7 ms·

Just because it serves a purpose doesnt mean it shouldn't be criticized.

DanieleProcida 10y ago
Do you mean WordPress? Sure, of course it shouldn't escape critical scrutiny, but people actually sneer at it (and PHP generally, and worse, at PHP programmers). There's a lot to learn from WordPress and PHP.
- pen2l 10y ago
  I remember that I was snobbish about my Django skills... with my college buddy who would build Wordpress sites for a buck or two here and there. The guy is in Chicago right now and gets a lot of business from engineering firms. He is doing phenomenally well, he gets about 30-40k from (what appears to be) 20-40 hours of setting up fairly basic things with Wordpress. That guy taught me well about my being snobbish.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    WP is a classic worse-is-better icon. WP built a culture, which mostly works, not just a product, which - by any reasonable standard - is utter crap internally. Once you build a cultural monopoly, it's damn near impossible for a second mover to dismantle it. You have to wait for a new niche to colonise, or for WP to implode under the weight of its own awfulness. A new niche is hard to imagine in blog land, at least while we have today's web. And awful as it is, WP isn't quite so awful it's likely to implode. If it was, it would have done it by now. Your friend is making money because he's thinking like a business person who can offer a service, not like a developer who primarily thinks about tools, not cultures.
- greenshackle 10y ago
  Among, say, the top 10 most used languages, PHP is easily the worst. I'm sure you can learn a lot from PHP/Wordpress, but everything has opportunity costs. You can learn better from better languages and frameworks. My shop does Python, Java, C and PHP. I know very good programmers who happen to write PHP for a living. They are the ones sneering at PHP the hardest.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    They're also the ones bringing PHP into the modern world and making it much harder to sneer at. There are some plain-crazy things about this language, but there are also some plain-crazy things about other popular languages too. It's like we forget that JavaScript was absolutely reviled for over a decade. PHP is undergoing a JavaScript-like transformation, though it will never get that kind of popularity because of the lack of client-side browser usability.
    - greenshackle 10y ago
      Yeah it's definitely improving. But last I checked the PHP internals team was very reluctant to change anything, even plain-crazy stuff, to maintain backward compatibility. In PHP, if a bug sticks around long enough, it becomes a feature. I'm not a purist, if you're making money coding PHP more power to you. Around here there are a lot of businesses hiring people to make them Wordpress sites. But an aspiring dev asks me what language to learn I don't recommend it.
      - busterarm 10y ago
        You've definitely nailed the problem. It's all about backwards-compatibility. Most of the plain-craziness I see day to day is in the Array methods, which certainly is annoying. There's also some crazy defaults with json_encode which you actually need to send a flag to disable to get valid UTF-8. JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE, I am looking at you...interestingly enough they set the default to not cause buggy JSON parsers people use to blow up. Not a choice I would have made, but I guess they like to be nice to their users. It would be nice if their documentation for this function gave a more prominent message about this. To address your second point though, I wouldn't advise that anyone learn _any_ language specifically. I would have them address concepts directly and try to be language agnostic. JavaScript would be the closest thing just for employability reasons, but it has way too many JavaScript-specific quirks for me to recommend someone to base their career on it.
- gtf21 10y ago
  Well, in fairness the WP codebase is horrific. I used to write everything in PHP, and once thought it a good idea to build a system in WP because it was user friendly. I needed some custom auth plugins and a custom theme. Having fought with a poorly documented, inconsistent and generally badly-designed codebase for a few months, I'm not sure I'd agree that WP is undeserving of some sneering. It is one of the worst made things I have ever seen. PS: I no longer develop in PHP, and haven't seen the WP codebase in about three years so perhaps it has improved.
  - knieveltech 10y ago
    It's worth underlining that the only people in the world that give a fuck if a codebase is a tangled mess are developers. Everyone else is solely interested in ease of use and budget concerns.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      What about not having to patch a security bug every five minutes? I very much doubt the messy codebase has no impact on WP's poor security track record.
      - knieveltech 10y ago
        I hear you, and yet WordPress usage numbers speak a lot louder than our grumbling about messy codebases.
      - simbalion 10y ago
        Wordpress doesn't have a poor security track record. Wordpress users have a poor security track record.
        icebraining 10y ago
        Sorry, but the fact speak for themselves. Wordpress itself (excluding plugins) has had more than 10 CVEs this year alone. That's more than one per month! As an ex-user myself, who built the site and only installed a couple of plugins, I moved my organization to another platform because I was sick and tired of having to babysit what should be a solved problem by now.
- limeyy 10y ago
  Theoretically, that makes sense. But I'm pretty sure you didn't try to customize one of these themes, if you write that. So..
- freshhawk 10y ago
  There isn't that much to learn. Entering a growth market early and appealing to beginners can get you a lot of traction and mind-share. Being easy to get started with is better than being easy to use overall because of human cognitive biases. You can coast on that initial traction for a long time and remain successful because people will become "fans" and tie their ego to the tools, especially if they started using it very young. No one gives a shit about security. Success does not have to be correlated with providing value if you target the less informed.

