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Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

40 points by Chirag 16y ago

slantyyz 16y ago
It's a little pointless to defend PHP to someone who thinks it's horrible. That's like asking someone to defend a religion. A waste of time and energy. In a good programmer's hands, the results will be good, regardless of language or platform choice. Sure, you can argue the finer points until you're blue in the face, but in the end, the only thing that should matter to your "customer" is that the solution satisfies his/her needs.
Goladus 16y ago
Actually, I think the depreciation point is one of the better points. Yeah, sometimes clean up is necessary, but when a language is a moving target like that, it raises serious concerns about portability and long term maintenance.
- arnorhs 16y ago
  But the PHP guys had told us about the deprecation of pass-by-reference years before it was deprecated. I think that's a really good argument for portability and long term maintenance. It they would've simply changed it over night, I'd have problems.
brlewis 16y ago
I'm not a PHP advocate, but I'll take this one: PHP encourages (practically requires) a coupling of processing with presentation. Yes, you can write PHP that doesn't do so, but it's actually easier to write code in the incorrect (from a sound design perspective) manner. The ideal web application is the one that best fits the unique characteristics of the data being manipulated. When exploring how a web app should work, you should be thinking at all levels: view, controller, model. A framework that forces you to separate all three from the start is a bad framework. It pushes you toward generic data manipulation forms and reports. If those generic tools are the best ones for the data model being manipulated, why involve a programmer at all? We would have much more interesting and varied web applications out there if the prevailing "wisdom" of MVC would die.
- jemfinch 16y ago
  > When exploring how a web app should work, you should be thinking at all levels: view, controller, model. And separating those aspects programmatically makes it easier to think about them, not to mention program the ideas that occur to you when thinking about them separately. > If those generic tools are the best ones for the data model being manipulated, why involve a programmer at all? If intertwining essentially unrelated ideas is the best way to write programs, why use high level languages at all? MVC--just like garbage collection, just data abstraction, just like most other high level languages features--is about modularity and separation of concerns. > We would have much more interesting and varied web applications out there if the prevailing "wisdom" of MVC would die. How do you reconcile this with the fact that there occurred a veritable explosion of various interesting web applications when MVC was (re)discovered by the webdev crowd?
  - brlewis 16y ago
    The explosion you speak of is sites making better use of JavaScript, a movement that took off with the launch of gmail in 2004. Paul Buchheit talks about the thinking and communication that created gmail. He doesn't mention MVC; he talks a lot about rapid prototyping. He shares some of his then-current thinking in the form of a single 600-line source file. Read the post: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-... EDIT: HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444615 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444615
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Let me take this in a slightly different direction. The problem with paradigms (such as MVC, ORM, and OOP) is that no one paradigm is perfectly suited for all problems, but people tend to forget that. (Why do they forget? Because there are advantages to picking one set of paradigms and focusing on them to the exclusion of all others: It focuses your toolkit development and your documentation and makes the story of your platform easier to tell. Thus, we have systems like Rails, where everything from Hello, World on up requires at least passing knowledge of MVC and objects, and the whole system is designed around the assumption that you are building an MVC web app, using an ORM with a certain standard layout, placing files in standard locations, et cetera.) Unfortunately, there is one very important class of problem that most frameworks are ill-suited for: Very, very simple programs. Programs like the ones you write when you're new. Like a one-field "sign up for my mailing list" application, or a "guess the number between 1 and 100" application like the one I rewrote dozens of times in my Applesoft-BASIC-tinged youth. PHP offers the new programmer the simplest thing that could possibly work. You edit your HTML file, sprinkle a line of PHP into it, and save it with a .php extension, and (assuming your $5/month web host set up Apache correctly) lo, you have a web application! But you won't get any distance into (e.g.) Rails before the books and the docs insist on sending you to school, instead of straightforwardly doing what you want. "We know you want to write a one-page app", say the docs, "but first we'd like to give you a miniature degree in software development. We want to teach you about installing software on a Unix system, and using the command line, and what objects are, and what an ORM is, and what MVC is and why you should care". Or, perhaps, you will use a walkthrough to generate your Hello, World. You will either use the scaffolding -- e.g. type some mystical incantations that seem to have nothing to do with HTML, or Ruby, or the web, and that have to be done on the command line and preferably not in Windows -- or you will edit multiple files in multiple places to set up your tiny view, and your tiny controller. Then you have Hello, World. To go any farther will require some more training. Budget a day or two to read the book. Maybe buy another book. Heroku has gone to heroic efforts to remove some of these stumbling blocks, but there's only so much they can do. Rails is a professional tool for professionals. Like emacs, it takes time and determination to learn. And, like emacs, you're not likely to be motivated to learn it until you have cut your teeth on the equivalent of Notepad. But, in web development, the equivalent of Notepad is PHP. None of the other frameworks bother with such silly stuff. I'm convinced that the big strength of PHP is that new people can pick it up fast. And this strength just builds on itself, all the way up to systems like Drupal. Not only because new PHP programmers gradually become experienced PHP programmers via a steady ramp, but because even an extremely advanced and complex PHP program has many edges -- like the templates -- which inexperienced programmers will want to be able to edit. And they can, because PHP is evolved to be simple and straightforward.
