2 ms·

Laravel has been around since 2011. PHP 7 is slow and continues to perform badly in all reasonably done comparisons: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ ht

Laravel has been around since 2011. PHP 7 is slow and continues to perform badly in all reasonably done comparisons: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ But even if both of your points were true, the point is to look at what is happening in other languages and frameworks. Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places. Ask yourself, honestly, how many interesting new ideas will you learn from studying PHP, versus the more versatile (as in more platforms, and also the frontend) languages such as Javascript/Node, or the more innovative such as Go or Rust or Clojure or R or Julia? And I'm not even mentioning the more experimental languages, such as Shen or Lux.

CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
> But even if both of your points were true, the point is to look at what is happening in other languages and frameworks. Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places. Which of those languages give you NaCl out of the box?
userbinator 9y ago
Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places. I continue to be baffled by this sort of "novelty-chasing" --- do I really care about "interesting new places" or "interesting new ideas"? No; and in fact I'd rather not, because it takes time and energy away from actually solving useful practical problems, besides the ones you create yourself in chasing after the latest cruft. PHP is slow on an absolute scale, but chances are that a minimal, straightforward application written with it can perform better than something with a bloated framework on top in a different language. That takes true skill and experience, not something you can get if you're continuously jumping around trying to chase the fashion trends. As someone who has witnessed several major trends in programming come and fall, the amount of churn (and encouragement thereof) in the web community is astoundingly unsettling. "It's not about the tool, it's how you use it."
- lkrubner 9y ago
  Maybe you don't realize this because you haven't studied them, but "bloated framework" is unknown in Go or Clojure or Rust. Each of these languages tends towards minimal frameworks. Clojure, in particular, is known for its composeable libraries which make frameworks a bit of a sideshow for that community. Go is known for having enough in its standard library that some aspects of frameworks are not needed. About this: "because it takes time and energy away from actually solving useful practical problems," You can not know that without first studying other languages. You might find that you are 10x more productive in Rust. You can only find out by studying Rust. But you bound the conversation in ways that I didn't when you write: "in the web community" I feel that developers can learn a great deal if they study projects that don't necessarily have anything to do with Web programming. Nothing in the article or on this page necessarily restricts us to only considering Web programming. "It's not about the tool, it's how you use it." I wouldn't use a hammer to go fishing. Nor would I use a saw to turn a screw. Nor would I use a frying pan to tune a piano. It helps to learn about a lot of different kinds of tools, because over the course of your career, you might be confronted with diverse tasks.
  - lkrubner 9y ago
    Why was this downvoted? What in this comment is untrue?
- cutler 9y ago
  Try writing a web app in Luminus (Clojure) or Phoenix (Elixir). I guarantee you will be enlightened. The danger, however, is that you may lose your tolerance for OOP languages thereafter.
  - conradfr 9y ago
    Elixir/Phoenix is great and promising but you don't get everything you have in Symfony out of the box. For example the EEx template system is behind Twig (I especially miss inheritance) and Auth/Autorization is kind of a mess. The ecosystem is also smaller and deployment in Elixir is still a work in progress (mismatch between Mix and Erlang releases).
badestrand 9y ago
> how many interesting new ideas will you learn from studying PHP, versus [...] languages such as Javascript/Node This is on point! Programming PHP is not about diving deep into interesting language constructs or creating beautifully structured software - PHP is about getting things done, about starting hurdle-free and progressing rapidly. It goes against some "good development practices" but it works, see for example the single-file website remoteok.io from Pieter Levels: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/938707166508154880 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/938707166508154880
- Annatar 9y ago
  Love it. Back to the roots - one file, load it up in the editor, if one needs to debug something, just search for it. Yep. This is how it should be: easy to debug.
Annatar 9y ago
Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places. That's "chasing shiny". Shiny is the cancer destroying the computer industry from the inside. Any day not learning how to do web application development in LISP is a day wasted. The old tech is still cutting edge, way ahead of any new shiny garbage, because that garbage is decidedly not moving the industry forward, just introducing one more variation of making a computer do something. And that's extremely bad.

CiPHPerCoder 9y ago

> But even if both of your points were true, the point is to look at what is happening in other languages and frameworks. Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places. Which of those languages give you NaCl out of the box?

userbinator 9y ago

Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places. I continue to be baffled by this sort of "novelty-chasing" --- do I really care about "interesting new places" or "interesting new ideas"? No; and in fact I'd rather not, because it takes time and energy away from actually solving useful practical problems, besides the ones you create yourself in chasing after the latest cruft. PHP is slow on an absolute scale, but chances are that a minimal, straightforward application written with it can perform better than something with a bloated framework on top in a different language. That takes true skill and experience, not something you can get if you're continuously jumping around trying to chase the fashion trends. As someone who has witnessed several major trends in programming come and fall, the amount of churn (and encouragement thereof) in the web community is astoundingly unsettling. "It's not about the tool, it's how you use it."

lkrubner 9y ago
Maybe you don't realize this because you haven't studied them, but "bloated framework" is unknown in Go or Clojure or Rust. Each of these languages tends towards minimal frameworks. Clojure, in particular, is known for its composeable libraries which make frameworks a bit of a sideshow for that community. Go is known for having enough in its standard library that some aspects of frameworks are not needed. About this: "because it takes time and energy away from actually solving useful practical problems," You can not know that without first studying other languages. You might find that you are 10x more productive in Rust. You can only find out by studying Rust. But you bound the conversation in ways that I didn't when you write: "in the web community" I feel that developers can learn a great deal if they study projects that don't necessarily have anything to do with Web programming. Nothing in the article or on this page necessarily restricts us to only considering Web programming. "It's not about the tool, it's how you use it." I wouldn't use a hammer to go fishing. Nor would I use a saw to turn a screw. Nor would I use a frying pan to tune a piano. It helps to learn about a lot of different kinds of tools, because over the course of your career, you might be confronted with diverse tasks.
- lkrubner 9y ago
  Why was this downvoted? What in this comment is untrue?
cutler 9y ago
Try writing a web app in Luminus (Clojure) or Phoenix (Elixir). I guarantee you will be enlightened. The danger, however, is that you may lose your tolerance for OOP languages thereafter.
- conradfr 9y ago
  Elixir/Phoenix is great and promising but you don't get everything you have in Symfony out of the box. For example the EEx template system is behind Twig (I especially miss inheritance) and Auth/Autorization is kind of a mess. The ecosystem is also smaller and deployment in Elixir is still a work in progress (mismatch between Mix and Erlang releases).

badestrand 9y ago

> how many interesting new ideas will you learn from studying PHP, versus [...] languages such as Javascript/Node This is on point! Programming PHP is not about diving deep into interesting language constructs or creating beautifully structured software - PHP is about getting things done, about starting hurdle-free and progressing rapidly. It goes against some "good development practices" but it works, see for example the single-file website remoteok.io from Pieter Levels: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/938707166508154880 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/938707166508154880

Annatar 9y ago
Love it. Back to the roots - one file, load it up in the editor, if one needs to debug something, just search for it. Yep. This is how it should be: easy to debug.

Annatar 9y ago

Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places. That's "chasing shiny". Shiny is the cancer destroying the computer industry from the inside. Any day not learning how to do web application development in LISP is a day wasted. The old tech is still cutting edge, way ahead of any new shiny garbage, because that garbage is decidedly not moving the industry forward, just introducing one more variation of making a computer do something. And that's extremely bad.