9 ms·

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter

paulhauggis 15y ago
If you showed me things like this in Ruby or Java I would go just as crazy. Yes, PHP has its issues (so do all languages). But, if you are a good developer, you can write good code. Many people writing PHP apps aren't good developers.
- vicobt 15y ago
  "Many people writing php apps are not good developers" whats your definition of a good developer. I think different tools (langs) hv their strengths and weakness. The questn we should be asking is that why did we wait so long before d "php is broken" debate. Chosin d ryt tools 4 d ryt job is one way of knwin hw good a developer is but then again, hw does one chose d ryt tools wat r d tel tale signs.
- vicobt 15y ago
  "Many people writing php apps are not good developers" whats your definition of a good developer. I think different tools (langs) hv their strengths and weakness. The questn we should be asking is that why did we wait so long before d "php is broken" debate. Chosin d ryt tools 4 d ryt job is one way of knwin hw good a developer is but then again, hw does one chose d ryt tools wat r d tel tale signs.
polemic 15y ago
Note that this is a response to: EDIT: refer https://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/189571656522534913 https://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/18957165652253491... - Jeff's 4 year old response is still valid. http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... Jeff gets it right - the language is poorly designed, but it hasn't stopped PHP powering many of the biggest most important sites on the internet today. Banging on about the language's flaws [again] is not very interesting. What would be fascinating would be an attempt to understand why PHP remains so dominant despite the well-known flaws. Seriously - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php throws up so many pearls of WTF that you wonder how PHP could possibly be so important. And yet! Time to stop the PHP bashing. It's like comp.lang.js complaining about the flaws of jQuery (and, indeed, any JS library) and expounding the many and various reasons you should never use a third party library. The reality is: when the keyboard meets the road, stuff has to get done, and these are the tools that seem to work.
- bigiain 15y ago
  Note that Jeff's blogpost is almost 4 years old. Posting this to HN might have been a response to the veekun.com article, but that's not what it was written for…
  - polemic 15y ago
    Thanks, noted.
- cageface 15y ago
  This is the wrong way to think about it. Just because people can hop on one leg across the finish line doesn't mean that's a smart way to run a race. Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP? I think not. Javascript is different because we're stuck with it for historical reasons but there are so many better choices on the back end that there is absolutely no excuse to start new work in PHP. Similar negligence would be considered unprofessional in any other engineering discipline.
  - rimantas 15y ago
    > Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen > PHP? I think not. Can you elaborate, why you think so? PHP worked OK for Facebook and Wikipedia.
    - cageface 15y ago
      The time you don't waste fighting with the language and coding around its deficiencies is time you can spend improving existing features and adding new ones. If you're trying to run a lean startup with only three backend people like Instagram these effects are very important. Those three engineers could have coded something similar in PHP but I'll guarantee you it wouldn't have been as good. Facebook can afford to throw money at the problem and nobody's really trying to compete with Wikipedia so they can get away with it.
      - 15y ago
tangue 15y ago
"building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language." Amen.
ngokevin 15y ago
Sure, Facebook and Wikipedia are built on PHP, and they serve to very many happy users. But are the developers very happy? PHP works, but for most cases, there are better solutions, and we should strive for better. Just because some sites were successful in doing it doesn't mean 'PHP sucks' isn't a valid argument.
- JohnnyFlash 15y ago
  I'm fairly happy as a PHP developer. It pay's the bills... there are times when I am presented with a mess which makes me want to shoot myself in the face. However I am sure such messes can easily be created in other languages. PHP has a history of Spaghetti code and when I was learning it mashing mysql, php and html into the same file was 'the way to do it'. Today though PHP development revolves much more about OOP frameworks like Symfony and a good application structure. The thing that bugs me most is inconsistency in core functions. Is it functionname or function_name. Is it ($needle, $haystack) or ($haystack, $needle). However, it is a minor annoyance negated by a decent IDE.
nchuhoai 15y ago
>But the converse is also true: sufficiently talented coders >can write great applications in terrible languages, too. >It's a painful lesson, but an important one. >Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it. I'd say life is too short to write in terrible languages. Yes, PHP was once the language of choice and now that it glorious days are beginning to set, I don't think a little PHP bashing is too inappropriate. Speaking of PHP popularity, are there any notable startups that launched recently (<1 year) that used PHP? Given the popularity of Rails, Django, Node etc. it feels completely dead. On that side note, let me get back to my Java Server Pages assignment in college (I'm not even kidding).
it 15y ago
The article claims that YouTube is written in PHP. As someone who worked there, I can tell you it's not. YouTube is written mostly in Python plus some Go. Some of it is a mess, but that's beside the point.