hsarvell 16y ago
PHP is great if you need to get some small thing up and running yesterday. PHP is also great if an out of the box solution will almost fit the bill due to the fact that there are so many. Just take a box and do some small modifications, voila, done!
- arnorhs 16y ago
  ...or big thing running yesterday, right? Take Facebook for an example. To me, Facebook seems like a pretty complicated piece of software. The concept isn't very complicated but there are so many features all over the place.
  - shod 16y ago
    He didn't say you _can't_ use PHP for such things, he said PHP is "great" for getting smaller sites built quickly. It's possible to build very large apps with PHP alone, if you like, but there are other solutions I think are preferable. Most of them weren't even available when Facebook was born. For example, I would rather build a Facebook-sized app in Rails than a PHP framework, especially with Rails 3's new features. There are some very capable PHP frameworks out there, but you'll still end up writing much larger models and a lot more code than if you were using Rails.
    - wvenable 16y ago
      Rails would get you started on Facebook app quicker, but then you'd be forever fighting the framework to do things outside of it's core abilities. For something as large as Facebook, that will be all the time.
  - sanderjd 16y ago
    Seems to me as if Facebook used PHP for the small thing running yesterday aspect - since they've gotten big they've had to switch to different tools.
- hackermom 16y ago
  Like someone else already said, "small thing"... like Facebook? Like Flickr? Like Wikipedia? Like Digg? :)
hackermom 16y ago
PHP may be one weird concoction, that's for sure, but all of the arguments brought up by this guy - and this is the exact same boring song belched out whenever there's an argument of "PHP is a terrible language" - fall into the category of vanity, because no matter how one twists and turns these points they still really don't make the language itself terrible, and they don't make PHP one bit less capable, nor one bit less adequate for the supposed job.
- Daishiman 16y ago
  What do you mean?? Do you have any idea of just how many programmer hours have been wasted by the absence of features, just how insecure so many web apps are due to the weird casting system and lack of safety-oriented features. My impression is that people who claim PHP has not cost them development time have simply never looked at alternatives that solve many of the problems.
  - hackermom 16y ago
    Without going off on a limb, I'm guessing you're a not too experienced developer. You comment as if instead going for Perl, Ruby or ASP inherently makes an application safe, saves buttloads of manhours etc. And you're wrong. Gravely wrong. Excluding the obvious issues caused by bugs that are a natural part of any programming language's development, security problems are not caused by the language chosen, but by the developers themselves.
    - chromatic 16y ago
      A well designed language or library can decrease the likelihood of specific bugs, and especially security problems. Imagine the existence of a library which made it easier to use SQL placeholders than to concatenate user input into a string. Imagine PHP without register globals.
      - hackermom 16y ago
        PHP already does that via PDO. PHP's "Register globals" was deprecated exactly one year ago, in 5.3.0.
DrJokepu 16y ago
To be honest I don't think case insensitivity is really that much of an issue. Common Lisp is case insensitive as well and I have never had any problems with that.
- DCoder 16y ago
  They could have made it fully case sensitive, or fully case insensitive... but they went for the confusing middle point: foobar() == FOOBAR() but $foobar != $fooBar And then there was that fun issue with the Turkish locale and function names...
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delano 16y ago
No one ought to convince anyone of anything. Use it yourself and keep using it for as long as you like it. When you stop liking it, stop using it. That doubles as a recipe for learning any new thing.
pilif 16y ago
I'm spending most of my time maintaining a web application consisting of around 150k lines of PHP code. We (well - initially, it was just me) began development back in 2004 but since then the application has grown constantly. Back in 04, I already felt some reservations against PHP, but that's what I knew best and that's what was most used for the web (Rails might have been around, but not really known - other ruby options were not quite there yet. Python I disliked and Java I. don't. touch.). The application was written in PHP5, initially developed on some RC of 5.0.0 and I was careful to keep a clean style and not using deprecated code. This lead to a quite clean application that I could really be proud of. And still: While it has suffered from sometimes not quite reasonable customer demands, it's still very good at what it's doing and while there might be some dead bodies rotting in the code, it's nowhere near daily WTF material (aside of some bugs we have a good laugh at and fix shamefully). Still. I have some bad gripes with PHP that made me stop doing anything new in that language. I can easily live with the usually quoted problems though: - parameter order in library function? I don't care - my IDE lists them. - Huge base library? I don't care as the stuff I don't need doesn't cost me anything but disk space and the stuff I do need, I'm glad is there. - No namespaces? Yeah. Bit me a couple of times, but I can work around that - besides, with 5.3 we got namespaces, so this doesn't count any more - Performance issues? It's fast enough for said application. - Security? It's just as secure as any other language you can write insecure code in (i.e. all of them). - Allows intermixing of layout and code? Sure, but you don't have to. If you have any sense what so ever, all requests go through a central /index.php and all other code is in some not-publicly accessible location and emits no html what so ever. All output is generated using any of the thousands of templating libraries. What really disturbs me about PHP is its type conversion rules. 