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This whole language bashing thing is really silly and tiresome. You know what the best language is? The one you use to actually launch a project. I don't care i

This whole language bashing thing is really silly and tiresome. You know what the best language is? The one you use to actually launch a project. I don't care if you write in PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, C#, Javascript; it really doesn't matter. There are incredibly successful services written in each and every language that prove it's possible. "Staying PHP is too expensive" Yeah? How big did Facebook get before starting to migrate off of it? Do you think you're going to be Facebook big? Probably not. I don't mean to sound snarky, and I know language bashing has been around as long as computers have. It would be nice though if this community, out of all of them, could at least acknowledge the fact that every language has it's pros and cons, we will all have our favourites, and just because we like X doesn't mean Y is horrible. I grew up writing PHP. I still do. I've written some applications that are handling millions of hits per day on a $20 Linode. You know what? For the longest time, despite having some some neat things in the past, I felt ashamed that all I knew was PHP. Because of comments like this. People bashing it constantly. It made me feel like a bit of a script kiddie, that I wasn't a "real" programmer unless I knew language _____. I had a huge, 2 year lull in my side projects where I tried to learn Ruby, Java, Python, before getting frustrated and dropping the project. I finally got over that and went back to PHP and suddenly I'm finishing, launching, and making a bit of money off my side projects again. For anyone that happens to read this; don't worry what language you write in. Just make cool, functional shit, that's really all that counts.

andy_ppp 11y ago
I wasn't bashing PHP per say but I was saying that if you are sticking with it you are going to get worse and worse jobs going forward because the market is looking for Python right now. Depends what you want to be building, or if you work for yourself and choose the technology. I'm building a network scanner at the moment and I have to say that even Python let alone PHP isn't really cutting it. As I've been learning Elixir (for a project in my spare time) and getting to grips with the OTP you really do start to realise that functional programming and the Actor Model amongst all the syntactic sugar is a big win. Sure if you are bashing out a PHP websites great. But if you are building something with lots of processes or parallelisation requirements PHP (or Python for that matter) is not your friend. In conclusion use the right tool for the job. As everyone knows we should all stop using PHP and start using lisp, given the choice :-) http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- stanmancan 11y ago
  Of course you don't want to use a hammer to dig a hole. Picking the right tool for the job is necessary regardless of what line of work you're in. With that being said, you can accomplish some pretty interesting things if you think outside the box a little bit. I wrote a small application to perform an ETL between various data sources (MySQL, an old version of MSSQL, various third party API's, CSVs). I populate a queue and spawn up as many PHP processes as I want/need (php -f /thread.php {$id}) and each one runs on their own, grabbing an item from the queue, processing it, then grabbing another one. Currently I run about 64 of these "threads" at a time with no issues, which allows me to sync a few million records relatively quickly. Best tool for the job? No. Does it work? Hell yeah. Had I tried to learn a new language to get this done I probably never would have finished it or it would be way harder for me to maintain/debug in a language I'm not familiar with or use often enough to efficiently troubleshoot when something comes up weeks/months/years down the road.

andy_ppp 11y ago

I wasn't bashing PHP per say but I was saying that if you are sticking with it you are going to get worse and worse jobs going forward because the market is looking for Python right now. Depends what you want to be building, or if you work for yourself and choose the technology. I'm building a network scanner at the moment and I have to say that even Python let alone PHP isn't really cutting it. As I've been learning Elixir (for a project in my spare time) and getting to grips with the OTP you really do start to realise that functional programming and the Actor Model amongst all the syntactic sugar is a big win. Sure if you are bashing out a PHP websites great. But if you are building something with lots of processes or parallelisation requirements PHP (or Python for that matter) is not your friend. In conclusion use the right tool for the job. As everyone knows we should all stop using PHP and start using lisp, given the choice :-) http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

stanmancan 11y ago
Of course you don't want to use a hammer to dig a hole. Picking the right tool for the job is necessary regardless of what line of work you're in. With that being said, you can accomplish some pretty interesting things if you think outside the box a little bit. I wrote a small application to perform an ETL between various data sources (MySQL, an old version of MSSQL, various third party API's, CSVs). I populate a queue and spawn up as many PHP processes as I want/need (php -f /thread.php {$id}) and each one runs on their own, grabbing an item from the queue, processing it, then grabbing another one. Currently I run about 64 of these "threads" at a time with no issues, which allows me to sync a few million records relatively quickly. Best tool for the job? No. Does it work? Hell yeah. Had I tried to learn a new language to get this done I probably never would have finished it or it would be way harder for me to maintain/debug in a language I'm not familiar with or use often enough to efficiently troubleshoot when something comes up weeks/months/years down the road.