Here’s to the PHP Misfits

http://melvinmt.com/80/heres-to-the-php-misfits

by melvinmt • 14 years ago

31 46 14 years ago

What I don't get about these "I get shit done with PHP so booya" posts is that people get shit done with better designed languages too. So where's the advantage?

IMO, PHP is only "magically productive" when you're starting out and banging out scripts over FTP on Shared Hosting with Apache/mod_php. Once you start running a "real app", with servers/deployment/nginx/php-fpm/frameworks, it requires the same amount of setup complexity as Rails/Django/etc.

Disclaimer: I write PHP for a living. Not a hater.

mildweed• 14 years ago

The advantage is that this guy, who otherwise wouldn't have been able to accomplish his goals, did. He did because PHP was accessible. And till other languages are as dead-simple to accomplish small-to-medium tasks, PHP will continue to have fans such as the OP.

RageKit3• 14 years ago

imho ruby is simpler than php.

astrodust5• 14 years ago

When you have more pride in your tools than in your craft, you're not doing it right.

Anyone who's been using PHP long enough to be proficient in it should move to a more robust toolset simply to get more done. To sneer on Python and Ruby as being elitist is just the sort of thing a self-proclaimed "PHP programmer" would do.

You shouldn't aspire to be an "X programmer", but a programmer period. Learn more tools, more techniques, even those outside your immediate comfort zone, and you will be able to improve in ways that being locked into a single way of thinking will never offer.

melvinmt5• 14 years ago

Here's the thing: I'm not interested in being a 'programmer', I just want to build out my product ideas. And right now I do it with the language I know best: PHP.

zenogais2• 14 years ago

Then why even bother listening to what people who do want to be programmers write about your tools?

astrodust5• 14 years ago

You're doing yourself a massive disservice to know PHP and only PHP. There are literally hundreds of other languages out there, some good, some bad, but all of them have something to teach you.

Remember a programmer is not necessarily interested in programming, but often in having programmed, where the end result is paramount.

When I see "PHP programmer" it's all too easy to jump to the conclusion of someone who's too timid to go outside their little bubble and see how other people get things done.

jiggy20114• 14 years ago

Another "Look I can build websites with PHP!" post.

The biggest draw of PHP seems to be that there is a large quantity of (often bad) copy paste-able code out there on the internet.

knieveltech2• 14 years ago

The biggest draws for PHP:

- a wide selection of well documented frameworks to choose from

- a wide selection of robust CMS's to choose from

- a variety of CRM's to choose from

- runs on a bog-standard web server (apache, IIS) right out of the box

jiggy20114• 14 years ago

It doesn't run "out of the box" you still need to install mod_php (although ubuntu/debian makes this pretty easy).

I'd be hesitant to call a CMS or CRM built on something that doesn't understand utf8 "robust".

There's plenty of great , well documented framework available for Java & Python too.

stevencorona2• 14 years ago

Agree. PHP is the only language where one looks for "snippets" instead of libraries. It's gross.

jiggy20114• 14 years ago

It wouldn't be so bad if standard practise was to put them in a separate files/folders with the original authors header left on with a link back to where it was downloaded.

Instead I tend to find the same POS code repeated 20 times in the codebase.

astrodust5• 14 years ago

PHP programmers are the hunter-gatherers of the technical world.

debacle2• 14 years ago

Disclaimer: I am a PHP programmer. I write PHP every day.

With that said, oh god please shut up already! This dick-waving is getting out of control. It has gotten to the point that people are writing these articles just because they know they will get hits.

PHP is a good tool. It's not the best tool, but it's good enough. Over time it will get better. It is what it is.

leftnode• 14 years ago

Thank you for saying this. I also do a ton of PHP development and it's so fucking tiring. Just stop with the posts already and get some shit done.

drobati• 14 years ago

Who gives points to an article like this. It's just a opinion, with nothing informative in it? On that note, does HN have an extension like the Reddit Enhancement Suite, to maybe setup or hide posts I'm not interested in?

bithive123• 14 years ago

If you take this story, remove anything specific to PHP and then copy paste it a few times replacing PHP successively with Perl, Ruby, Python, and JavaScript then you have my trajectory as a coder.

Similarly, I wasn't interested in the computer science part at first either, but boy has the importance of the "managing complexity" part made itself obvious over the years.

