11 ms·

It would be an outlier company indeed who held an 'all hands on deck' meeting and said, "We're succeeding in spite of PHP everyone!" Only engineers care about

It would be an outlier company indeed who held an 'all hands on deck' meeting and said, "We're succeeding in spite of PHP everyone!" Only engineers care about programming languages. Seriously. That's it. No one else cares about them. I work in a large public university alongside a revolving door of student interns who are always 19. In 10+ years of work, I've still yet to meet the person who talked about their favourite website or app, but lamented that it was written in Php or JavaScript or Go or Java. It's only us (the HN'ers) who fret about this. Don't believe me? Imagine the look on everyone's faces at the tech publishing houses around 2009 when books about Objective-C sold a few hundred copies a year to doing tens of thousands per month when the iPhone rocked the world. This happened without a proper language hot stove on Hacker News, no? People care about outcomes. People care about products. People care about being dazzled. People care about showing their friends this incredible thing they saw on the web/this new app.

michaelmrose 10y ago
Doesn't it stand to reason that the people that actually know how things work under the hood are the people that care about such things. You could say the same thing about cars people don't care about what sort of engine is under the hood or how it works they just want to go places! It doesn't then follow that all cars are the same and you are just as well getting any one of the millions of cars or even any one of the models out there.
- increment_i 10y ago
  You have a logical point for sure. I think it might be an apples to oranges comparison in this case though. I just don't know that building cars is the same as building websites and apps. I know Php and JavaScript can respond to an HTTP request. I don't know how to optimize an internal combustion engine. There's probably parallels in terms of expertise with software developers, but I can't be sure.
  - pif 10y ago
    > I just don't know that building cars is the same as building websites and apps. Indeed it isn't. "Maintenance" has opposite meanings in those worlds: maintaining a car means keeping its original functionalities still available; maintaining an application means letting it evolve.
ddw 10y ago
But program managers and CTOs and other non-engineers at a company care about scalability, performance, technical debt and quality, right? Let's not pretend that these don't matter once you've gone past the "users actually care about our app" phase, because they do and they affect the bottom line of a company. And IMHO PHP falters in these regards.
- increment_i 10y ago
  At this point, I would have no problem arguing with a straight face that your choice of technology stack might be the least important factor in whether your business succeeds or fails. I don't mind if I get torched for this, it's just my current, non-Silicon Valley, non-substantiated opinion at this time (though I don't think it's without merit).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- jwatte 10y ago
  The scalability of PHP is great, because each request is fully independent. This is like the Amazon lambda model. You /have/ to put your state in some storage back end, network attached RAM or such. This is a scalability best practice!
  - haimez 10y ago
    Yeah, but you also have to fork a whole process per request to do it. Process fork, CoW overhead every time you mutate a page, and a full OS thread per request. Oh, and let's not forget negotiating a new database connection per request. I think by the time you've added up all those overheads, you're not off to a scalable start. It's possible to work around the limitations, but it's not easy.
    - justinhj 10y ago
      It is easy if you are just willing to spend more money on servers. Often it's worth it.
pif 10y ago
> Only engineers care about programming languages. Seriously. That's it. No one else cares about them. So what? Who else could care for something apart from those professionals using it? Maintenance is the biggest part of software development. A wrong technological choice can turn my nice job into my worst nightmare. Why shouldn't I care?
- cloverich 10y ago
  > So what? I think the intention is: While they are important to us, languages are frequently distorted to the point that we believe that company success as a whole is dependent on it. Companies like Facebook flatly contradict that. I agree with you in spirit: Facebook would obviously prefer not PHP. But if the choice is: Learn something other than PHP or use language I know to test some idea, I think the latter is an obvious choice.
  - evilduck 10y ago
    Runaway successes like FB are outliers. Failed businesses OTOH are quite common and usually have a number of causes where bad technology choices can be at least a factor. You call it poor management in retrospect, but it's succeeding in spite of the tools when you're still doing ok. There's a lot of companies that exist in between failure and "Facebook" who don't have hockey stick growth curves who also can't afford needlessly higher technology costs, whether that's in infrastructure or staffing or opportunity costs in getting features to market. If PHP does't incur a higher cost personally, go for it, but it might be a strategic disadvantage later if you don't hit it big.
guitarbill 10y ago
Developers care about cognitive load, and people care about security. Sure, they'll be some guy who's memorised all of PHPs quirks, but for most of us the inconsistencies make it hell to program, because you're always looking up stuff. As a result, writing secure PHP is possible, but far harder than it should be. IMO the laughable security track record of e.g. Wordpress have damaged PHP's reputation more than anything else.
- dsacco 10y ago
  As a counterpoint, Facebook, one of the most secure companies in the world, is also the largest single PHP deployment in the world. C is also a language with a frankly horrific security track record; at least an order of magnitude more so than PHP. But C continues to be used because it is a useful and relatively simple language despite its warts and pitfalls.[1] Security is just as much a business process as it is a technical feature. ______________________ 1. Granted, one of the major design goals of Rust is replacing C, but you get the point.
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    Or Etsy. I think your comment about C is right, however in many cases mercifully the C code isn't facing the internet :) When it does, it can go very wrong, e.g. OpenSSL. The extra cognitive load doesn't guarantee failure, it just makes it easier to slip up. Even with Python or Rust, you can put insecure code in there (e.g. with Python's subprocess.call(..., shell=True)). Realistically, strict modes and linters are always a good idea and can catch most of these pitfalls.
    - jagger27 10y ago
      Of course C is facing the internet. The entire Linux networking stack is written in C. Damn near every request on the internet touches that code.
      - sebcat 10y ago
        And nginx, and apache, and php, and ...
__s 10y ago
I work at a company that use to do PHP, but now only does asp.net for web projects. We dread having to maintain our legacy PHP code
continuational 10y ago
Only farmers care about tractors. That's not a reason to use horses instead.
- vancouverwill 10y ago
  exactly.
pmoriarty 10y ago
"Only engineers care about programming languages." It's sadly quite common for non-engineers to make technical decisions such as what language, tool, or hardware will be used, and everyone else just has to live with it.

