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I hate to say this and I know I will be downvoted by "hackers" but I really don't understand why people (who know limited or nothing about Java & blindly follow

I hate to say this and I know I will be downvoted by "hackers" but I really don't understand why people (who know limited or nothing about Java & blindly follow the norm) always pick the word "ugly", "stupid" for Java? What superior of PHP to Java when with Java I can program from a stand-alone app to webapp, from client side to server side, from desktop to mobile app?... If you are a coder, you must pick a language & a standard lib to be master, and I would say that picking a language that only sticks to a very specific application platform (web-only, desktop-only...) is a very bad choice. I started from C/C++ and moved to Java and I feel very comfortable to use/study Python, C#, Scala & Ruby.. but PHP, get off, never & never ever! One last thing (to convince more PHP people to downvote me) is, if you are spending most of your time on PHP or a web-only-language, you will never see the beauty of asynchronous I/O, socket programming, threading, hooking... Update: When I mentioned "web-only-language", I was thinking of people who use & only use Ruby with RoR for web apps. I don't know how many developers who can't distinguish between Ruby & RoR but I guess it's not a small number. And of course, what I said is toward to those who aren't willing to learn new things. They always think about web & only web.

pilif 16y ago
beauty of threading? shudder anyways. I have some reasons for my strong dislike of Java: a) checked exceptions, b) no method pointers or something similar and c) lots of the code produced by the community out there (and in the standard library itself) is full of FactoryFactoryFactories and other typing intensive, mind-bending and ultimately useless abstractions (most of them not DRY at all either). Back in 2004 I did strongly consider Java though, but ultimately, I didn't have time to implement this web application AND learn a new library (learning the language is easy. learning the library is what makes you slow in the beginning). As a side note: Said web application also accesses locally connected barcode scanners over the local serial port. Unfortunately the only way to do this (aside of a locally installed client) is still using a Java Applet which I've also written back in 2004. So I do have the Java experience to know that I don't quite like it :-)
- bigiain 16y ago
  "beauty of threading? shudder" Indeed, this whole thread's reminding me of: "Combining the sanity of threads with the robustness of web development" http://wearehugh.com/public/2010/08/html5-web-workers/ http://wearehugh.com/public/2010/08/html5-web-workers/
- brown9-2 16y ago
  lots of the code produced by the community out there is full of FactoryFactoryFactories and other typing intensive, mind-bending and ultimately useless abstractions (most of them not DRY at all either So what? Why does the code produced by others in "the community" affect your perception of the language and/or tools, if you aren't using their code?
  - AndyKelley 16y ago
    Because when we call Java "ugly" or "stupid," it's the community we're talking about. My room mate is an extremely talented Java programmer, and he can fly around Eclipse[1] like a giant rainbow steamroller[2]. He uses Java like it should be used, and it's great. But I don't think he represents the community. He tells me horror stories of code he refactors at work written by people in his own office, or worse, outsourced companies, and it's bad. It seems to me that that kind of code is more representative of the community. When you're going to join a project, you have a better chance of encountering code not sucking if the overall culture of that language is better. [1]: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eclipse+sorcery http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eclipse+sorcery [2]: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally
    - instcode 16y ago
      Ha, if you are thinking that way, I would suggest VB.NET or C# instead. Why? I remember the first time I was creating an MFC project using Project Wizard, I felt like I'm a fool looking at a bunch of auto-generated text & having no clue what it is about. And once again, I was in the same situation when I was using VS.NET to generate code for my first ASP.NET web app. But I still completed that webapp without even knowing what code is for. Does that make VB.NET/C# community more stupid than Java? Does that mean C#/VB.NET should be the ugly & stupid thing other than Java? So, you should better have another way to explain that.
rimantas 16y ago
Curious, what language is web-only… And spending most of the time with PHP does not prevent you from trying all these thing in the remaining time.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sigzero 16y ago
  PHP is pretty much considered web-only. Sure you can use it on the command line (never seen it myself) and yes you can do Gtk stuff with it but that doesn't change the perception of it even if you can argue differently. EDIT: I don't hold that view because of the things I mentioned but I am pretty sure a lot of programmers do.
  - cosmok 16y ago
    I have been writing command line scripts in PHP for the most part of the past 18 months. I will have to agree with you that PHP is perceived as a web language. Hopefully with more articles like these that perception will change.
    - mechanical_fish 16y ago
