3• 14 years ago

If all your friends jumped off a bridge while programming in COBOL, would you follow them?

If Visual Basic was a popular language, did that make it good?

Maybe PHP Addiction is real: http://www.marco.org/2012/06/29/php-addiction. It does seem like its users will go out of their way to defend their choice, as if it really matters what anyone else thinks. Jeff Atwood didn't really rant on PHP so much as link to another rant and lament that there aren't any decent alternatives that are as easy for the rest of the world to deploy. He even called for us to quit whining about PHP's shortcomings and do something about it.

Why is that suggestion so offensive? What's wrong with trying to advance the state of the art of Web development?

Did anyone attacking this "rant" actually read the whole thing first?

conradfr• 14 years ago

Yeah we know, weak typing and function parameters inconstancies sucks.

Move along :)

shadowmint• 14 years ago

To be honest I don't like PHP for exactly the reasons I don't like javascript.

It's easy to write in a way which is stupid.

You can write good php and you can write cool stuff with it. It is easy to non-technical folk to pickup and write a little bit of.

It's also amazingly easy to:

1) Write code which is broken and stupid (woops, left error_reporting(E_ALL) on! silly me. dumped all the passwords out into the website. woops. stabs designer)

2) Write code which is clever, but different from the coding style of every other piece of code in the project (>_> look, my js is so clever, its using closures for everything and events and... oh, you guys weren't doing that? um... ok. Well, now we have some piece of code that only one person knows how to understand stabs self important javascript ninja with spoon).

3) Introduce bugs.

Managing your developers is really the key. If you can keep your php programmers in line, and keep bad code out of your project, php isn't that bad.

...but its that much harder to do when twice as many people are working on the code, and some of them belong to another team.

Produce2• 14 years ago

1) Use a framework like Symfony2.

2) Yes, I agree, PHP encourages you to write esoteric code. Oh wait, what the fuck am I smoking? Better yet, what are you smoking? You can do this in every language I know.

3) Use unit and functional testing. You do use automated testing, don't you?

j_baker• 14 years ago

I think you missed the nuance in #2. Yes, you can write esoteric code in any language, but few languages actively encourage it like PHP.

elliotanderson• 14 years ago

Read the Symfony source, it's a template for how good PHP should be written.

ing33k• 14 years ago

If people who bash about PHP , had used symfony2 framework, they would have changed their mind to some extent..

Styck• 14 years ago

If you need to learn a framework then PHP loses simplicity, one of the few things its got going for itself. And if your needs validate the use of a framework, you'd probably be better off with RoR or Django.

wilmoore5• 14 years ago

I love and use many parts of symfony2 (as well as other high-quality libraries); however, that doesn't change my highly negative opinion about the core PHP language. It is still a far cry from desirable, elegant, fluent, or expressive.

Xylakant5• 14 years ago

One major problem I see in this article is that the stats that are cited as "proof" that PHP is the most widespread language are skewed.

* The sample is not representative. It's the top 1 million according to alexa.

* The percentage cited is "x percent of all pages that we can determine are..." which skews heavily in favor of PHP since PHP exposes it's version by default at least in older versions while other languages such as ruby don't. The percentage of pages that turned up as "unknown" is not listed.

* They don't give an error margin for their stats.

* Same is true for the Content-Management Sites. It skews heavily in favor of wordpress because lots of sites do have a wordpress blog installed somewhere.

I do acknowledge that PHP is probably leading by market share, but I'm not convinced that it's as pronounced as Fabien wants us to believe.

Composer is a nice step forward, but it's still behind of what bundler can do. One of it's main problems is that it created a completely new package format, so you need a new package repo - now they're at a respectable 1900 packages. Bundler uses the regular rubygems packages and has the full list of over 40.000 gems available. All tools that used to work with gems still work. There's also a couple of features that it's missing (local overrides for development, binstubs, etc.) but I guess that's just catch-up work. That the commandline interface looks plain ugly is probably just personal preference (heck, why do I need to call 'php composer.phar' instead of 'composer'?) Last but least, it's pretty much a feature-wise copy of bundler - that's maybe "on par" but not "the most awesome and best thing in existence".