Do you mean WordPress? Sure, of course it shouldn't escape critical scrutiny, but people actually sneer at it (and PHP generally, and worse, at PHP programmers). There's a lot to learn from WordPress and PHP.

pen2l 10y ago
I remember that I was snobbish about my Django skills... with my college buddy who would build Wordpress sites for a buck or two here and there. The guy is in Chicago right now and gets a lot of business from engineering firms. He is doing phenomenally well, he gets about 30-40k from (what appears to be) 20-40 hours of setting up fairly basic things with Wordpress. That guy taught me well about my being snobbish.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  WP is a classic worse-is-better icon. WP built a culture, which mostly works, not just a product, which - by any reasonable standard - is utter crap internally. Once you build a cultural monopoly, it's damn near impossible for a second mover to dismantle it. You have to wait for a new niche to colonise, or for WP to implode under the weight of its own awfulness. A new niche is hard to imagine in blog land, at least while we have today's web. And awful as it is, WP isn't quite so awful it's likely to implode. If it was, it would have done it by now. Your friend is making money because he's thinking like a business person who can offer a service, not like a developer who primarily thinks about tools, not cultures.
greenshackle 10y ago
Among, say, the top 10 most used languages, PHP is easily the worst. I'm sure you can learn a lot from PHP/Wordpress, but everything has opportunity costs. You can learn better from better languages and frameworks. My shop does Python, Java, C and PHP. I know very good programmers who happen to write PHP for a living. They are the ones sneering at PHP the hardest.
- busterarm 10y ago
  They're also the ones bringing PHP into the modern world and making it much harder to sneer at. There are some plain-crazy things about this language, but there are also some plain-crazy things about other popular languages too. It's like we forget that JavaScript was absolutely reviled for over a decade. PHP is undergoing a JavaScript-like transformation, though it will never get that kind of popularity because of the lack of client-side browser usability.
  - greenshackle 10y ago
    Yeah it's definitely improving. But last I checked the PHP internals team was very reluctant to change anything, even plain-crazy stuff, to maintain backward compatibility. In PHP, if a bug sticks around long enough, it becomes a feature. I'm not a purist, if you're making money coding PHP more power to you. Around here there are a lot of businesses hiring people to make them Wordpress sites. But an aspiring dev asks me what language to learn I don't recommend it.
    - busterarm 10y ago
      You've definitely nailed the problem. It's all about backwards-compatibility. Most of the plain-craziness I see day to day is in the Array methods, which certainly is annoying. There's also some crazy defaults with json_encode which you actually need to send a flag to disable to get valid UTF-8. JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE, I am looking at you...interestingly enough they set the default to not cause buggy JSON parsers people use to blow up. Not a choice I would have made, but I guess they like to be nice to their users. It would be nice if their documentation for this function gave a more prominent message about this. To address your second point though, I wouldn't advise that anyone learn _any_ language specifically. I would have them address concepts directly and try to be language agnostic. JavaScript would be the closest thing just for employability reasons, but it has way too many JavaScript-specific quirks for me to recommend someone to base their career on it.
gtf21 10y ago
Well, in fairness the WP codebase is horrific. I used to write everything in PHP, and once thought it a good idea to build a system in WP because it was user friendly. I needed some custom auth plugins and a custom theme. Having fought with a poorly documented, inconsistent and generally badly-designed codebase for a few months, I'm not sure I'd agree that WP is undeserving of some sneering. It is one of the worst made things I have ever seen. PS: I no longer develop in PHP, and haven't seen the WP codebase in about three years so perhaps it has improved.
- knieveltech 10y ago
  It's worth underlining that the only people in the world that give a fuck if a codebase is a tangled mess are developers. Everyone else is solely interested in ease of use and budget concerns.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    What about not having to patch a security bug every five minutes? I very much doubt the messy codebase has no impact on WP's poor security track record.
    - knieveltech 10y ago
      I hear you, and yet WordPress usage numbers speak a lot louder than our grumbling about messy codebases.
    - simbalion 10y ago
      Wordpress doesn't have a poor security track record. Wordpress users have a poor security track record.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        Sorry, but the fact speak for themselves. Wordpress itself (excluding plugins) has had more than 10 CVEs this year alone. That's more than one per month! As an ex-user myself, who built the site and only installed a couple of plugins, I moved my organization to another platform because I was sick and tired of having to babysit what should be a solved problem by now.
limeyy 10y ago
Theoretically, that makes sense. But I'm pretty sure you didn't try to customize one of these themes, if you write that. So..
freshhawk 10y ago
There isn't that much to learn. Entering a growth market early and appealing to beginners can get you a lot of traction and mind-share. Being easy to get started with is better than being easy to use overall because of human cognitive biases. You can coast on that initial traction for a long time and remain successful because people will become "fans" and tie their ego to the tools, especially if they started using it very young. No one gives a shit about security. Success does not have to be correlated with providing value if you target the less informed.