      I have also been writing PHP command-line scripts, or rather maintaining them. They are a bad idea, in general. PHP is designed for a very specific purpose: Very quickly building web pages in a CGI or mod_php environment and spitting them out. Everything else is an afterthought, and it shows. For example, if you try to manipulate the filesystem extensively using PHP you will eventually trip over its "stat cache". PHP caches the result of stat() calls, presumably assuming that, hey, it is more important to avoid redundantly calling stat() during the time-sensitive rendering of your web page than it is to actually return correct information about the state of the filesystem. I mean, how often do symlinks change or files get moved during the rendering of a typical web page? And how much web-page-rendering code really depends on being able to read a link, then read the link again after the link has changed on disk? You can afford to ignore that stuff at the language level, if you're PHP. The result is that you have to learn about the stat cache and remember to call clearstatcache() all the time when manipulating the filesystem in PHP. That's just one example of why it's better to use Ruby or Perl to write command-line scripts. These languages were designed with command-line scripting in mind. Indeed, this is the flip side of the reason why PHP eventually drove out Perl as a web development language: Perl was originally designed for command-line scripting, and PHP was originally designed for the web. Use tools for their proper purpose.
streety 16y ago
Until recently, an ignoring a brief foray into Limbo, I've been a PHP only/focused programmer. I've been working with python more in the past year as I've been doing more work with data processing and statistical analysis for which PHP really doesn't have the tools. Having said that I wonder if missing the 'beauty' of async I/O etc has more to do with the projects people take than the language. Would a python or ruby developer who focuses on creating web apps have any more familiarity with those concepts than a PHP developer?
- pilif 16y ago
  because PHP provides practically NO means for async I/O whereas the other languages do. One of the reasons for this is because PHP was designed to quickly handle single HTTP requests. The scaling is ment to be done on the app-server side and that single request that your script is serving at a given time will take as long as it will take anyways. So you don't really need the async I/O (in theory). Python and Javascript (and to some degree ruby) rely on their own web servers implemented in their own language, in many cases with no or bad (GIL) concurrency at which point it gets more interesting to move into an event based model where it becomes imperative that operations don't block. There async I/O becomes important. So: PHP: concurrency by firing off another apache/fastcgi process or thread. Don't worry about blocking on I/O. node.js and some python/ruby frameworks: concurrency by using an event based system. Because one operation blocks the whole server, they need to be quick. async I/O becomes important. Of course the evented model has huge advantages too: You worry much less about races, you get huge performance with a simple architecture and you can potentially handle much more concurrency (because each thread/process consumes resources that your one evented process does only once). Both paradigms are interesting, but having first-class functions certainly makes an evented model more convenient to work with.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    Async I/O is important for any time the connection needs to be kept open while processing the request under heavily concurrent conditions; it's less about not blocking on I/O, than it is about avoiding the overhead of context switching in the kernel and the extra resources of keeping a thread / process alive for the duration of the request. I don't see it as less or more important in a PHP context than an event-based model. However, without an automatic CPS transformation (continuation passing style) of the source of your request handling logic - in particular, continuations at the boundary points all I/Os - you do need to write to a pattern which is in effect event-driven.
tswicegood 16y ago
I disagree that you have to pick one language and one language only to be really good at. At least after you've become a decent programmer. As a polyglot (I can start a project comfortably in PHP, Python, Ruby, JS, Erlang, and wouldn't feel too out of place working in Clojure or Objective C), I think a "master" programmer is someone who's gotten to that point to realize that a programming problem is a programming problem regardless of language. Language is only the syntax you use to formulate your answer.
- Someone 16y ago
  I do agree with what you say, but there is a gamut with 'programming problems' on one end and 'work' on the other. Especially on the web, most of programming is work, not problem solving. When doing work in a language/framework, knowledge of other languages/framework can distract you. For example, a Java-only specialist would know whether substring takes start offset and length or start and end offsets arguments. I would have to look it up (or wait for the IDE to help me), but I do know that C# and Java disagree about it.
jbarham 16y ago
> if you are spending most of your time on PHP or a web-only-language, you will never see the beauty of asynchronous I/O... FYI, JavaScript programmers use asynchronous I/O all the time. That's what the 'A' in AJAX stands for...
hartror 16y ago
When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