So yes, PHP has taken huge steps forward but it's still ugly. You can get shit done if you know your way around and you can write amazing and elegant software in it - it's just harder than it needs to be.

jasonlotito8• 14 years ago

> (heck, why do I need to call 'php composer.phar' instead of 'composer'?)

You can.

http://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#globally

    $ curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php
    $ sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
    $ composer --version
      Composer version 6573fd3

Xylakant5• 14 years ago

right. I could write a short shell wrapper as well - but why do I have to? I don't have to with pip or bundler.

soulclap2• 14 years ago

While Composer introduced a new package format, it can be used to retrieve PEAR packages, 'plain' zip files and even git, svn and hg repositories - and these can be integrated even if they don't contain a composer.json file, needing just a little extra configuration in your project. This is a huge step forward and very convenient.

http://getcomposer.org/doc/05-repositories.md

I don't know how Bundler handles this and it probably isn't even needed, as gems are just the standard in Ruby but PHP didn't really have a standard besides PEAR and Composer brings everything together.

Xylakant5• 14 years ago

Well, it's not needed - that's my point. Bundler just uses the one well-established format for packaging libraries and declaring dependencies. Even git repositories and local code uses the same depency-declaring format: A standard gemspec. Otherwise bundler just stays out of the way to do it's main job - dependency resolution. There is no such thing as two package formats in the ruby world. There is now in the PHP world - PEAR and Composer (and zip and tarfiles). PEAR has always been severely lacking - no way to install two versions of the same PEAR package, improper dependency-tracking - so I guess that's required. It's probably a huge step forward, but it's still not "better" to be able to track two package formats "with just a little extra configuration" instead of "it works just fine without extra work with the default package format." And that's exactly what the article claims: "Yes, PHP has a better dependency manager than any other languages.

mxey• 14 years ago

Funny. People criticize PHP the language and the PHP fanboys retort by praising PHP the platform.

Jeff Atwood more or less said that we should provide the platform advantages of PHP in other languages in order to steer new developers there.

debacle11• 14 years ago

You can't provide the platform advantages of PHP in other languages because either there aren't enough programmers in that language (Ruby, Python) or that language is fundamentally much more difficult to work with (Java).

InclinedPlane9• 14 years ago

So create something new.

slurgfest13• 14 years ago

There are plenty of people writing Ruby and Python.

There is another reason, which is that some of PHP's design choices seem easy but make things harder down the line.

jasonlotito8• 14 years ago

Jeff Atwood wasn't the first to say that, by a long shot. PHP devs have been saying it since Rails made Ruby popular. That it's 8 years on, and Atwoods rehashing old arguments is telling.

wazoox2• 14 years ago

OK, I hate PHP. It's ugly, and I don't want to code anything with it.

Good developers mostly aren't available to small shops like mine; I don't have anything to get them in. I must do with young, cheap developers anyway. Young cheap developers knows only one language, to be chosen among PHP or Java (that's just the way it is).

So I'm getting a whole lot of interns coming in for two months at a time, and they mostly know nothing but PHP. so we make them code PHP.

They built a nice application in a few months for the quarter of the money I would need to get an half-decent <your preferred language here> developer. Getting more done with less money, from a business perspective that's the only thing that counts.

emperorcezar3• 14 years ago

Using intern developers to write PHP.

I really hope you're using a framework, because that above sentence is a recipe for disaster.

wazoox2• 14 years ago

No, we're using careful project management, code reviews, the interns are very happy because they're learning a lot, and the code is tolerable. Code elegance doesn't put food on the table, anyway.

soc882• 14 years ago

I hate this apologist bullshit. Yes, we know that there are a lot of PHP sites on the net, we aren't retarded.

If PHP wouldn't be such a wide-spread problem, people wouldn't have to spend so much time fighting against it.

