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If you have to ask this question, you're out of your technical depth. The best thing you can do is promote the guy who's clamoring the loudest to steer clear o
by benno 16y ago
If you have to ask this question, you're out of your technical depth.
The best thing you can do is promote the guy who's clamoring the loudest to steer clear of PHP to technical lead, and defer all future technical decisions to him.
The language is just a tool. Consider car racing. If you have a poor driver in the fastest car, it won't make a difference. No matter how fast the car is that he's driving, he's going to lose. And if you have a great driver in a slow car, no matter how good he is, he's going to be limited by the speed of his car.
If you have a poor technical lead, it won't matter what language you choose. You can give him a great language, but he will not understand and take advantage of its best features. If you have a good technical lead, but you choose a bad language, the quality and pace of his development will be forever limited by the language.
(And in the context of a team, the abilities of the team to make good technical decisions are limited by the technical direction your technical lead sets -- which is why you need the most talented guy in the position of technical lead.)
The guy on your team who is the most against using PHP is likely the one who best understands the ways in which PHP will limit your team. You do not have the deep technical understanding to make these judgments, and for that reason (without taking months of hard work to gain such understanding) you should defer to him.
Yes, some of the largest websites are written in PHP. But you do not have the same level of resources to throw at the problem that they have.
You're also starting your development at least 5 years later than any of the largest websites that you refer too. Frameworks/plugins/communities evolve quickly. There were more reasons 5-10 years ago to choose PHP then there are today. Companies that have already written millions of lines of code in PHP will find it very hard to switch to another language -- but you do not have to deal with the weight of such legacy issues.
As a small team, you need to look for every advantage you can get. Choosing a programming language that makes your developers more productive is an important part of that.
If you care about framework, community and plugins, Ruby is also a better language than PHP, and Rails provides these three things in spades. Assuming you don't have a good system administrator on your team, companies like Engine Yard and Heroku provide scalable managed Ruby on Rails hosting -- so you can outsource combating issues like down-time and data loss.
- bandushrew 16y ago"The guy on your team who is the most against using PHP is likely the one who best understands the ways in which PHP will limit your team. You do not have the deep technical understanding to make these judgments, and for that reason (without taking months of hard work to gain such understanding) you should defer to him." sorry, what? the guy on his team who is most against using PHP could equally well be an idiot who is simply repeating stuff he has heard on the web by rote, using regurgitated puff to hide his complete lack of understanding of both the issues and the languages themselves. Your willingness to entirely overlook that possibility and to make the kind of sweeping statements you have made in your post in the absence of any data causes me to doubt that you have the kind of experience and technical expertise that is required to make that kind of statement.
- benno 16y agoOf course he could be. I don't envy the position of any non-technical person that has to make key technical decisions on a technical project. Ultimately it takes a good developer to spot a good developer, so a non-technical person seeking to build a "robust web application" starts at a huge disadvantage. Without understanding the pros and cons of each language choice, all he can do is gamble on finding a smarter person than himself that he can trust. I'm advocating he choose the anti-PHP guy, slightly tongue-in-cheek, because given the limited amount of information presented, that choice gives him the best odds. Being in the position of having to make such a bet is less than desirable, but given his lack of technical knowledge, what else would you have him do?
- bandushrew 16y agoIm not clear what makes you think the OP is a non-technical person? The question he phrased was the exact question that he should have asked, what is unfortunate (but unsurprising, given the complexity of the answer) is that nobody seems to be answering it clearly. He asked: "How will it impact my webapp if it is written in Python and not PHP" That is a fantastic question, and it deserves better responses than the 'language x sucks' ones it is mostly getting. The simple fact that he asked the correct question gives me a great deal of faith that he is in fact technically inclined, technically able and has some development experience. The way in which it was phrased makes me believe that english is not his habitually spoken language. He clearly does lack experience in using Python, and is (quite reasonably) hesitant about plunging into a different language without attempting to find out more about it. "I'm advocating he choose the anti-PHP guy, slightly tongue-in-cheek, because given the limited amount of information presented, that choice gives him the best odds." it really doesn't. some quite ridiculously stupid people are anti-PHP. Given the information available, I would advocate that he use the language that the majority of people on his team are most familiar with. Nothing like having a team learn an entirely new language and associated design skills to bog down a project.