pilif 16y ago

beauty of threading? shudder anyways. I have some reasons for my strong dislike of Java: a) checked exceptions, b) no method pointers or something similar and c) lots of the code produced by the community out there (and in the standard library itself) is full of FactoryFactoryFactories and other typing intensive, mind-bending and ultimately useless abstractions (most of them not DRY at all either). Back in 2004 I did strongly consider Java though, but ultimately, I didn't have time to implement this web application AND learn a new library (learning the language is easy. learning the library is what makes you slow in the beginning). As a side note: Said web application also accesses locally connected barcode scanners over the local serial port. Unfortunately the only way to do this (aside of a locally installed client) is still using a Java Applet which I've also written back in 2004. So I do have the Java experience to know that I don't quite like it :-)

bigiain 16y ago
"beauty of threading? shudder" Indeed, this whole thread's reminding me of: "Combining the sanity of threads with the robustness of web development" http://wearehugh.com/public/2010/08/html5-web-workers/ http://wearehugh.com/public/2010/08/html5-web-workers/
brown9-2 16y ago
lots of the code produced by the community out there is full of FactoryFactoryFactories and other typing intensive, mind-bending and ultimately useless abstractions (most of them not DRY at all either So what? Why does the code produced by others in "the community" affect your perception of the language and/or tools, if you aren't using their code?
- AndyKelley 16y ago
  Because when we call Java "ugly" or "stupid," it's the community we're talking about. My room mate is an extremely talented Java programmer, and he can fly around Eclipse[1] like a giant rainbow steamroller[2]. He uses Java like it should be used, and it's great. But I don't think he represents the community. He tells me horror stories of code he refactors at work written by people in his own office, or worse, outsourced companies, and it's bad. It seems to me that that kind of code is more representative of the community. When you're going to join a project, you have a better chance of encountering code not sucking if the overall culture of that language is better. [1]: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eclipse+sorcery http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eclipse+sorcery [2]: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally
  - instcode 16y ago
    Ha, if you are thinking that way, I would suggest VB.NET or C# instead. Why? I remember the first time I was creating an MFC project using Project Wizard, I felt like I'm a fool looking at a bunch of auto-generated text & having no clue what it is about. And once again, I was in the same situation when I was using VS.NET to generate code for my first ASP.NET web app. But I still completed that webapp without even knowing what code is for. Does that make VB.NET/C# community more stupid than Java? Does that mean C#/VB.NET should be the ugly & stupid thing other than Java? So, you should better have another way to explain that.