One positive thing: His post was didn't kill my spell checker, that's an impressive achievement for a PHP developer. You don't see coherent sentences that often from those people.

netshade• 14 years ago

"PHP is the easiest language to learn for non technical people".

I believe that is a flawed statement. I think looking at the number of existing sites and using that as evidence that because there are a large number of PHP websites, the website authors must have made some value judgement at some point on the easiest language available and arrived at PHP, is incorrect. I think the early availability of PHP as a web language, the perception of it as an easy language, and the wide install base drive its adoption.

I helped my brother learn PHP and JavaScript at the same time, my belief (at the time) being that PHP would be the easiest server side language to learn. Watching him struggle to: A) find adequate, modern PHP tutorials, B) see good examples of data structures, and C) understand the division between server side and client side development made me question my decision to have him learn PHP. By comparison, while JavaScript lacked a centralized site (php.net) to educate its users, he was able to find more than enough resources to help get learning fast.

bbrizzi• 14 years ago

Well, the reasons I started learning PHP were:

1. It was the most popular web language when I started (in 2000), the alternative being ASP...

2. It's extremely easy to use and set up. Most starting programmers/developpers work on Windows. If you want to start developping on Ruby or Pythons you have two possibilities:

- Install linux, which (whatever you may think) is not easy for any newbie.

- Try to work out the Windows ports of your programming language of choice. In the case of ruby, you have to find windows installs for ruby, gems, bundler, rake, rails (or whatever app you want to use), git, probably cygwin, your webserver of choice, etc... Most of these elements are not made for the Windows ecosystem and the ports are usually pretty poorly documented.

If you use PHP, you just have to: 1. Install XAMPP. 2. Click on "launch server" 3. go to http://localhost/

This is why PHP is still popular.

emperorcezar3• 14 years ago

PHP is big because 10 years ago, it was the best choice. Back then, the non-microsoft options were Perl, ColdFusion, Java, and PHP. PHP was the best for web development out of that.

This isn't the case anymore. PHP has been far surpassed by Python and Ruby.

PHP is a wonderful templating language.

Where does my opinion come from? I switch us from PHP to Python after writing a large CMS in PHP.

ericingram5• 14 years ago

I've written "large" systems in PHP and some things annoy me, but I imagine this is true with other languages too (I hear from Ruby and Python devs all the time, some things get annoying).

That said, I spend most of my time on the web writing templates, and PHP is amazing at making that easier. There's a good reason PHP is used in ~78% of all web sites -- most of them are basic blogs or content sites.

Most web development is just templating attached to a business model layer, so why not use a language ideal for templating?

Shish2k7• 14 years ago

Does PHP have a function to generate a new URL that is the current URL with one of the GET parameters changed yet?

After working with PHP for years, I've taken a look at rails and a few python frameworks, and looking back to PHP it makes me sad that I have to keep using a "web oriented language" that doesn't come with basic web features :-(

wilmoore5• 14 years ago

This is an excellent point that I think too few PHP developers care to admit.

theycallmemorty• 14 years ago

What would happen if you could put a <?python> tag with python code right in a page just like you do with the <?php> tag? Is this even theoretically possible?

I feel like the biggest advantage PHP and classic ASP have is that there is a low barrier to get the most basic dynamic content working. If you're not a programmer, you don't need to understand a framework or a design pattern to get things going.

slurgfest13• 14 years ago

There's no reason you couldn't. It wouldn't be Python, but you could do it by defining a new file format to be parsed by the server (mod_whatever).

The earliest Python web frameworks were obsessed with this kind of stunt and it gave rise to a profusion of templating engines, some of which look pretty much exactly like what you are discussing.

I think what happened is that people tried it and found that the advantage is not that great, but the disadvantages are substantial for things significantly beyond "hello world".

dotborg22• 14 years ago

Do PHP engineers even know what multithreading is?

ps. I don't mean crontab

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

Do you even know how many days/weeks/months I've seen engineers waste on tracking down threading issues?

ps. I don't mean sewing shirts.

dotborg22• 14 years ago

PHP programs are indirectly affected by those issues anyway

ericingram5• 14 years ago

I've technically made $millions in transactions on web sites built with PHP, and I've never had to confront multi-threading.

