Why Hacker News Thinks PHP Won Something

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-hacker-news-thinks-php-won.html

by gaika • 18 years ago

99 80 18 years ago

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

jjames9• 18 years ago

While I agree with the assertion that warm bodies organized around a specific technology does not = win, I'm not certain that those are the only metrics for success at play in these articles.

Take the case of the small startup without an inspired coder CTO which didn't have time to wait for ruby or python programmers who went shopping for contractors. PHP can get you far and fast (and often badly).

I was interviewed to lead technology in a place like this and they knew I'd try to make them start over and abandon PHP (purist, longview). PHP had provided them capability and in their mind clearly "won" (developers existed and made themselves clearly visible on the market). They wouldn't have been in business at that point if they had held out for something better.

jballanc• 18 years ago

Without the disparaging remarks toward HN, this post would be much better. Granted, I'm new here, but I feel like HN is more about embracing intelligent discussion than embracing the "right way".

The fact that this post could raise a coherent counterpoint to the issue is evidence enough of that.

Xichekolas4• 18 years ago

Giles is still angry that his post "Muppets" got downmodded a lot. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172894)

I thought his criticism was valid though. (Not that he cares one bit! ;) ... Both those articles started off assuming that PHP 'won' something, and then tried to explain why by pointing out good things about PHP and its community. Neither of them started by laying down the contest rules, examining all the contenders, and picking a winner... They started with a winner and worked backwards somehow into the aether.

On the other hand, if you just realize headlines are by definition linkbait, you can make the mental substitution of the phrase "became more popular than any other toy language" for the word "won". Suddenly those articles make more sense, even if they become less controversial (or insightful) in the process.

mattlyon2• 18 years ago

from talking to Giles (I work with him), I think his problem with hacker news is that it's basically turning into another digg/reddit/slashdot type of thing. It's basically a pool of links outlining what's popular with whoever the users of the site are at the moment, and that group of people is likely to change over time.

I think what would work better is a pool of links that shows you stuff you might find interesting based on past usage (voting up/down, friending others, etc). Don't show me what's interesting to everybody who reads the site, show me what's interesting to _me_. As Giles has said in the past, I have a need for better filtering mechanisms.

derefr• 18 years ago

> headlines are by definition linkbait

pg would prefer that not to be the case, and actually frequently edits headlines to "blunt" them.

giles_bowkett5• 18 years ago

>>Giles is still angry that his post "Muppets" got downmodded a lot

hahaha. dude even after I clicked that I had no idea what you were talking about. however, I had to turn off a Greasemonkey script to even find the comments here. I have it set up to automatically block me from seeing whether my posts are on HN or not. if I see them, I read the comments, and get pissed off. so not I'm not still angry but yeah I did get quite mad at the time, whatever it was about.

volida• 18 years ago

I find it interesting that the story was up-voted. It can be safely considered a rant to gain attention.

antidaily• 18 years ago

Good points but why not just comment within the thread?

bootload• 18 years ago

"... Good points but why not just comment within the thread? ..."

Read ... http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...

and specifically ...

"... When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site. Votes appear to be free, like contribution is with Wikipedia, but in reality you have to register to vote, and you have to be there frequently for your votes to make much difference. So the votes aren't really free - they cost time. If you do the math, it's actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be. ..."

GHFigs• 18 years ago

The target audience is readers of Giles' blog, not readers of HN.

petercooper2• 18 years ago

The chance of an in-thread comment getting as much attention and forty-or-so replies is a lot lower.

TweedHeads• 18 years ago

PHP won because web designers now can be programmers too.

I don't care about algorithms, binary trees or what fuck. I can code a web page in a day and that pays the bills.

It could have been an echo, a print or a put, but it had to be simple for us, not scary as system.console.writeln()

Most of you will never understand, you all come from a C or Lisp background and can make a computer cry for sure. We don't care, we just want to spit HTML in shiny ways and 'echo' is all we need.

jjames9• 18 years ago

Indeed, there is design and then there is Design. There is architecture and there is Architecture. There is programming and there is Programming.