rimantas 16y ago

Curious, what language is web-only… And spending most of the time with PHP does not prevent you from trying all these thing in the remaining time.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sigzero 16y ago
PHP is pretty much considered web-only. Sure you can use it on the command line (never seen it myself) and yes you can do Gtk stuff with it but that doesn't change the perception of it even if you can argue differently. EDIT: I don't hold that view because of the things I mentioned but I am pretty sure a lot of programmers do.
- cosmok 16y ago
  I have been writing command line scripts in PHP for the most part of the past 18 months. I will have to agree with you that PHP is perceived as a web language. Hopefully with more articles like these that perception will change.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    I have also been writing PHP command-line scripts, or rather maintaining them. They are a bad idea, in general. PHP is designed for a very specific purpose: Very quickly building web pages in a CGI or mod_php environment and spitting them out. Everything else is an afterthought, and it shows. For example, if you try to manipulate the filesystem extensively using PHP you will eventually trip over its "stat cache". PHP caches the result of stat() calls, presumably assuming that, hey, it is more important to avoid redundantly calling stat() during the time-sensitive rendering of your web page than it is to actually return correct information about the state of the filesystem. I mean, how often do symlinks change or files get moved during the rendering of a typical web page? And how much web-page-rendering code really depends on being able to read a link, then read the link again after the link has changed on disk? You can afford to ignore that stuff at the language level, if you're PHP. The result is that you have to learn about the stat cache and remember to call clearstatcache() all the time when manipulating the filesystem in PHP. That's just one example of why it's better to use Ruby or Perl to write command-line scripts. These languages were designed with command-line scripting in mind. Indeed, this is the flip side of the reason why PHP eventually drove out Perl as a web development language: Perl was originally designed for command-line scripting, and PHP was originally designed for the web. Use tools for their proper purpose.

streety 16y ago

Until recently, an ignoring a brief foray into Limbo, I've been a PHP only/focused programmer. I've been working with python more in the past year as I've been doing more work with data processing and statistical analysis for which PHP really doesn't have the tools. Having said that I wonder if missing the 'beauty' of async I/O etc has more to do with the projects people take than the language. Would a python or ruby developer who focuses on creating web apps have any more familiarity with those concepts than a PHP developer?

pilif 16y ago
because PHP provides practically NO means for async I/O whereas the other languages do. One of the reasons for this is because PHP was designed to quickly handle single HTTP requests. The scaling is ment to be done on the app-server side and that single request that your script is serving at a given time will take as long as it will take anyways. So you don't really need the async I/O (in theory). Python and Javascript (and to some degree ruby) rely on their own web servers implemented in their own language, in many cases with no or bad (GIL) concurrency at which point it gets more interesting to move into an event based model where it becomes imperative that operations don't block. There async I/O becomes important. So: PHP: concurrency by firing off another apache/fastcgi process or thread. Don't worry about blocking on I/O. node.js and some python/ruby frameworks: concurrency by using an event based system. Because one operation blocks the whole server, they need to be quick. async I/O becomes important. Of course the evented model has huge advantages too: You worry much less about races, you get huge performance with a simple architecture and you can potentially handle much more concurrency (because each thread/process consumes resources that your one evented process does only once). Both paradigms are interesting, but having first-class functions certainly makes an evented model more convenient to work with.
- barrkel 16y ago
  Async I/O is important for any time the connection needs to be kept open while processing the request under heavily concurrent conditions; it's less about not blocking on I/O, than it is about avoiding the overhead of context switching in the kernel and the extra resources of keeping a thread / process alive for the duration of the request. I don't see it as less or more important in a PHP context than an event-based model. However, without an automatic CPS transformation (continuation passing style) of the source of your request handling logic - in particular, continuations at the boundary points all I/Os - you do need to write to a pattern which is in effect event-driven.

tswicegood 16y ago

I disagree that you have to pick one language and one language only to be really good at. At least after you've become a decent programmer. As a polyglot (I can start a project comfortably in PHP, Python, Ruby, JS, Erlang, and wouldn't feel too out of place working in Clojure or Objective C), I think a "master" programmer is someone who's gotten to that point to realize that a programming problem is a programming problem regardless of language. Language is only the syntax you use to formulate your answer.

Someone 16y ago
I do agree with what you say, but there is a gamut with 'programming problems' on one end and 'work' on the other. Especially on the web, most of programming is work, not problem solving. When doing work in a language/framework, knowledge of other languages/framework can distract you. For example, a Java-only specialist would know whether substring takes start offset and length or start and end offsets arguments. I would have to look it up (or wait for the IDE to help me), but I do know that C# and Java disagree about it.

jbarham 16y ago

> if you are spending most of your time on PHP or a web-only-language, you will never see the beauty of asynchronous I/O... FYI, JavaScript programmers use asynchronous I/O all the time. That's what the 'A' in AJAX stands for...

hartror 16y ago

When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.