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PHP is a great because it lets you get stuff done. Easy to understand, deploy and extend. Also, with the new reactive frameworks such as swoole, it can even sup

by osrec 8y ago

PHP is a great because it lets you get stuff done. Easy to understand, deploy and extend. Also, with the new reactive frameworks such as swoole, it can even support situations where you need to service a very high number of connections. We use it extensively at my firm and are proud to do so. A lot of PHP criticism comes from developer snootiness and a fairly hefty survivorship bias. PHP is good for a bunch of things - let's just be okay with that!

brianpgordon 8y ago
Other programming languages "let you get stuff done" without all of the ugly warts and rough edges of PHP. And the only survivorship bias involved is that only developers with a high tolerance for terrible programming languages stick with PHP so the community disappears into its own navel in an endless cycle of awfulness. Calling this developer snootiness is like building houses with stone hand tools and scoffing at the workers who won't join your construction company until you buy some hammers.
- osrec 8y ago
  Not really. PHP is not awful. It powers much of the web because it's actually good at its job. What's your programming language of choice? I bet you will find ample, justified criticism of it too.
mgkimsal 8y ago
i've taken to writing some console-oriented tools in PHP for projects (and sometimes just my own stuff). It hit me years ago that it was pretty easy to do stuff like db connections, decent filehandling, etc as one-off scripting vs bash. Sure, perl/ruby/python are there, but if you're already using PHP for a main project, extending cli stuff out in to PHP as well is handy (handier than bash, by comparison). PHP can scale up or down, but some tools are harder to 'scale down' - by that I mean be able to be used for short one-off things (cli tools, etc). I'm not saying it can't be done, but people don't often write smaller supporting tools (quick text preprocessing before an import, for example) in Java, even when their main projects are in Java. Of course, IME, and YMMV.

by osrec 8y ago

brianpgordon 8y ago

Other programming languages "let you get stuff done" without all of the ugly warts and rough edges of PHP. And the only survivorship bias involved is that only developers with a high tolerance for terrible programming languages stick with PHP so the community disappears into its own navel in an endless cycle of awfulness. Calling this developer snootiness is like building houses with stone hand tools and scoffing at the workers who won't join your construction company until you buy some hammers.

osrec 8y ago
Not really. PHP is not awful. It powers much of the web because it's actually good at its job. What's your programming language of choice? I bet you will find ample, justified criticism of it too.

mgkimsal 8y ago

i've taken to writing some console-oriented tools in PHP for projects (and sometimes just my own stuff). It hit me years ago that it was pretty easy to do stuff like db connections, decent filehandling, etc as one-off scripting vs bash. Sure, perl/ruby/python are there, but if you're already using PHP for a main project, extending cli stuff out in to PHP as well is handy (handier than bash, by comparison). PHP can scale up or down, but some tools are harder to 'scale down' - by that I mean be able to be used for short one-off things (cli tools, etc). I'm not saying it can't be done, but people don't often write smaller supporting tools (quick text preprocessing before an import, for example) in Java, even when their main projects are in Java. Of course, IME, and YMMV.