23 ms·

Like someone else already said, "small thing"... like Facebook? Like Flickr? Like Wikipedia? Like Digg? :)

superk 16y ago
Somewhere I read a quote that went "if you take the top 100 most popular websites on the internet... 90 of them use PHP". I don't have the source and I don't know if it's still true.. but you can add Yahoo, WordPress, PhotoBucket, SourceForge, etc...
shabble 16y ago
It's probably fair to say that all of these started out pretty small (and quite a lot time ago). If you're a one-man company with a great idea and possibly not a huge amount of programming experience, then PHP is a fair choice for prototyping your design and getting things off the ground. Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features. So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase. To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever.
- rick888 16y ago
  "Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features." Using Ruby on Rails, .NET, or python won't magically give you great programming skills. If you are a poor developer in general, you will run into problems with all of these languages. "So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase." All sites are successful because of their ideas. Using language X is just a design choice. I carefully choose php for all of my projects because it's better than all of the alternatives. I know I'm not alone in my thinking. "To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever." A positive spin? How about a bias spin against php. If this were the case, we would see many more sites using other languages because PHP is so terrible. Here is an old article on why the guy from cdbaby.com switched from ruby back to php: http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_swit...
  - sanderjd 16y ago
    "I carefully choose php for all of my projects because it's better than all of the alternatives. I know I'm not alone in my thinking." I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better', would you care to describe what features work better for you than what the alternatives offer?
    - rick888 16y ago
      "I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better'" Why "more practical"? There are a slew of other languages and frameworks out there that could be used. PHP gives you the flexibility to create more complex projects without being pigeon-holed into one specific framework. I noticed this with some of the newer languages (and frameworks) such as RoR and Django. The higher the level you go, the more difficult it is to get around the built-in features that try to make it easier to develop an application. PHP is at the perfect level for me. Higher than say c, but lower than something like RoR. Also, the c syntax makes it to move onto other languages. It's also been around for 15 years, which means a plethora of support and examples. The language itself may have some issues (naming convention, Unicode support, non-standard namespace convention), but it can still be used to create solid applications that scale well (if you know what you are doing). Since PHP has been around longer, people really need to come up with reasons NOT to use it (and why I should be using new language X). So far, I'm not convinced.
- rje 16y ago
  Quora's decision to use python seems to support your theory: "PHP was out of the question. Facebook is stuck on that for legacy reasons, not because it's the best choice right now. Our main takeaway from that experience is that programming language choice is very important and is extremely costly to change." From: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Quora-choose-Python-for-its-development http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Quora-choose-Python-for-its-dev...

Somewhere I read a quote that went "if you take the top 100 most popular websites on the internet... 90 of them use PHP". I don't have the source and I don't know if it's still true.. but you can add Yahoo, WordPress, PhotoBucket, SourceForge, etc...

shabble 16y ago

It's probably fair to say that all of these started out pretty small (and quite a lot time ago). If you're a one-man company with a great idea and possibly not a huge amount of programming experience, then PHP is a fair choice for prototyping your design and getting things off the ground. Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features. So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase. To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever.

rick888 16y ago
"Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features." Using Ruby on Rails, .NET, or python won't magically give you great programming skills. If you are a poor developer in general, you will run into problems with all of these languages. "So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase." All sites are successful because of their ideas. Using language X is just a design choice. I carefully choose php for all of my projects because it's better than all of the alternatives. I know I'm not alone in my thinking. "To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever." A positive spin? How about a bias spin against php. If this were the case, we would see many more sites using other languages because PHP is so terrible. Here is an old article on why the guy from cdbaby.com switched from ruby back to php: http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_swit...
- sanderjd 16y ago
  "I carefully choose php for all of my projects because it's better than all of the alternatives. I know I'm not alone in my thinking." I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better', would you care to describe what features work better for you than what the alternatives offer?
  - rick888 16y ago
    "I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better'" Why "more practical"? There are a slew of other languages and frameworks out there that could be used. PHP gives you the flexibility to create more complex projects without being pigeon-holed into one specific framework. I noticed this with some of the newer languages (and frameworks) such as RoR and Django. The higher the level you go, the more difficult it is to get around the built-in features that try to make it easier to develop an application. PHP is at the perfect level for me. Higher than say c, but lower than something like RoR. Also, the c syntax makes it to move onto other languages. It's also been around for 15 years, which means a plethora of support and examples. The language itself may have some issues (naming convention, Unicode support, non-standard namespace convention), but it can still be used to create solid applications that scale well (if you know what you are doing). Since PHP has been around longer, people really need to come up with reasons NOT to use it (and why I should be using new language X). So far, I'm not convinced.
rje 16y ago
Quora's decision to use python seems to support your theory: "PHP was out of the question. Facebook is stuck on that for legacy reasons, not because it's the best choice right now. Our main takeaway from that experience is that programming language choice is very important and is extremely costly to change." From: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Quora-choose-Python-for-its-development http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Quora-choose-Python-for-its-dev...