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If you're like Facebook and started out with PHP, built your own compiler for it, and have a brilliant engineering team that regularly comes out with products l

If you're like Facebook and started out with PHP, built your own compiler for it, and have a brilliant engineering team that regularly comes out with products like Haystack or Cassandra, then go ahead use PHP. But you're not Facebook are you? You're not the go-to source for graduates in the top of their class. You're seeing incredible traffic, and the original source is not a wet pile of spaghetti mushing up every improvement you try to make. Perhaps then its fair to say you shouldn't have used PHP, and instead used a language that was a better fit for your organizations structure and practices at scale.

cemregr 15y ago
Are you implying that Etsy's engineers aren't good?
- true_religion 15y ago
  I'm implying that Facebook's organization is superior. More to the point: The idea is that if you're a company working with a high-scale website, don't bog yourself down with PHP if (a) you don't have to and (b) it doesn't fit your organization. If you're planning on working with PHP at scale, you have to be hacking the codebase extensively. Yahoo used PHP back in the 90s, but they had so many C extensions that the PHP was effectively thin glue.
donohoe 15y ago
Your reply gives the impression that you might think that I work at Etsy - I don't. No one here has cited examples of how Etsy's API has failed. At least, nothing substantive. I'd love to see examples as the few times I have used it, its worked fine. I guess the questions are: - (1) If Etsy's API is defective, then what makes it so? - (2) What potion of the blame lies with the language it was written in? Anyone?
- code_duck 15y ago
  Not sure why my response wasn't enough to provide insight that your brief examination of their API has not. Nor do I understand why you'd like to focus on examining that one statement I made along with what was intended to be a brief aside. My aim was to raise the question of how well the API program has worked out for Etsy and developers overall. Whether the design of their API is technologically sound or whether PHP is a good choice or played a role in their API's successes or failures is only part of that.

cemregr 15y ago

Are you implying that Etsy's engineers aren't good?

true_religion 15y ago
I'm implying that Facebook's organization is superior. More to the point: The idea is that if you're a company working with a high-scale website, don't bog yourself down with PHP if (a) you don't have to and (b) it doesn't fit your organization. If you're planning on working with PHP at scale, you have to be hacking the codebase extensively. Yahoo used PHP back in the 90s, but they had so many C extensions that the PHP was effectively thin glue.

donohoe 15y ago

Your reply gives the impression that you might think that I work at Etsy - I don't. No one here has cited examples of how Etsy's API has failed. At least, nothing substantive. I'd love to see examples as the few times I have used it, its worked fine. I guess the questions are: - (1) If Etsy's API is defective, then what makes it so? - (2) What potion of the blame lies with the language it was written in? Anyone?

code_duck 15y ago
Not sure why my response wasn't enough to provide insight that your brief examination of their API has not. Nor do I understand why you'd like to focus on examining that one statement I made along with what was intended to be a brief aside. My aim was to raise the question of how well the API program has worked out for Etsy and developers overall. Whether the design of their API is technologically sound or whether PHP is a good choice or played a role in their API's successes or failures is only part of that.