1 == '1' or even worse 'foobar' == 0, or '123n' == 123. This is cause for so many subtle bugs. Just use === you tell me? Sure, but then you clutter your code with an insane amount of isset()'s and isint()'s and whatnot - the fact that the database library I'm using (pgsql) returns everything as strings doesn't help that cause either. The other thing is the really clumsy syntax. Array literals, anonymous functions, closures (with explicit declaration of all variables of the outer scope you want access to), operators, even just the lack of named function parameters. The syntax is clumsy and all the elegant code you see even from JavaScript just gets bloated and unreadable once you port it to PHP. These two issues made me do stuff in Ruby, Python(3) and lately a lot of Node.js, but the maintenance of that huge application remains to be the main part of my day-job and even though the two issues really bug me, it's still not painful enough to really be complaining (or, heaven forbid, port the thing to whatever-other-language-thats-currently-hip). So in retrospect, while I'm as die-hard a PHP user as you can get with many, many lines of PHP under my belt and while I do find some of the stuff highly enjoyable (php's arrays that are also ordered hashes for example. Or the really easy and accessible web-server/HTTP integration), I also dislike it quite a bit to the point of being unwilling to start something new in PHP.
weego 16y ago
These topics always just smell of "Now I'm a grown up programmer I'm going to tell the world how much I understand by slamming an easy target language". I love PHP and have used it for years since moving away from asp.net and agree with some of the posters arguments as a theoretical principle, but as day-to-day PHP developer I also say so what. Naming and parameter inconsistencies? Yes, my libraries have that too and I can at least learn the PHP ones with some experiernce. I don't know any asp.net developer that doesn't have to use some kind of tool to help them find where System.Obscure.FoundItOnline.Function exists in the monster .net namespace system. It allows me to be productive and allows me to be the gatekeeper of how well or poorly I implement things. This is a crucial point of the constant argument about poor PHP logic/presentation support for me, I can happily write mixed and messy code for a £500 job or I can write some clever system that implements caching and output buffer manipulation and have a great template system. There are far too many people spending far too much time thinking that academic level programming considerations are applicable in every detail to every day programming practices of web developers.
- lhorie 16y ago
  Agreed. Fwiw, many of the complaints apply to other "better" languages also: - PHP has inconsistent naming of built-in and library functions. - C has types like int, size_t, jmp_buf and FILE - PHP performance is abysmal without caching - MRI Ruby is pretty slow too - Functions are case insensitive - Lisp anyone? etc etc The whole meme of PHP warts seems more like an exercise in confirmation bias than objective analysis.
  - marte 16y ago
    Yeah, but if we continue that logic and fill up that "etc etc" it would seem that the other languages have their own bad features and PHP combines them all.
    - lhorie 16y ago
      That "all" is what I'm referring to when I mentioned confirmation bias. PHP programs don't segfault when you have a typo. You don't have macro expansion problems. It's not particularly verbose. Most languages have a ton of issues. Imho, the stuff in the PHP list is pretty minor compared to some of the warts in some other languages.
pierrefar 16y ago
I think this is the wrong approach. The guy should try to convince me that PHP is bad. That PHP has never not did what I wanted it to do. That I need to invest time and switch to some other language because it's better for my needs and purposes, and the switch will quickly get me to a level of expertise that I have with PHP now. The fact of the matter is PHP is ugly and that's really it. I can live with ugly because I know it and it does everything I've ever asked it to. Frankly, it's no different than me switching from English because it has quirks.
- mfukar 16y ago
  The guy should try to convince me that PHP is bad. It goes both ways: he has tried to do certain things with PHP and made his life miserable; you've done certain things with PHP that made your life easier. Telling each other which is which will let the one know what to avoid and the other one what's he doing wrong. Anyway, it's about time we started thinking and being more mature than 'my language is better than yours'. Which is why I hate all similar postings and articles which aim to enlighten me On the Amazing Features Of Language X (or the opposite).
billpg 16y ago
I wish I could ignore PHP, but it's just so darn ubiquitous. Most webhosts priced within the means of "normal" people have PHP, while far superior (IMO) platforms like ASP.NET are the exception. Until webhosts can be convinced to support a wider range of platforms, I fear humanity will never be freed of the bonds of PHP. Bill, hates PHP with the heat of a thousand suns.
Yaggo 16y ago
From a programming language perspective, PHP is somewhat horrible (PHP 5.3 less so, but still). I guess nobody will deny that. But from practical perspective, PHP is very suitable tool for many tasks and has huge ecosystem behind it. Complex real-world websites and applications have been successfully built with PHP. Isn't that proof enough? Do you consider yourself a purist or pragmatic? In the latter case, PHP may be worth dating for a while.
- billpg 16y ago
  "Complex real-world websites and applications have been successfully built with PHP." Thanks to PHP or in spite of PHP?
  - Yaggo 16y ago
    :-) Seriously, I like the photographing analogy: "Wow, what a photo you have taken! You must have really good camera?" A programming language is rarely the limiting factor. Skillful programmer may benefit from advanced language, but mostly it's about knowing your tools and the bigger concepts, regardless of the language. Try yourself and learn to master something you like most. (My current choice being Python.)
ndimopoulos 16y ago
