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Beside the technical aspects that others already mentioned, I think there is also a social aspect. PHP vs Node is like the old Apple ads "I'm a Mac vs I'm a PC"

by tored 4y ago

Beside the technical aspects that others already mentioned, I think there is also a social aspect. PHP vs Node is like the old Apple ads "I'm a Mac vs I'm a PC" where Node is Mac, it is modern and the future, the person is dressed as slacker and taking it cool. PHP is PC, old school with a blazer and pens in his shirt pocket, your class mate who came to school with an attaché case. It is in-group vs out-group. If you are going to target something, you pick what you think is going to get the most effect, thus you pick the in-group, not the out-group. PHP is in-group in one area and that is Wordpress, and of course it also constantly targeted.

noduerme 4y ago
I'm skeptical of this. People used to say that Windows viruses were much more common than Mac viruses because there were so many more PC users, the market share just made Windows a more attractive target. If this[1] is to be believed, in spite of its outsized footprint in recent supply chain hacks, Nodejs is still really only backing 1/20th the number of sites as PHP, and 1/7th as many as ASP. https://www.similartech.com/compare/nodejs-vs-php https://www.similartech.com/compare/nodejs-vs-php
- FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
  yeah but those PHP websites are mostly legacy stuff that would completely break if automatically updated to the latest version of any package whereas node.js is clearly dominant for new websites, and we all use hundreds/thousands of new packages every month without even giving it a second thought
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Is it clearly dominant? I work with both, and for original/personal stuff I'd rather work in Nodejs as a coder (especially if I'm also building the front end)... but I'm still happier as an admin running reliable old Apache/FPM stacks at scale, and that's where the majority of my jobs are. Granted I mostly code in a "boring" non-tech, retail industry these days, but PHP is almost all I deal with in corporate jobs. And supply chain attacks are just not a thing. One reason I asked this question is that I've never built a commercial Nodejs project from the ground up, just my own side projects which aren't particularly sensitive targets... but I'm trying to choose between Nodejs and PHP for a new client's business app which is somewhat sensitive. I'd be a lot more excited to write it in Nodejs, but looking down the road at having to maintain it securely for years I'm not sure. The Nodejs environment and keeping on top of dependencies feels risky right now in a way that's inclining me to use the old familiar PHP. It just struck me as I wrote this that there's a lot I do in PHP that's just part of the language or default plugins, where almost every one of those things requires choosing NPM packages in Nodejs. Even simple stuff like talking to a database or managing sessions or setting up sockets. And the NPM packages get deprecated and renamed, sometimes there are two with very similar names by different authors and it's easy to miss a dash or something. Maybe I'm answering my own question here..
    - FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
      I don't think stuff life talking to a database is actually the problem in Node.js, I think you can trust mongo/mysql packages in NPM just as much as in PHP if you choose the right versions parameters in your package.json. The packages/package manager are not the problem, it's more about the bad habits that you start to get when coding with Node/NPM, basically for every function you write, 9 times out of 10 you can just import a package after 1 import and a command, and so you start to have 200 potential liabilities because you became too lazy to code because it's really easy. But if you stay at least a bit vigilant it's just as safe to use Node.js(or even safer). I think it's really mostly about bad habits rather than the lack of functionality in the language.

by tored 4y ago

noduerme 4y ago

I'm skeptical of this. People used to say that Windows viruses were much more common than Mac viruses because there were so many more PC users, the market share just made Windows a more attractive target. If this[1] is to be believed, in spite of its outsized footprint in recent supply chain hacks, Nodejs is still really only backing 1/20th the number of sites as PHP, and 1/7th as many as ASP. https://www.similartech.com/compare/nodejs-vs-php https://www.similartech.com/compare/nodejs-vs-php

FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
yeah but those PHP websites are mostly legacy stuff that would completely break if automatically updated to the latest version of any package whereas node.js is clearly dominant for new websites, and we all use hundreds/thousands of new packages every month without even giving it a second thought
- noduerme 4y ago
  Is it clearly dominant? I work with both, and for original/personal stuff I'd rather work in Nodejs as a coder (especially if I'm also building the front end)... but I'm still happier as an admin running reliable old Apache/FPM stacks at scale, and that's where the majority of my jobs are. Granted I mostly code in a "boring" non-tech, retail industry these days, but PHP is almost all I deal with in corporate jobs. And supply chain attacks are just not a thing. One reason I asked this question is that I've never built a commercial Nodejs project from the ground up, just my own side projects which aren't particularly sensitive targets... but I'm trying to choose between Nodejs and PHP for a new client's business app which is somewhat sensitive. I'd be a lot more excited to write it in Nodejs, but looking down the road at having to maintain it securely for years I'm not sure. The Nodejs environment and keeping on top of dependencies feels risky right now in a way that's inclining me to use the old familiar PHP. It just struck me as I wrote this that there's a lot I do in PHP that's just part of the language or default plugins, where almost every one of those things requires choosing NPM packages in Nodejs. Even simple stuff like talking to a database or managing sessions or setting up sockets. And the NPM packages get deprecated and renamed, sometimes there are two with very similar names by different authors and it's easy to miss a dash or something. Maybe I'm answering my own question here..
  - FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
    I don't think stuff life talking to a database is actually the problem in Node.js, I think you can trust mongo/mysql packages in NPM just as much as in PHP if you choose the right versions parameters in your package.json. The packages/package manager are not the problem, it's more about the bad habits that you start to get when coding with Node/NPM, basically for every function you write, 9 times out of 10 you can just import a package after 1 import and a command, and so you start to have 200 potential liabilities because you became too lazy to code because it's really easy. But if you stay at least a bit vigilant it's just as safe to use Node.js(or even safer). I think it's really mostly about bad habits rather than the lack of functionality in the language.