michaelmrose 10y ago

Doesn't it stand to reason that the people that actually know how things work under the hood are the people that care about such things. You could say the same thing about cars people don't care about what sort of engine is under the hood or how it works they just want to go places! It doesn't then follow that all cars are the same and you are just as well getting any one of the millions of cars or even any one of the models out there.

increment_i 10y ago
You have a logical point for sure. I think it might be an apples to oranges comparison in this case though. I just don't know that building cars is the same as building websites and apps. I know Php and JavaScript can respond to an HTTP request. I don't know how to optimize an internal combustion engine. There's probably parallels in terms of expertise with software developers, but I can't be sure.
- pif 10y ago
  > I just don't know that building cars is the same as building websites and apps. Indeed it isn't. "Maintenance" has opposite meanings in those worlds: maintaining a car means keeping its original functionalities still available; maintaining an application means letting it evolve.

ddw 10y ago

But program managers and CTOs and other non-engineers at a company care about scalability, performance, technical debt and quality, right? Let's not pretend that these don't matter once you've gone past the "users actually care about our app" phase, because they do and they affect the bottom line of a company. And IMHO PHP falters in these regards.

increment_i 10y ago
At this point, I would have no problem arguing with a straight face that your choice of technology stack might be the least important factor in whether your business succeeds or fails. I don't mind if I get torched for this, it's just my current, non-Silicon Valley, non-substantiated opinion at this time (though I don't think it's without merit).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jwatte 10y ago
The scalability of PHP is great, because each request is fully independent. This is like the Amazon lambda model. You /have/ to put your state in some storage back end, network attached RAM or such. This is a scalability best practice!
- haimez 10y ago
  Yeah, but you also have to fork a whole process per request to do it. Process fork, CoW overhead every time you mutate a page, and a full OS thread per request. Oh, and let's not forget negotiating a new database connection per request. I think by the time you've added up all those overheads, you're not off to a scalable start. It's possible to work around the limitations, but it's not easy.
  - justinhj 10y ago
    It is easy if you are just willing to spend more money on servers. Often it's worth it.

pif 10y ago

> Only engineers care about programming languages. Seriously. That's it. No one else cares about them. So what? Who else could care for something apart from those professionals using it? Maintenance is the biggest part of software development. A wrong technological choice can turn my nice job into my worst nightmare. Why shouldn't I care?

cloverich 10y ago
> So what? I think the intention is: While they are important to us, languages are frequently distorted to the point that we believe that company success as a whole is dependent on it. Companies like Facebook flatly contradict that. I agree with you in spirit: Facebook would obviously prefer not PHP. But if the choice is: Learn something other than PHP or use language I know to test some idea, I think the latter is an obvious choice.
- evilduck 10y ago
  Runaway successes like FB are outliers. Failed businesses OTOH are quite common and usually have a number of causes where bad technology choices can be at least a factor. You call it poor management in retrospect, but it's succeeding in spite of the tools when you're still doing ok. There's a lot of companies that exist in between failure and "Facebook" who don't have hockey stick growth curves who also can't afford needlessly higher technology costs, whether that's in infrastructure or staffing or opportunity costs in getting features to market. If PHP does't incur a higher cost personally, go for it, but it might be a strategic disadvantage later if you don't hit it big.

guitarbill 10y ago

Developers care about cognitive load, and people care about security. Sure, they'll be some guy who's memorised all of PHPs quirks, but for most of us the inconsistencies make it hell to program, because you're always looking up stuff. As a result, writing secure PHP is possible, but far harder than it should be. IMO the laughable security track record of e.g. Wordpress have damaged PHP's reputation more than anything else.

dsacco 10y ago
As a counterpoint, Facebook, one of the most secure companies in the world, is also the largest single PHP deployment in the world. C is also a language with a frankly horrific security track record; at least an order of magnitude more so than PHP. But C continues to be used because it is a useful and relatively simple language despite its warts and pitfalls.[1] Security is just as much a business process as it is a technical feature. ______________________ 1. Granted, one of the major design goals of Rust is replacing C, but you get the point.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  Or Etsy. I think your comment about C is right, however in many cases mercifully the C code isn't facing the internet :) When it does, it can go very wrong, e.g. OpenSSL. The extra cognitive load doesn't guarantee failure, it just makes it easier to slip up. Even with Python or Rust, you can put insecure code in there (e.g. with Python's subprocess.call(..., shell=True)). Realistically, strict modes and linters are always a good idea and can catch most of these pitfalls.
  - jagger27 10y ago
    Of course C is facing the internet. The entire Linux networking stack is written in C. Damn near every request on the internet touches that code.
    - sebcat 10y ago
      And nginx, and apache, and php, and ...

__s 10y ago

I work at a company that use to do PHP, but now only does asp.net for web projects. We dread having to maintain our legacy PHP code

continuational 10y ago

Only farmers care about tractors. That's not a reason to use horses instead.

vancouverwill 10y ago
exactly.

pmoriarty 10y ago

"Only engineers care about programming languages." It's sadly quite common for non-engineers to make technical decisions such as what language, tool, or hardware will be used, and everyone else just has to live with it.