To answer to the topic of the post - why should I (or anyone else for that matter) bother trying to convince the author that PHP isn't horrible. If the author does not think that PHP is suited for his/her needs then he/she should not use it. There is a plethora of programming languages out there - pick and choose. The post has a disconnect between the title and the content. The author does not want to use PHP and tries to outline the flaws in the language from his/her own view. Sorry to disappoint, but I disagree with those points. I use PHP amongst other programming languages and I use it only when it suits my needs and the needs of my project. It is not perfect but then again nothing is. Final thought for the article would be a paraphrase of its title as a reply: Defend 'behaviour'. Convince me it isn't spelled horribly - correct spelling 'behavior'. I think you get the point :)
- raganwald 16y ago
  My friend Anthony Lewin and I were Macintosh salespeople back in the Dark Times when Jedi Master Jobs was in exile. People would walk in to the store and ask the same question: Convince me: Why should I buy a Mac instead of a PC? Anthony quickly learned not to feed the trolls. He would say "I don't know. Why would you buy a Mac instead of a PC? Most people buy PCs. What's so special about you that you need what a Mac has to offer?" The genuinely curious would explain about their graphics needs or what-not, and Anthony would go from there. I think of Anthony when I see questions like this. My response back to the OP is to ask Why should you use PHP? What's so special about your situation that you need it?
  - ndimopoulos 16y ago
    /bow to the last sentence :)
  - hnal943 16y ago
    Doesn't this fit more appropriately the other way around? "I don't know. Why would you use a language other than PHP? Most people use PHP. What's so special about you that you need what another language has to offer?" In your example, the PC is the inferior but nearly ubiquitous (and easier) choice. Isn't that the position PHP is in as well?
bufordtwain 16y ago
"There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful--many more." -Bjarne Stroustrup
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steverb 16y ago
Personally, my distaste for PHP centers around the fact that there are so many developers pumping out crappy PHP code for $20 / hr. I don't need to compete in a race to the bottom.
sandGorgon 16y ago
Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, phpbb, vbulletin, invision power board:: Together they are 99% of online communities + personal websites. If you want to use any of them. Then it is php. I may not particularly like PHP, but to deliver projects in reasonable time, you may have to leverage PHP
byoung2 16y ago
This debate reminds me a lot about another debate about language. When I studied English in college, I occasionally came across papers enumerating the weaknesses of the English language. It's terrible for writing poetry, because you can't rhyme like you can with Italian or seduce like you can with French. It's difficult to learn, because of irregularities in spelling and pronunciation. Now that I'm a PHP developer, the response I give when people ask me why I use PHP and not a "real language" is the same one I would give if someone asked me why I speak English. There are more people who speak my language. If I travel to a remote fishing village in China, chances are I can find one person who speaks English. Try to find someone who speaks Italian. When I'm working on a web project, I know that if I write it in PHP I can find hundreds of developers to hire at a reasonable price versus hunting around for Ruby developers (who cost double). At my day job, we run 200 websites, and 194 of them are written in PHP (1 is Java, 2 are .NET, 1 Ruby, 2 Coldfusion). When the company buys sites, the first step is converting them to PHP (if they aren't already), just so future maintenance is easy and cheap.
terra_t 16y ago
The real advantage of PHP is deploy-ability. If you choose mod_perl, mod_python, JSP, or most of the classic environments you need a sysadmin to take care of the web server... It's going to crash from time to time, run out of memory, and otherwise make trouble for you. PHP's mode of integration with the prefork Apache web server is almost trouble-free... It's such a big difference that there could be a "blub" factor here... People who program in other environments often have a really hard time believing that a large fraction of the sysadmin activities that they are doing just don't need to be done if you're running PHP. (You can go five years and never "kick Tomcat", something that some shops have to do every 5 hours). That said, scaling comes to play here. For a small company or for a company that's doing a number of small projects, the cost of system administration that comes with other programming environment matters a lot more than it does for a big company. It's not such a big factor for a company like Facebook. On the other hand, PHP forces people into a "shared nothing" model that scales well and ~eliminates~ a wide range of concurrency-related problems that are endemic to thread-based backend apps. For instance, quite often I've seen a race condition in an ASP.NET app and had everybody on the team swear up and down that there's no shared state, then I spend a few hours looking at the app and there's a static variable that nobody knew was there. Another strength of PHP is that it has a very complete library that's largely correct. The PHP team is much more honest about what works and what doesn't work than a lot of others (PHP and Python have the same problem with threads, for the same reason -- PHP says "don't use them", Python says "jump in the water is fine".) If you program in some weird-o language like Haskell you'll probably have to write your own urldecode function and you'll probably be so busy thinking about higher-order functions you won't pay attention to details... Like making it work right. (Perl has a broken urldecode function in CPAN FOREVER) Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to hate about PHP; but try to get some real work done in environment X and you'll find plenty to hate too.
snorkel 16y ago
Facebook and Wikipedia.
noodle 16y ago
php is a tool. it has its benefits and its drawbacks. you shouldn't have to "defend" the language itself, but you should be able to defend your choice of language. if you don't like a language, go use another one.
jamesmontalvo3 16y ago
I'm wondering, as a fairly inexperience programmer with most of my time in PHP: is there any good reference for "How to start web development in ___ with previous experience only in PHP". I would love a tutorial that explained how to accomplish in another language all the things that PHP makes simple for newbies. I'd also be totally willing to help an experience person develop such a tutorial.

