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PHP gets so much love and money shoved at it, the Ruby programmer in me finds it unfair. That being said, I'm really glad that this helps millions of PHP devs
by VeejayRampay 11y ago
PHP gets so much love and money shoved at it, the Ruby programmer in me finds it unfair.
That being said, I'm really glad that this helps millions of PHP devs around the world so bravo to the people working on this.
- dr_zoidberg 11y agoPHP gets "so much love and money shoved at it" because, for a lot of problems, it's the right tool. You can always ask facebook about it.
- lmm 11y agoIt wasn't the right tool for Facebook - Python would have been a better alternative, at least once they graduated from shared hosting. It was good enough that migration was never worthwhile, because the technology wasn't the innovative part of Facebook, but that doesn't make it good.
- dr_zoidberg 11y agoCould you explain your point? Given it's success, I can't see why PHP wasn't the right tool for Facebook.
- lmm 11y agoJust that Python is a better language for solving those kind of problems. I wrote a vaguely-facebook-like webapp in the same timeframe; later I worked (briefly) at last.fm (which uses, or at least used, the facebook stack) and spent most of my time working on better replacements for PHP code and issues that were caused primarily by PHP. If nothing else look at all the tools facebook produces - thrift and HHVM being the most prominent ones - to work around their PHP problems. PHP was the "right tool" in that it was the language Zuck knew when it was a one-man project. And facebook's success is a reminder that second-tier technologies can be perfectly adequate to build a successful business on, that business concerns often have a lot more impact than technical ones. It shouldn't be taken as an indication that all their technical decisions were right.
- dr_zoidberg 11y agoThanks for the answer.
- vpkaihla 11y agoNo, the set of problems where PHP is the correct tool is rather small: 1) existing PHP codebase and 2) small webpages in need of little dynamism.
- jdhawk 11y agoYou're mistaking a language for a framework/library.
- marssaxman 11y agoSo does PHP.
- jdhawk 11y agoYou're mistaking a language for a framework/library.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> PHP gets so much love and money shoved at it, the Ruby programmer in me finds it unfair. Popular has little to do with fair, and a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time. And network effects mean that being popular can make something desirable for some uses even when its intrinsic features aren't superior. And, anyway, while Ruby may sometimes lose to PHP for this reasons, it (due to Rails) often benefits from this, too.
- nikic 11y agoI think this is the first time I've seen PHP accused of getting "so much love"...