10 ms·

Is the success thanks to PHP or in spite of PHP?

• hobs 10y ago
  IMO any good dev can be professional in any language, its just harder in some than others. It is a bit sad to see someone who has built up their knowledge and skill leave it because of its social stigma. Why PHP is so successful? Well... "Shantytowns are usually built from common, inexpensive materials and simple tools. Shantytowns can be built using relatively unskilled labor. Even though the labor force is "unskilled" in the customary sense, the construction and maintenance of this sort of housing can be quite labor intensive. There is little specialization. Each housing unit is constructed and maintained primarily by its inhabitants, and each inhabitant must be a jack of all the necessary trades. There is little concern for infrastructure, since infrastructure requires coordination and capital, and specialized resources, equipment, and skills. There is little overall planning or regulation of growth. Shantytowns emerge where there is a need for housing, a surplus of unskilled labor, and a dearth of capital investment. Shantytowns fulfill an immediate, local need for housing by bringing available resources to bear on the problem. Loftier architectural goals are a luxury that has to wait." - http://www.laputan.org/mud/ http://www.laputan.org/mud/
• brianwawok 10y ago
  Well.. people that don't know how to code but want to hack in a 1 line dynamic thingy.. where else would they turn? It build a pretty good community for newcomers. Now as to why a facebook would use it? mindblown
  • lujim 10y ago
    Facebook wouldn't use it if Facebook started two or three years after it did.
    • jpea 10y ago
      Facebook wouldn't likely exist if it wasn't for PHP. Zuck wrote something quickly in what he knew. They were able to deploy quickly, scale quickly, etc. Internally, they likely had the hope to migrate off of it at some point, but the business goals trumped the tech stack. From an outsiders point of view, no one cares about the tech problems they face with their tech stack.
    • rythie 10y ago
      That's right they'd probably be struggling to scale Ruby on Rails like Twitter who started 2 years after facebook.
      • nkozyra 10y ago
        To be fair, FB struggled to scale with PHP, although it certainly fares better out of the box (even then). A lot of their work has gone into making PHP more performant and better by way of Hack. PHP7 took a lot of great ideas from Hack but is still saddled with its legacy.
        • rythie 10y ago
          They did? I remember numerous Twitter outages due to scale and the infamous Fail Whale. Twitter's issues risked the company losing users or even it's sustainability as a business. Never remember Facebook having much issue.
    • anonjdgpogjsop 10y ago
      Facebook is using his own PHP, optimized as fuck, so... Tell us what they should have used ? :D
      • lujim 10y ago
        A few years later there would have been Rails or Django. With the strides FB made in PHP it would have been cool to see what they could have done with those frameworks/languages.
    • krallja 10y ago
      What would they use instead?
• pokle 10y ago
  PHP has always had this hyper productivity about it. You just made a change in your editor, saved the file, and refreshed your browser for rapid feedback. It's always been like that. It's also stateless - less rope to hang yourself with. Many web programming environments started with the same simple CGI model, but eventually moved away chasing performance (for the computer), and leaving behind rapid feedback during development time. hyperdev.com is nice, but it's still way more complicated than a single file PHP app.
  • spdionis 10y ago
    > It's also stateless - less rope to hang yourself with. That's its best feature and I love it.
• spriggan3 10y ago
  PHP became successful when hosting companies began offering cheap PHP hosting. PHP runs on low cost servers with very little memory,so hosting companies could put many customers on a single server. It was then just a matter of uploading a few files via FTP to have a working website. .Net deployment, Java deployment were always more complicated and expensive. It was also easy for administrators to deploy Wordpress or Drupal, with next to no PHP knowledge whatsoever. That feature (ease of deployment) was often underestimated by other solutions, until the PAAS era. Could PHP have been made better language wise while keeping the same features absolutely, but PHP was not taken seriously by people who could have fixed it early on.