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PHP. It may be old, tricky to debug, and cumbersome to write long projects with but the ability to bounce in and out of logic on a simple, proven, well adopted

by zelon88 10y ago

PHP. It may be old, tricky to debug, and cumbersome to write long projects with but the ability to bounce in and out of logic on a simple, proven, well adopted stack that has plenty of knowledge-base and ready machines everywhere has it's advantages. Plus, I've heard a lot of developers knock PHP but I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP.

VeejayRampay 10y ago
That last sentence is pretty true of any combination of languages and it feels defensive.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  It is and it is.
- irrational 10y ago
  Its pretty much the definition of Turing complete.
Joeri 10y ago
After about a decade programming PHP, I'm now mostly using java 8 (play framework), with some node.js thrown in on the side. I've found that PHP's benefits are also its downsides. The simplistic concurrency model where every request starts from a blank slate and has no asynchronicity is easy to understand, but difficult to optimize for performance. The large knowledge base is great for getting a solution, not so great for getting the right solution. The "just keep going" error handling philosophy is excellent for newbie programmers, but terrible for guaranteeing correct operation. The interpreted zero-build dev model is excellent for quick edit-reload cycles, not so great for large-scale refactorings where you want to know you've correctly adapted all uses of a core api. Java has improved a lot from what I remember it used to be. Java 8's elimination of a lot of the boilerplate, coupled with the simplicity of the play framework, and activator's hot reloading of code for quick edit-reload cycles brings it on par with PHP as far as developer comfort is concerned, at least for me. In my experience java is nicer for large-scale web dev, while PHP is nicer for a quick side project. Node with javascript I would put more in the PHP camp than the Java camp. It is great for side projects, but scaling it up necessitates switching languages to something like typescript with a whole-project build, which takes away much of the "ease" that something like PHP or Node provides.
yulaow 10y ago
I still use PHP for a very simple reason: stable libraries and extremely well done documentation. As a language and general features I prefer by far node.js... but i hate the total lack of decent-level documentation I found over the years.
jimbokun 10y ago
"Plus, I've heard a lot of developers knock PHP but I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP." Of course. Since all of those languages are Turing-Complete, this is trivially true.
- geofft 10y ago
  Solving a problem and computing a function are almost entirely unrelated concepts. For instance, solving a problem usually takes the form of "write a system which can do X, within budget, on schedule, in a maintainable way, with integration with these services, with at least this much reliability." Out of that list, the only thing a function can compute there is to do X, once. And maybe not even that; functions can't even do I/O. Unless you have developers who are super excited about writing web services via BPF filters, Turing-completeness is not a meaningful way to compare programming languages; that is, that's not the reason why we have multiple programming languages in the world and why different people or projects prefer different ones.
simonw 10y ago
"I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP" Scientific computing is extremely strong in Python - numpy, scipy, scikit-learn etc - and a lot of it makes use of language features that aren't present in PHP (at least as-of a few years ago, my PHP experience is rusty at this point).

by zelon88 10y ago

VeejayRampay 10y ago

That last sentence is pretty true of any combination of languages and it feels defensive.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
It is and it is.
irrational 10y ago
Its pretty much the definition of Turing complete.

Joeri 10y ago

After about a decade programming PHP, I'm now mostly using java 8 (play framework), with some node.js thrown in on the side. I've found that PHP's benefits are also its downsides. The simplistic concurrency model where every request starts from a blank slate and has no asynchronicity is easy to understand, but difficult to optimize for performance. The large knowledge base is great for getting a solution, not so great for getting the right solution. The "just keep going" error handling philosophy is excellent for newbie programmers, but terrible for guaranteeing correct operation. The interpreted zero-build dev model is excellent for quick edit-reload cycles, not so great for large-scale refactorings where you want to know you've correctly adapted all uses of a core api. Java has improved a lot from what I remember it used to be. Java 8's elimination of a lot of the boilerplate, coupled with the simplicity of the play framework, and activator's hot reloading of code for quick edit-reload cycles brings it on par with PHP as far as developer comfort is concerned, at least for me. In my experience java is nicer for large-scale web dev, while PHP is nicer for a quick side project. Node with javascript I would put more in the PHP camp than the Java camp. It is great for side projects, but scaling it up necessitates switching languages to something like typescript with a whole-project build, which takes away much of the "ease" that something like PHP or Node provides.

yulaow 10y ago

I still use PHP for a very simple reason: stable libraries and extremely well done documentation. As a language and general features I prefer by far node.js... but i hate the total lack of decent-level documentation I found over the years.

jimbokun 10y ago

"Plus, I've heard a lot of developers knock PHP but I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP." Of course. Since all of those languages are Turing-Complete, this is trivially true.

geofft 10y ago
Solving a problem and computing a function are almost entirely unrelated concepts. For instance, solving a problem usually takes the form of "write a system which can do X, within budget, on schedule, in a maintainable way, with integration with these services, with at least this much reliability." Out of that list, the only thing a function can compute there is to do X, once. And maybe not even that; functions can't even do I/O. Unless you have developers who are super excited about writing web services via BPF filters, Turing-completeness is not a meaningful way to compare programming languages; that is, that's not the reason why we have multiple programming languages in the world and why different people or projects prefer different ones.

simonw 10y ago

"I've yet to see a problem solved with Ruby or Python that couldn't have been solved with PHP" Scientific computing is extremely strong in Python - numpy, scipy, scikit-learn etc - and a lot of it makes use of language features that aren't present in PHP (at least as-of a few years ago, my PHP experience is rusty at this point).