Why is it that the people who take the time to blog defensively about PHP are typically monoglot coders? After my third or fourth language helped me understand what programming was at its core, I stopped using just one and ended up writing...a lot less code for any particular task.

melvinmt5• 14 years ago

Obviously the complexity of my projects have also been increased since I started out 10 years ago. But thanks to frameworks like Kohana I've been able to manage it pretty well.

I'm not saying that I will never use another language (obj-c has caught my interest) but I will never use another language for the sake of using it - especially not when I can do more or less the same thing as with PHP.

webjunkie• 14 years ago

"Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door. "

debacle2• 14 years ago

> where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door. "

That's a straw man. There are thousands of sites out there, running on PHP, that are incredibly well-engineered.

astrodust5• 14 years ago

The problem is there are millions of PHP sites out there.

Killswitch2• 14 years ago

Stop blaming the tools for the stupidity and unoriginality of the carpenter. The tools don't make the house stable, look good, or even become something people want. How the carpenter uses those tools and puts his own vision into it does.

The same hammer, nails, screwdriver, whatever is used to build mansions... It's also the same tools used to build shitty houses that fall apart... Your point means exactly what the original author meant. Don't worry about the tools used to build your product, just build the damn thing.

zenogais2• 14 years ago

Tools have a lot to do with setting the range of possible creations you can make. If I have better tools I can build much larger buildings than you on similar timescales. It's the difference between using wood and all the standard tools to build a skyscraper and using forklifts, cranes, and welded beams. No amount of skill is going to turn your toolbox into a forklift. Similar sorts of increases are possible with other programming languages and better toolsets, unfortunately you usually have to use them to see these things. You'll probably ask why everyone isn't using these tools if they're so good. The answer is for the same reason people write articles like this. New stuff is scary and weird and the old stuff works well enough, right?

YmMot• 14 years ago

Saying that PHP has value because it lets beginners get up and running quickly is like suggesting we outfit babies with jetpacks so they can get about quicker without all that crawling nonsense.

I'm being over dramatic of course, but I find it interesting that in a lot of these posts the author doesn't seem to consider if it's really a feature that you can just hack away and not have to think or work to much to get something running.

Hanging out on help forums and irc I see a lot of requests for help in dealing with the fallout from poorly coded PHP applications; whether it's been hacked, they need to update it but the design is poorly thought out, etc etc.

I think in reality like most things, it's shades of grey. It is nice that people can use it to just get up and running quickly but that also lands us tons of poorly coded, brittle, and insecure websites. This of course isn't a problem unique to PHP, but I think because it's considered a "good language for beginners" and the barrier is a little lower, more beginners or "Just hack and slash until I have something that works" types end up using it and the effect is more pronounced.

shaunxcode• 14 years ago

I think it's more like arguing that one can safely drive on the freeway with a tricycle, after all it has wheels and it moves quickly if you pedal fast and hard enough.

k3n• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247245

Oh, and:

> I said: “give me 3 days” and I learned everything I needed to know about OOP that weekend and showed off a OO-based numbers game on Monday.

Perhaps he learned all that he "needed" to know for that job, but I kind of doubt that he 'learned everything he needed to know about OOP'.

I get so tired of people tooting their own horns, but I guess I should get used to it in this new era of what I like to call conference-coders.

derpmeister3• 14 years ago

Seems like the article vanished:

  This is the standard TransIP page for reserved domain names. No website
  has been published for this domain. Are you still seeing this after
  publishing your website? Please make sure you upload your website to
  the /www directory and clear your browser cache before reloading
  this page.

melvinmt5• 14 years ago

No it's still up, guess Cloudflare decided to stop serving pages at one point :/.

derpmeister3• 14 years ago

You should consider switching to a better host. There is no excuse for this:

wget -4 output: http://scrp.at/bAD

wget -6 output: http://scrp.at/bAE

As an IPv6 advocate on the side, I'm disappointed by this.

crazydoggers• 14 years ago

It's the same type of irresponsible behavior in any industry before it's regulated. If you can get away with building crap for cheap, why not.

Here's my longer response: http://tumblr.crazydogsoftware.com/post/27412353720/when-the...

Here’s to the PHP Misfits

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