Anyone can write but not everyone can (or rightly wants to) Write.

This is nothing new. Pulp outsells literature and I'm sure people cry rivers over it. Does that mean pulp "wins"? By one measure, obviously. But they still won't teach it in school and noone will remember it when it's gone.

patio11• 18 years ago

[T]hey still won't teach it in school and noone will remember it when it's gone.

Indeed, imagine a world in which English classes started with bawdy, violence filled plays written to entertain a mostly drunken and illiterate rabble. Then for the second unit, you could maybe read a serializations designed to sell magazines, whose author was paid by the word. Perhaps by the end of the year, you'd be ready for pop-lit writers who had to retcon their stories due to marketing considerations.

Ugh, what a pitiful and impoverished English curriculum it would be if transient crowd-pleasing drek like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Doyle were studied as literature.

raquo• 18 years ago

Programming (arguably) is not an end it itself. Programs are written to be useful to people, who don't care what tools/languages were used to create what's useful to them. A website does not turn out useless if its backend is written in PHP rather than Ruby, just as a novel does not turn out less interesting/intelligent/whatever if it is typed on a cheap typewriter rather than some Mac Pro.

1gor• 18 years ago

You are right.

Also, this website needs more lifestyle, social and political topics.

Vote this up if you want to rename it Designer News.

CalmQuiet2• 18 years ago

Nope. There's lots of places for designer news. I visit them for that. If you raise "designer issues" that have broad appeal to the somewhat geekier HN audience, they'll get addressed here - and probably with more explanation of arcane underlying issues... which is what I appreciate here.

jjames9• 18 years ago

Or perhaps Insufficiently Veiled Sarcasm News.

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

Just because an article with a subjective title gets voted up doesn't mean the community necessarily agrees with it.

Unless you're on Reddit and the post is titled "Vote up if you think PHP won!!!"

ars• 18 years ago

Exactly. I upvote if I think it's interesting, even if I also think it's wrong.

maxwell• 18 years ago

I upvote if I think the discussion is or might get interesting, even if the link isn't. And this isn't meant as a criticism, but boolean judgments in general don't seem to carry much data; when I read a submission, and I don't think I'm alone, I update a (lazily loaded) mental hash table with any new information on a particular key (or, less often, I add a new one). For efficiency I periodically cache this in hardware by reconfiguring neurons.

giles_bowkett5• 18 years ago

yeah but that's what bothers me. you've got a site founded by the guy who wrote "The Python Paradox" and everybody there thinks it's interesting to discuss PHP. come on! it doesn't matter if it's wrong or not. there is nothing interesting about PHP. there's nothing to learn there. there's no story. even my rant was just Economics 101.

trying to extract lessons from the design of PHP is like trying to win the lottery by wearing a trucker hat because you saw some dude in a trucker hat win the lottery. there's nothing there! you might as well be reading tea leaves. which is what I said in the rant, but you didn't get the point. you might as well be posting a picture of some tea leaves and then having a discussion about that.

yes a good enough conversationalist can extract something meaningful from anything, and that's the real challenge I was after when I wrote the rant, but if your goal is to write something interesting about what you saw on Hacker News, let me tell you, Hacker News does not make it easy for you by talking about PHP.

wvenable• 18 years ago

It's a rather strange argument: Use the least popular language around to make the most money. He's probably right. When I was younger (and I'm not that old) I did a stint working in COBOL. And honestly, you couldn't pay me enough to do that day in and day out!! But those that can stand it and know how to do it are paid well and have reasonable job security.

knieveltech• 18 years ago

Dude's post was standard-issue comical purist bitching if you ask me. Sure, there's some value to be had by specialization, but taken to the logical conclusion dude's premise reduces to "step 1, learn fortran. step 3, make one million dollars.". Simply put, any language-specific grousing is either an expression of monkey-see-monkey-do false zealotry, or just plain wanking. The real question with any tool is, does it get the job done and from where I'm sitting PHP appears to be getting the job done for a lot of people.