40 points by Chirag 16y ago

It's a little pointless to defend PHP to someone who thinks it's horrible. That's like asking someone to defend a religion. A waste of time and energy. In a good programmer's hands, the results will be good, regardless of language or platform choice. Sure, you can argue the finer points until you're blue in the face, but in the end, the only thing that should matter to your "customer" is that the solution satisfies his/her needs.

Goladus 16y ago

Actually, I think the depreciation point is one of the better points. Yeah, sometimes clean up is necessary, but when a language is a moving target like that, it raises serious concerns about portability and long term maintenance.

arnorhs 16y ago
But the PHP guys had told us about the deprecation of pass-by-reference years before it was deprecated. I think that's a really good argument for portability and long term maintenance. It they would've simply changed it over night, I'd have problems.

brlewis 16y ago

I'm not a PHP advocate, but I'll take this one: PHP encourages (practically requires) a coupling of processing with presentation. Yes, you can write PHP that doesn't do so, but it's actually easier to write code in the incorrect (from a sound design perspective) manner. The ideal web application is the one that best fits the unique characteristics of the data being manipulated. When exploring how a web app should work, you should be thinking at all levels: view, controller, model. A framework that forces you to separate all three from the start is a bad framework. It pushes you toward generic data manipulation forms and reports. If those generic tools are the best ones for the data model being manipulated, why involve a programmer at all? We would have much more interesting and varied web applications out there if the prevailing "wisdom" of MVC would die.

jemfinch 16y ago
> When exploring how a web app should work, you should be thinking at all levels: view, controller, model. And separating those aspects programmatically makes it easier to think about them, not to mention program the ideas that occur to you when thinking about them separately. > If those generic tools are the best ones for the data model being manipulated, why involve a programmer at all? If intertwining essentially unrelated ideas is the best way to write programs, why use high level languages at all? MVC--just like garbage collection, just data abstraction, just like most other high level languages features--is about modularity and separation of concerns. > We would have much more interesting and varied web applications out there if the prevailing "wisdom" of MVC would die. How do you reconcile this with the fact that there occurred a veritable explosion of various interesting web applications when MVC was (re)discovered by the webdev crowd?
- brlewis 16y ago
  The explosion you speak of is sites making better use of JavaScript, a movement that took off with the launch of gmail in 2004. Paul Buchheit talks about the thinking and communication that created gmail. He doesn't mention MVC; he talks a lot about rapid prototyping. He shares some of his then-current thinking in the form of a single 600-line source file. Read the post: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-... EDIT: HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444615 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444615
mechanical_fish 16y ago
Let me take this in a slightly different direction. The problem with paradigms (such as MVC, ORM, and OOP) is that no one paradigm is perfectly suited for all problems, but people tend to forget that. (Why do they forget? Because there are advantages to picking one set of paradigms and focusing on them to the exclusion of all others: It focuses your toolkit development and your documentation and makes the story of your platform easier to tell. Thus, we have systems like Rails, where everything from Hello, World on up requires at least passing knowledge of MVC and objects, and the whole system is designed around the assumption that you are building an MVC web app, using an ORM with a certain standard layout, placing files in standard locations, et cetera.) Unfortunately, there is one very important class of problem that most frameworks are ill-suited for: Very, very simple programs. Programs like the ones you write when you're new. Like a one-field "sign up for my mailing list" application, or a "guess the number between 1 and 100" application like the one I rewrote dozens of times in my Applesoft-BASIC-tinged youth. PHP offers the new programmer the simplest thing that could possibly work. You edit your HTML file, sprinkle a line of PHP into it, and save it with a .php extension, and (assuming your $5/month web host set up Apache correctly) lo, you have a web application! But you won't get any distance into (e.g.) Rails before the books and the docs insist on sending you to school, instead of straightforwardly doing what you want. "We know you want to write a one-page app", say the docs, "but first we'd like to give you a miniature degree in software development. We want to teach you about installing software on a Unix system, and using the command line, and what objects are, and what an ORM is, and what MVC is and why you should care". Or, perhaps, you will use a walkthrough to generate your Hello, World. You will either use the scaffolding -- e.g. type some mystical incantations that seem to have nothing to do with HTML, or Ruby, or the web, and that have to be done on the command line and preferably not in Windows -- or you will edit multiple files in multiple places to set up your tiny view, and your tiny controller. Then you have Hello, World. To go any farther will require some more training. Budget a day or two to read the book. Maybe buy another book. Heroku has gone to heroic efforts to remove some of these stumbling blocks, but there's only so much they can do. Rails is a professional tool for professionals. Like emacs, it takes time and determination to learn. And, like emacs, you're not likely to be motivated to learn it until you have cut your teeth on the equivalent of Notepad. But, in web development, the equivalent of Notepad is PHP. None of the other frameworks bother with such silly stuff. I'm convinced that the big strength of PHP is that new people can pick it up fast. And this strength just builds on itself, all the way up to systems like Drupal. Not only because new PHP programmers gradually become experienced PHP programmers via a steady ramp, but because even an extremely advanced and complex PHP program has many edges -- like the templates -- which inexperienced programmers will want to be able to edit. And they can, because PHP is evolved to be simple and straightforward.

