4 ms·

I worked at the second largest adult content network about 10 years ago. They used the same stack mentioned in the article. The design philosophy was about simp

I worked at the second largest adult content network about 10 years ago. They used the same stack mentioned in the article. The design philosophy was about simplicity and continuity above all. They didn't want to use newer technology because it's hard to find people to support it. They didn't even like you to use regular expressions when case statements could be used. Regex is too conceptually complicated. If you can host and serve porn on a LAMP stack from a traditional bare metal server data center, the guy on the other end doesn't care as long as it's reliable. I work at a large tech company now and it amazes me how terribly executed and unnecessarily complex most development efforts are. There was a very strong results-oriented culture at the adult media company.

pantaloony 6y ago
It's funny how in 2020 PHP use is a sharply bimodal signal—it either means your tech leadership is clueless/absent/hopelessly-terrible, or they are among the few who've achieved true enlightenment.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  PHP is a very robust, debugged, proven, workhorse language, with millions of pages of documentation, tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of seasoned developers, huge libraries and communities of support, decades of experience, strong, universal, server support, and is used on a lot of "big pipe" servers. Like C++, it's not going anywhere, anytime soon; despite all the kvetching about it. That said, I don't especially like the language, but I knew that I needed to use it, if I wanted to design an infrastructure system that I could throw over the wall to be taken over by a bunch of other people. I was right. There's that old urban myth about the fancy space pen, vs. the pencil.[0] [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
  - cutler 6y ago
    In many ways I preferred PHP4. Can't stand all the pseudo-Java in PHP5+.
    - spoopyskelly 6y ago
      You can still (mostly) code in PHP4 style and ignore all the new cruft and syntactic sugar they added over the years. And you get the performance boost of 7.x for "free".
      - cutler 6y ago
        Yes, I suppose what really worries me about the "Modern PHP" movement how it looks down on anything that isn't Java-style OO. Procedural PHP is now considered to be some kind of unwashed Cinderella. I cringe when I look at a typical PSR-compliant page of PHP with its K&R braces, blank lines between each line of code and fanfold doc comments. You're lucky if you get more than a handful of lines of business logic on a screen.
        ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        I never learned Java until late in my career (when I learned up on Android). I started as an EE, and my programming has been primarily self-taught. PHP is a kind of crappy OO language, but it is sufficient. I think Java is a better language, for OO. PHP 7+ is lot better than it was, before 5. A lot of Java programmers came out of school, and started to create PHP chimeras. I feel as if that results in unnecessarily complex code. Things are complex enough, without applying UI-style MVC to server backend systems. I wrote PHP for around twenty years, starting off procedural and mixed into HTML pages, to OO-based pure PHP systems. I stopped a couple of years ago. This was my final PHP project[0][1]. It was sort of a "dissertation." No one is actually interested in using it, but it was developed in order to practice my architectural skills. It's a pretty intense system. [0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#baobab https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba... [1] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/basalt/tree/master https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/basalt/tree/master
hef19898 6y ago
It's crazy how conservative most high-reliablity high-volume stuff is on the technical side. And yet, especially the porn industry, is quite on the fore front of other tech, like VR, DVD, VCR,...
- mywittyname 6y ago
  They don't seem any different from other industries in this respect. A lot of banks still run on systems originally designed in the 60s. So they are conservative from an operations perspective. But most of the big ones have no issues pumping money into the latest financial fad, so they are pretty flexible from a product perspective. Their content is relatively cheap to produce and it tends to be churned out at a high frequency. There's almost no industry out there that matches the frequency of content they produce, except maybe radio (and now YouTube). And with new technology, the limiting factor is almost always content creation. So it makes sense that they'd put aside a few dollars buy some new equipment for some trend. Doing a VR shoot probably involves a new camera and a plugin for Premiere.
mpfundstein 6y ago
i truly believe that a lot of devs make stuff often much more difficult than necessary JUST for the sake of it. reason is probably that the main product is boring af, so you need some distraction to keep it interesting :-)
choward 6y ago
> They didn't even like you to use regular expressions when case statements could be used. I'm confused. How are those two related? Case statements can replace if statements and can be used for exhaustiveness checking. Regexes are for parsing strings.
- sbarre 6y ago
  I think the point was that even within the codebase, simplicity and reduced complexity was preferred over perhaps a "cleaner" or more advanced approach. So managing a bunch of hard-coded code paths via a switch instead of using a regex to pattern-match. It's less future-proof, but even an entry-level dev can reason about a switch statement and update it as needed.
  - kradroy 6y ago
    This is exactly it. The nuances of regex patterns can be misconstrued. Obviously if the regex used for flow control cannot be sensibly translated to more traditional conditional statements, then they are permitted. Even in that case, the "simplest" regex was preferred.
- praptak 6y ago
  All of the stuff you can do with regexes can be done with some hand written code. Since thst code often implements the FSM for the regex, it contains a fair share of case statements. The benefit is that the regex library costs a lot in hidden complexity - debugging why a particular regex works slowly or eats lots of memory is hard. If a similar problem pops up in hand written code, you can use your standard profilers and other tools to see what's happening.
  - cutler 6y ago
    I can't begin to imagine how much MORE complicated reproducing a regex long-hand might be. They were invented to solve real problems.
    - 6y ago