WilliamLP• 18 years ago

"A commodity can only compete on location and price, and location doesn't really get you much on the Internet."

I don't know why the author thinks PHP coding is somehow different from every other kind of programming, and that there aren't huge differences between programmers (we're talking orders of magnitude) as far as speed of output and code quality go.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

Yeah, Giles seems kind of confused about how the PHP ecosystem works. Those "commodity" PHP programmers who flood the market with insanely low bids? As a PHP programmer, they are not your problem. They are your client's problem, one that you can charge money to solve. Because it's really hard for a client to find good developer talent among that huge crowd. Lord knows it can't be done by screening resumes for keywords. So once you (the aspiring PHP programmer) have done a bit of work and a bit of networking, and a handful of established PHP folks have met you and filed your name in their contact lists under good PHP talent (a club that is really not that hard to join) you're likely to start getting leads. Leads who are willing to pay your price just to avoid having to screen another 5,000 resumes.

Meanwhile, that army of "commodity" programmers will be out there, energetically growing the market for your services by bringing lots and lots of new PHP-powered sites online. Every blogger who installs Wordpress, and every school and church and magazine and music label that goes online with a basic Drupal site, is a potential future customer.

Of course, just because PHP work pays decently and is easy to find doesn't mean you'll enjoy it. There's a lot of pain involved in working with PHP, particularly other people's PHP. (I ameliorate the pain somewhat by sticking strictly to Drupal, which has higher coding standards and a better defined, more modular structure than the average PHP newbie's code.) But the work is certainly out there.

cschwarm• 18 years ago

I believe he didn't think much, but just wanted to rant.

It's easy to see that an interference from the attribute of one good to the attribute of another is usually not sound. For example, just because bricks are commodities doesn not mean everybody is able to build proper houses.

Also, if we follow his assumptions and logic, any language that would have won the popularity contest, would have been a "looser" by his definition. For nearly everybody would code in the most popular language, therefore reducing prices for programming jobs in that language.

But, of course, this logic is also flawed. For it assumes that supply of programmers increases while demand remains more or less constant, which consequently leads to decreasing prices for programming jobs. However, the popularity of a language may also increase demand for programming jobs. Depending on the relative effects, (average) prices may decrease or increase.

greendestiny2• 18 years ago

I don't understand this article. I think it wouldn't have gotten as much interest without the meta-hacker news aspect, and I'd much rather see less of that stuff than less about PHP.

The thing thats most wrong with this article is the author understands exactly what the other authors meant. I don't think they were attaching any more meaning to word 'won' than having the most users. Something this author doesn't dispute. Communication was successful, if you need to add extra information about why you think PHP sucks then go ahead. It's not in conflict with those other articles.

I doubt anyone's idea of won is: earns contract programmers more money. Even here though the author contradicts himself in two ways: he says that PHP was more popular because you didn't need headers, and that this meant the "difference between driving a Honda and piloting a yacht". Then he claims that PHP had no language advantages and earns you less money.

There is a lesson in there for language designers - keep making those simple but common tasks easier, every little bit can make huge difference if its multiplied by an economic shift.

zby• 18 years ago

Yeah - this was simply trolling. But when you go through this - he actually has one interesting argument about why PHP won the biggest market share - and it is that it improved in just one aspect over the dominant language of that time - Perl.

zacharydanger• 18 years ago

Giles seems to be operating on the assumption that you can't charge a reasonable amount for PHP work. Does this imply that he views himself as a commodity programmer? That if he were to be doing PHP work he'd be doing it at the same caliber of an outsourced shop in India?

Of course if this Giles character knew anything about economics he would also know that complementary products have complementary demand curves. So, the more PHP applications out there means there's more demand for PHP programmers.

Tichy• 18 years ago

Salary is not the only criterion - what if I mostly care about getting things done, not about becoming employed? (Not that I would choose PHP anyway, but still).