hsarvell 16y ago

PHP is great if you need to get some small thing up and running yesterday. PHP is also great if an out of the box solution will almost fit the bill due to the fact that there are so many. Just take a box and do some small modifications, voila, done!

arnorhs 16y ago
...or big thing running yesterday, right? Take Facebook for an example. To me, Facebook seems like a pretty complicated piece of software. The concept isn't very complicated but there are so many features all over the place.
- shod 16y ago
  He didn't say you _can't_ use PHP for such things, he said PHP is "great" for getting smaller sites built quickly. It's possible to build very large apps with PHP alone, if you like, but there are other solutions I think are preferable. Most of them weren't even available when Facebook was born. For example, I would rather build a Facebook-sized app in Rails than a PHP framework, especially with Rails 3's new features. There are some very capable PHP frameworks out there, but you'll still end up writing much larger models and a lot more code than if you were using Rails.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    Rails would get you started on Facebook app quicker, but then you'd be forever fighting the framework to do things outside of it's core abilities. For something as large as Facebook, that will be all the time.
- sanderjd 16y ago
  Seems to me as if Facebook used PHP for the small thing running yesterday aspect - since they've gotten big they've had to switch to different tools.
hackermom 16y ago
Like someone else already said, "small thing"... like Facebook? Like Flickr? Like Wikipedia? Like Digg? :)

hackermom 16y ago

PHP may be one weird concoction, that's for sure, but all of the arguments brought up by this guy - and this is the exact same boring song belched out whenever there's an argument of "PHP is a terrible language" - fall into the category of vanity, because no matter how one twists and turns these points they still really don't make the language itself terrible, and they don't make PHP one bit less capable, nor one bit less adequate for the supposed job.

Daishiman 16y ago
What do you mean?? Do you have any idea of just how many programmer hours have been wasted by the absence of features, just how insecure so many web apps are due to the weird casting system and lack of safety-oriented features. My impression is that people who claim PHP has not cost them development time have simply never looked at alternatives that solve many of the problems.
- hackermom 16y ago
  Without going off on a limb, I'm guessing you're a not too experienced developer. You comment as if instead going for Perl, Ruby or ASP inherently makes an application safe, saves buttloads of manhours etc. And you're wrong. Gravely wrong. Excluding the obvious issues caused by bugs that are a natural part of any programming language's development, security problems are not caused by the language chosen, but by the developers themselves.
  - chromatic 16y ago
    A well designed language or library can decrease the likelihood of specific bugs, and especially security problems. Imagine the existence of a library which made it easier to use SQL placeholders than to concatenate user input into a string. Imagine PHP without register globals.
    - hackermom 16y ago
      PHP already does that via PDO. PHP's "Register globals" was deprecated exactly one year ago, in 5.3.0.

DrJokepu 16y ago

To be honest I don't think case insensitivity is really that much of an issue. Common Lisp is case insensitive as well and I have never had any problems with that.

DCoder 16y ago
They could have made it fully case sensitive, or fully case insensitive... but they went for the confusing middle point: foobar() == FOOBAR() but $foobar != $fooBar And then there was that fun issue with the Turkish locale and function names...

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delano 16y ago

No one ought to convince anyone of anything. Use it yourself and keep using it for as long as you like it. When you stop liking it, stop using it. That doubles as a recipe for learning any new thing.

pilif 16y ago

I'm spending most of my time maintaining a web application consisting of around 150k lines of PHP code. We (well - initially, it was just me) began development back in 2004 but since then the application has grown constantly. Back in 04, I already felt some reservations against PHP, but that's what I knew best and that's what was most used for the web (Rails might have been around, but not really known - other ruby options were not quite there yet. Python I disliked and Java I. don't. touch.). The application was written in PHP5, initially developed on some RC of 5.0.0 and I was careful to keep a clean style and not using deprecated code. This lead to a quite clean application that I could really be proud of. And still: While it has suffered from sometimes not quite reasonable customer demands, it's still very good at what it's doing and while there might be some dead bodies rotting in the code, it's nowhere near daily WTF material (aside of some bugs we have a good laugh at and fix shamefully). Still. I have some bad gripes with PHP that made me stop doing anything new in that language. I can easily live with the usually quoted problems though: - parameter order in library function? I don't care - my IDE lists them. - Huge base library? I don't care as the stuff I don't need doesn't cost me anything but disk space and the stuff I do need, I'm glad is there. - No namespaces? Yeah. Bit me a couple of times, but I can work around that - besides, with 5.3 we got namespaces, so this doesn't count any more - Performance issues? It's fast enough for said application. - Security? It's just as secure as any other language you can write insecure code in (i.e. all of them). - Allows intermixing of layout and code? Sure, but you don't have to. If you have any sense what so ever, all requests go through a central /index.php and all other code is in some not-publicly accessible location and emits no html what so ever. All output is generated using any of the thousands of templating libraries. What really disturbs me about PHP is its type conversion rules. 1 == '1' or even worse 'foobar' == 0, or '123n' == 123. This is cause for so many subtle bugs. Just use === you tell me? Sure, but then you clutter your code with an insane amount of isset()'s and isint()'s and whatnot - the fact that the database library I'm using (pgsql) returns everything as strings doesn't help that cause either. The other thing is the really clumsy syntax. Array literals, anonymous functions, closures (with explicit declaration of all variables of the outer scope you want access to), operators, even just the lack of named function parameters. The syntax is clumsy and all the elegant code you see even from JavaScript just gets bloated and unreadable once you port it to PHP. These two issues made me do stuff in Ruby, Python(3) and lately a lot of Node.js, but the maintenance of that huge application remains to be the main part of my day-job and even though the two issues really bug me, it's still not painful enough to really be complaining (or, heaven forbid, port the thing to whatever-other-language-thats-currently-hip). So in retrospect, while I'm as die-hard a PHP user as you can get with many, many lines of PHP under my belt and while I do find some of the stuff highly enjoyable (php's arrays that are also ordered hashes for example. Or the really easy and accessible web-server/HTTP integration), I also dislike it quite a bit to the point of being unwilling to start something new in PHP.