pantaloony 6y ago

It's funny how in 2020 PHP use is a sharply bimodal signal—it either means your tech leadership is clueless/absent/hopelessly-terrible, or they are among the few who've achieved true enlightenment.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
PHP is a very robust, debugged, proven, workhorse language, with millions of pages of documentation, tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of seasoned developers, huge libraries and communities of support, decades of experience, strong, universal, server support, and is used on a lot of "big pipe" servers. Like C++, it's not going anywhere, anytime soon; despite all the kvetching about it. That said, I don't especially like the language, but I knew that I needed to use it, if I wanted to design an infrastructure system that I could throw over the wall to be taken over by a bunch of other people. I was right. There's that old urban myth about the fancy space pen, vs. the pencil.[0] [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
- cutler 6y ago
  In many ways I preferred PHP4. Can't stand all the pseudo-Java in PHP5+.
  - spoopyskelly 6y ago
    You can still (mostly) code in PHP4 style and ignore all the new cruft and syntactic sugar they added over the years. And you get the performance boost of 7.x for "free".
    - cutler 6y ago
      Yes, I suppose what really worries me about the "Modern PHP" movement how it looks down on anything that isn't Java-style OO. Procedural PHP is now considered to be some kind of unwashed Cinderella. I cringe when I look at a typical PSR-compliant page of PHP with its K&R braces, blank lines between each line of code and fanfold doc comments. You're lucky if you get more than a handful of lines of business logic on a screen.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        I never learned Java until late in my career (when I learned up on Android). I started as an EE, and my programming has been primarily self-taught. PHP is a kind of crappy OO language, but it is sufficient. I think Java is a better language, for OO. PHP 7+ is lot better than it was, before 5. A lot of Java programmers came out of school, and started to create PHP chimeras. I feel as if that results in unnecessarily complex code. Things are complex enough, without applying UI-style MVC to server backend systems. I wrote PHP for around twenty years, starting off procedural and mixed into HTML pages, to OO-based pure PHP systems. I stopped a couple of years ago. This was my final PHP project[0][1]. It was sort of a "dissertation." No one is actually interested in using it, but it was developed in order to practice my architectural skills. It's a pretty intense system. [0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#baobab https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba... [1] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/basalt/tree/master https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/basalt/tree/master

hef19898 6y ago

It's crazy how conservative most high-reliablity high-volume stuff is on the technical side. And yet, especially the porn industry, is quite on the fore front of other tech, like VR, DVD, VCR,...

mywittyname 6y ago
They don't seem any different from other industries in this respect. A lot of banks still run on systems originally designed in the 60s. So they are conservative from an operations perspective. But most of the big ones have no issues pumping money into the latest financial fad, so they are pretty flexible from a product perspective. Their content is relatively cheap to produce and it tends to be churned out at a high frequency. There's almost no industry out there that matches the frequency of content they produce, except maybe radio (and now YouTube). And with new technology, the limiting factor is almost always content creation. So it makes sense that they'd put aside a few dollars buy some new equipment for some trend. Doing a VR shoot probably involves a new camera and a plugin for Premiere.

mpfundstein 6y ago

i truly believe that a lot of devs make stuff often much more difficult than necessary JUST for the sake of it. reason is probably that the main product is boring af, so you need some distraction to keep it interesting :-)

choward 6y ago

> They didn't even like you to use regular expressions when case statements could be used. I'm confused. How are those two related? Case statements can replace if statements and can be used for exhaustiveness checking. Regexes are for parsing strings.

sbarre 6y ago
I think the point was that even within the codebase, simplicity and reduced complexity was preferred over perhaps a "cleaner" or more advanced approach. So managing a bunch of hard-coded code paths via a switch instead of using a regex to pattern-match. It's less future-proof, but even an entry-level dev can reason about a switch statement and update it as needed.
- kradroy 6y ago
  This is exactly it. The nuances of regex patterns can be misconstrued. Obviously if the regex used for flow control cannot be sensibly translated to more traditional conditional statements, then they are permitted. Even in that case, the "simplest" regex was preferred.
praptak 6y ago
All of the stuff you can do with regexes can be done with some hand written code. Since thst code often implements the FSM for the regex, it contains a fair share of case statements. The benefit is that the regex library costs a lot in hidden complexity - debugging why a particular regex works slowly or eats lots of memory is hard. If a similar problem pops up in hand written code, you can use your standard profilers and other tools to see what's happening.
- cutler 6y ago
  I can't begin to imagine how much MORE complicated reproducing a regex long-hand might be. They were invented to solve real problems.
  - 6y ago