I am also not convinced that PHP just got lucky with the timing and that therefore there are no language design lessons to be learned. Perhaps if you get a noob into programming, they would still have an easier time with PHP than with more modern MVC based frameworks, because it is more straightforward. You still just write SQL directly in the code - it is messy, but easier to grasp than having to work through all sorts of layers of abstraction.

Maybe there IS a language lesson there - although I sure hope PHP is not the final answer...

DougBTX2• 18 years ago

Perhaps not a "language lesson", but PHP has a great deployment story: upload then refresh your browser.

PHP allows a strong separation between system administrator (who is running Apache) and the "application developers" who are people using FTP to upload their script files to a shared host. The simplicity of the system makes it easy for anyone to get started, hence the popularity.

There is also the bit about taking an existing UI (written in HTML) and being able to insert programming hooks into it at will. The "minimal change" is very small, the biggest step is changing the file extension from html to php.

ashr• 18 years ago

Spot on! Except for the hint of hacker news disdain.

tdavis2• 18 years ago

I didn't bother reading this, based on the title which assumes I think PHP won something, I guess. I used PHP for a few years, then found something better. I never thought PHP won anything, other than a momentary lapse of my reason.

Next time, be less of a generalizing dick.

jjames9• 18 years ago

This comment won't be very popular and let me explain why in case you are interested in retaining credibility for potentially well thought out things you say in the future.

First, admitting that you didn't read the article in a comment on that article is showing your hand before the call and you know for a fact it's a losing hand. In the future, just fold and keep your chips.

Second, it's important to retain your clout in a community like this and actually reading the site regularly is key. If you had been reading this week you would have seen the 2 posts riding the top two related to PHP "winning". In both cases you would have gotten grumpy and written precisely this comment on those articles. If you had, you might have actually had a lot of upvotes. This articles is a response to those posts saying something resembling your point with some meditation on the topic.

Third, and this is the key point, try harder before commenting to ascertain whether or not you agree with the article before admitting to having not read it and then personally attacking someone you don't know. If you absolutely have to attack someone, it is universally bad form to attack someone whom you agree with.

tdavis2• 18 years ago

Thank you for that very thorough critique. I have internally summarized it as "do not post comments after a night of heavy drinking." I trust this is in keeping with the spirit and overall theme of your follow-up.

ryanwaggoner3• 18 years ago

A commodity can only compete on location and price, and location doesn't really get you much on the Internet.

I used to think this until I started freelancing, but it's much easier to get quality jobs if you can meet with the client face-to-face at the start of the gig.

If you program only in the most popular programming language, you have made yourself a commodity.

The author seems to think that one PHP programmer is just as good as the next, but there's a whole litany of skills beyond just writing code in whatever language that make someone desirable to a client or employer, from communication to product design. Programmers are not cogs in a machine that you can replace easily as long as you find one that speaks the right language.

ssharp• 18 years ago

So if PHP is a commodity and price wins, why would any company NOT choose PHP as it's development environment? Cost wins in business. If PHP essentially does the same thing that Ruby and Python does, there would be no reason to pay a Ruby developer more.

There are various levels of skill within any programming language. It may take someone with no programming experience a day to write a small database app in PHP. It doesn't mean that I'd be willing to hire that person to code something worthwhile for my company.

You can't simply real world situations into easily digested bites and act like you are saying something profound. In reality, you're just omitting the layers that make the real world situations complicated.

rnernento• 18 years ago

I'm not sure it's fair to say that the ability to write php is less valuable then the ability to code other languages just because php is more popular. This may be true for contract work but if the majority of companies are using php it's probably in your best interest to know it. While it may be beneficial to know other languages, it could be detrimental not to know php, which could be considered a win for the language.

brlewis• 18 years ago

There's a repeatable principle in the PHP story: Know who the real customer is. In this case the real customer was shared hosting providers. In other cases you'll have to figure it out for yourself.

cosmo72• 18 years ago

This isn't about PHP winning, it's about Ruby on Rails not winning, ie: losing.

Obviously C# beats the pants of both of these hippy languages so the argument is moot anyway.

Why Hacker News Thinks PHP Won Something

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