weego 16y ago

These topics always just smell of "Now I'm a grown up programmer I'm going to tell the world how much I understand by slamming an easy target language". I love PHP and have used it for years since moving away from asp.net and agree with some of the posters arguments as a theoretical principle, but as day-to-day PHP developer I also say so what. Naming and parameter inconsistencies? Yes, my libraries have that too and I can at least learn the PHP ones with some experiernce. I don't know any asp.net developer that doesn't have to use some kind of tool to help them find where System.Obscure.FoundItOnline.Function exists in the monster .net namespace system. It allows me to be productive and allows me to be the gatekeeper of how well or poorly I implement things. This is a crucial point of the constant argument about poor PHP logic/presentation support for me, I can happily write mixed and messy code for a £500 job or I can write some clever system that implements caching and output buffer manipulation and have a great template system. There are far too many people spending far too much time thinking that academic level programming considerations are applicable in every detail to every day programming practices of web developers.

lhorie 16y ago
Agreed. Fwiw, many of the complaints apply to other "better" languages also: - PHP has inconsistent naming of built-in and library functions. - C has types like int, size_t, jmp_buf and FILE - PHP performance is abysmal without caching - MRI Ruby is pretty slow too - Functions are case insensitive - Lisp anyone? etc etc The whole meme of PHP warts seems more like an exercise in confirmation bias than objective analysis.
- marte 16y ago
  Yeah, but if we continue that logic and fill up that "etc etc" it would seem that the other languages have their own bad features and PHP combines them all.
  - lhorie 16y ago
    That "all" is what I'm referring to when I mentioned confirmation bias. PHP programs don't segfault when you have a typo. You don't have macro expansion problems. It's not particularly verbose. Most languages have a ton of issues. Imho, the stuff in the PHP list is pretty minor compared to some of the warts in some other languages.

pierrefar 16y ago

I think this is the wrong approach. The guy should try to convince me that PHP is bad. That PHP has never not did what I wanted it to do. That I need to invest time and switch to some other language because it's better for my needs and purposes, and the switch will quickly get me to a level of expertise that I have with PHP now. The fact of the matter is PHP is ugly and that's really it. I can live with ugly because I know it and it does everything I've ever asked it to. Frankly, it's no different than me switching from English because it has quirks.

mfukar 16y ago
The guy should try to convince me that PHP is bad. It goes both ways: he has tried to do certain things with PHP and made his life miserable; you've done certain things with PHP that made your life easier. Telling each other which is which will let the one know what to avoid and the other one what's he doing wrong. Anyway, it's about time we started thinking and being more mature than 'my language is better than yours'. Which is why I hate all similar postings and articles which aim to enlighten me On the Amazing Features Of Language X (or the opposite).

billpg 16y ago

I wish I could ignore PHP, but it's just so darn ubiquitous. Most webhosts priced within the means of "normal" people have PHP, while far superior (IMO) platforms like ASP.NET are the exception. Until webhosts can be convinced to support a wider range of platforms, I fear humanity will never be freed of the bonds of PHP. Bill, hates PHP with the heat of a thousand suns.

Yaggo 16y ago

From a programming language perspective, PHP is somewhat horrible (PHP 5.3 less so, but still). I guess nobody will deny that. But from practical perspective, PHP is very suitable tool for many tasks and has huge ecosystem behind it. Complex real-world websites and applications have been successfully built with PHP. Isn't that proof enough? Do you consider yourself a purist or pragmatic? In the latter case, PHP may be worth dating for a while.

billpg 16y ago
"Complex real-world websites and applications have been successfully built with PHP." Thanks to PHP or in spite of PHP?
- Yaggo 16y ago
  :-) Seriously, I like the photographing analogy: "Wow, what a photo you have taken! You must have really good camera?" A programming language is rarely the limiting factor. Skillful programmer may benefit from advanced language, but mostly it's about knowing your tools and the bigger concepts, regardless of the language. Try yourself and learn to master something you like most. (My current choice being Python.)