Danieru• 14 years ago

I would suggest that serving webpages falls into the set of embarrassingly parallel problems. The solution is to saturate your cpu running multiple instances.

chris_wot• 14 years ago

Don't forget to turn off the Easter eggs when you use your default install of PHP (expose_php = off in php.ini). [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001...

mekwall• 14 years ago

As a developer I have great respect for Fabien Potencier and his contributions to the PHP community. Sadly thoguh, I think he's done so in vain. You cannot fix what's infinitely broken.

* PHP may have evolved to support many new methods and features that is expected from a modern language, but mixing and mashing ideas and implementations from other languages in a semingly random fashion doesn't make a language good; only messy. It still and always will lack a proper philosophical design.

* PHP's ecosystem is far from healthy. It's flooded with outdated and/or badly written code, so it really doesn't matter if dependency management is good. Wordpress is proof of this, just look at the source.

* PHP is neither easy to learn or code (correctly). It's just so forgivable that you can do more or less everything wrong and still have a working application. Fabien, you should know this.

* PHP is a resource hog compared to the competition; even with the tiniest stack. I.e. running Node.js will use less then a third of the resources compared to a LAMP stack.

There will never be a "best language" to rule them all. Every situation have different needs. Sure, PHP have filled its purpose during the years, but I'm certain that we've hit peak-PHP. It's the IE of programming languages, and its slow death have already begun.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

> PHP is used by 77.9% of all the websites (...) PHP must have done something right, no?

My favorite answer to this is "because millions of lemmings cannot be wrong".

PHP is a horrible language. Like FORTRAN and COBOL. Like BASIC.

Let me be clear about this. It is a horrible language.

Having said that, a good programmer can make good programs even in the most horrible (and I'm deliberately excluding the deliberately horrible ones) language. It is possible to write elegant PHP just like it's possible to write concise Java. All it takes is lots of discipline. Something most programmers, sadly, lack.

PHP is immensely popular and its runtime is incredibly easy to deploy. I sometimes have small fights with Apache to enable some WSGI app (I never remember every detail I have to include in the configuration) but PHP is unusually easy to set up. That probably is a good explanation on why it's so popular on cheap hosting - because it's easy to manage. That also makes it a good choice for quick projects such as hotsites. I prefer to do those on Google's App Engine, but this is a question of taste, not of availability. In all fairness, those sites could be developed in ASP/VBScript and I wouldn't regard that as a mortal offense - they'll live for months under a single release lifecycle. Use whatever gets the job done for less. And programmers without discipline usually cost less.

Much like there are millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC we'll never get rid of, there are millions of lines of PHP that'll keep running for decades. PHP is a fact of life. I won't be using it for any new projects and would question the sanity of anyone willing to start a long life one with it, but each developer must choose which tools they want to spend their lives with.

tubbo• 14 years ago

PHP still can't access email inboxes inherently, can't do CSV import, can't download packages from GitHub the way Bundler can, doesn't support metaprogramming, has a hacked-together OOP system, and has an absolutely horrid syntax.

Why am I meant to use PHP again?

Oh yeah, because you haven't discovered Ruby yet.

karlshea• 14 years ago

Uh, Ruby can't do most of that out of the box either. Lots of those things you mention you need gems for.

And really? Can't do CSV import? What does that even mean?

I mean, it's a programming language. There are packages you can get that will do those things, and if there aren't, you program them.

I'll give you the point on the syntax.

glenjamin• 14 years ago

Composer is pretty nice, but there's at least once vital package that's missing from it: PHPUnit.

As long as the only decent testing framework[1] isn't in the package repository, It just seems somehow not "official" enough.

[1] which still has more than its fair share of legacy warts

brendoncrawford2• 14 years ago

From the article:

> PHP is used by 77.9% of all the websites whose server-side programming language is known.

Selection bias. PHP Has a higher tendency to advertise itself.

PHP is much better than what you think

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