ndimopoulos 16y ago

To answer to the topic of the post - why should I (or anyone else for that matter) bother trying to convince the author that PHP isn't horrible. If the author does not think that PHP is suited for his/her needs then he/she should not use it. There is a plethora of programming languages out there - pick and choose. The post has a disconnect between the title and the content. The author does not want to use PHP and tries to outline the flaws in the language from his/her own view. Sorry to disappoint, but I disagree with those points. I use PHP amongst other programming languages and I use it only when it suits my needs and the needs of my project. It is not perfect but then again nothing is. Final thought for the article would be a paraphrase of its title as a reply: Defend 'behaviour'. Convince me it isn't spelled horribly - correct spelling 'behavior'. I think you get the point :)

raganwald 16y ago
My friend Anthony Lewin and I were Macintosh salespeople back in the Dark Times when Jedi Master Jobs was in exile. People would walk in to the store and ask the same question: Convince me: Why should I buy a Mac instead of a PC? Anthony quickly learned not to feed the trolls. He would say "I don't know. Why would you buy a Mac instead of a PC? Most people buy PCs. What's so special about you that you need what a Mac has to offer?" The genuinely curious would explain about their graphics needs or what-not, and Anthony would go from there. I think of Anthony when I see questions like this. My response back to the OP is to ask Why should you use PHP? What's so special about your situation that you need it?
- ndimopoulos 16y ago
  /bow to the last sentence :)
- hnal943 16y ago
  Doesn't this fit more appropriately the other way around? "I don't know. Why would you use a language other than PHP? Most people use PHP. What's so special about you that you need what another language has to offer?" In your example, the PC is the inferior but nearly ubiquitous (and easier) choice. Isn't that the position PHP is in as well?

bufordtwain 16y ago

"There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful--many more." -Bjarne Stroustrup

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steverb 16y ago

Personally, my distaste for PHP centers around the fact that there are so many developers pumping out crappy PHP code for $20 / hr. I don't need to compete in a race to the bottom.

sandGorgon 16y ago

Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, phpbb, vbulletin, invision power board:: Together they are 99% of online communities + personal websites. If you want to use any of them. Then it is php. I may not particularly like PHP, but to deliver projects in reasonable time, you may have to leverage PHP

byoung2 16y ago

This debate reminds me a lot about another debate about language. When I studied English in college, I occasionally came across papers enumerating the weaknesses of the English language. It's terrible for writing poetry, because you can't rhyme like you can with Italian or seduce like you can with French. It's difficult to learn, because of irregularities in spelling and pronunciation. Now that I'm a PHP developer, the response I give when people ask me why I use PHP and not a "real language" is the same one I would give if someone asked me why I speak English. There are more people who speak my language. If I travel to a remote fishing village in China, chances are I can find one person who speaks English. Try to find someone who speaks Italian. When I'm working on a web project, I know that if I write it in PHP I can find hundreds of developers to hire at a reasonable price versus hunting around for Ruby developers (who cost double). At my day job, we run 200 websites, and 194 of them are written in PHP (1 is Java, 2 are .NET, 1 Ruby, 2 Coldfusion). When the company buys sites, the first step is converting them to PHP (if they aren't already), just so future maintenance is easy and cheap.

terra_t 16y ago

The real advantage of PHP is deploy-ability. If you choose mod_perl, mod_python, JSP, or most of the classic environments you need a sysadmin to take care of the web server... It's going to crash from time to time, run out of memory, and otherwise make trouble for you. PHP's mode of integration with the prefork Apache web server is almost trouble-free... It's such a big difference that there could be a "blub" factor here... People who program in other environments often have a really hard time believing that a large fraction of the sysadmin activities that they are doing just don't need to be done if you're running PHP. (You can go five years and never "kick Tomcat", something that some shops have to do every 5 hours). That said, scaling comes to play here. For a small company or for a company that's doing a number of small projects, the cost of system administration that comes with other programming environment matters a lot more than it does for a big company. It's not such a big factor for a company like Facebook. On the other hand, PHP forces people into a "shared nothing" model that scales well and ~eliminates~ a wide range of concurrency-related problems that are endemic to thread-based backend apps. For instance, quite often I've seen a race condition in an ASP.NET app and had everybody on the team swear up and down that there's no shared state, then I spend a few hours looking at the app and there's a static variable that nobody knew was there. Another strength of PHP is that it has a very complete library that's largely correct. The PHP team is much more honest about what works and what doesn't work than a lot of others (PHP and Python have the same problem with threads, for the same reason -- PHP says "don't use them", Python says "jump in the water is fine".) If you program in some weird-o language like Haskell you'll probably have to write your own urldecode function and you'll probably be so busy thinking about higher-order functions you won't pay attention to details... Like making it work right. (Perl has a broken urldecode function in CPAN FOREVER) Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to hate about PHP; but try to get some real work done in environment X and you'll find plenty to hate too.

snorkel 16y ago

Facebook and Wikipedia.

noodle 16y ago

php is a tool. it has its benefits and its drawbacks. you shouldn't have to "defend" the language itself, but you should be able to defend your choice of language. if you don't like a language, go use another one.

jamesmontalvo3 16y ago

I'm wondering, as a fairly inexperience programmer with most of my time in PHP: is there any good reference for "How to start web development in ___ with previous experience only in PHP". I would love a tutorial that explained how to accomplish in another language all the things that PHP makes simple for newbies. I'd also be totally willing to help an experience person develop such a tutorial.