- JohnnyFlash 15y ago
  You should have finished the paragraph >> (Update: While YouTube was originally written in PHP, it migrated to Python fairly early on, per Matt Cutts and Guido van Rossum.)
- evoxed 15y ago
  This was actually the reason why I started learning Python for web development. I can't remember how long ago it was, but I had spent months/years burying myself in PHP and hoping to see the light... after having a short affair with rails, Python was the language that called out to me from... eh, usenet probably. It seemed so simple and pleasant, yet with the performance to be powering the 'Tube.
  - sandwitch 15y ago
    do i understand you correctly - you found it harder to learn PHP because its so unorganized and inconsistent , and found Python easier to understand and learn than PHP ... anyone else here with similar experience ?
    - evoxed 15y ago
      Absolutely. I feel like I wasted some of my most able years fiddling with code that was complete garbage (my fault) and not learning much of anything because I was constantly looking for explanations of, well, everything. Granted, I was young, foolish, and accepted what everyone was saying ("All you need for webdev is PHP... shhhh shhhh"). I didn't really 'get' programming due to all that. But Python was a breath of fresh air, and while I'm no expert I feel much better for it even while going through snippets of PHP. Basically, I saw PHP as the pragmatic solution to programming for the web. Problem was I didn't really understand programming until Python showed me the light, and while I'm much happier now using and [still] learning C I found it to be an immense help.
ryannielsen 15y ago
Things that don't matter: - OS - Language - Compiler - Runtime - Editor - Testing process - Deployment process - Bug management systems The thing that does matter: - Building something successful that people want Frankly, I don't care what language you used to build it. I don't care what shoddy infrastructure supports it. I don't care what hacks you put into place to scale that infrastructure. You know why? Because your customers don't care. They just care that the thing you built works. So just build something successful that people want. And do it however you want.
- pjmlp 15y ago
  This is the right attitude. If you want to do business that is how it is supposed to work. The customer won't care less how the product was developed, and if he cares, he will be defining the tools anyway.
- cageface 15y ago
  These are two different questions: 1. Should I care what successful product X was written in? 2. What influence does my choice of language have on the success of my product.
- Joeboy 15y ago
  That's absolutely right. I've established that there's a market for digging trenches for subterranean cables, and my decision to use teaspoons instead of pneumatic drills and mechanical diggers has no bearing whatsoever on my venture's prospects.
  - ryanwaggoner 15y ago
    That would be a very valid analogy if no other trenches had been dug with teaspoons, but a high percentage have, including some of the largest and most successful.
    - Joeboy 15y ago
      The analogy wasn't particularly about PHP, it was about tools. It might be true that the choice of tool is irrelevant to an end user, investor or other person that's not capable of or interested in judging the tool's merits, but if you're actually trying to build something the choice of tool matters quite a lot. The fact ryannielson doesn't know or care what I do all day doesn't help me get stuff done. Epilogue: The company I work for recently bought a Content Management System / web framework for half a million bucks, then spent another half a million bucks trying to make it work, then abandoned it in favour of the system we were running before. I think the decision to go with that tool was a poor one.
eurohacker 15y ago
do you know any NEW major startups that have been built with PHP, say the same age as Instagram - 2 years http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/rh3u2/any_new_major_startups_built_with_php/ http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/rh3u2/any_new_major_sta...
dageshi 15y ago
I've always thought that php was the script equivalent of c, in as much as it'll run anywhere and any library that's ever been written will probably have a version that works in it. Perhaps those two factors alone outweigh all the others?
Tichy 15y ago
What surprises me is that "they" can find talented programmers who are willing to code PHP.
- greyfade 15y ago
  They don't. They find a lot of "programmers" who can hammer out PHP. The talented programmers who end up writing PHP don't do it because it was their first choice. It was probably their tenth. Or twentieth. PHP is one of those tools that you can find a lot of people who know how to use it. Certainly not all of them are actually talented or even competent. But there's a lot of them. I think the article's conclusion is misguided.
hk_kh 15y ago
If you think about it, there are two noticeable motives that put PHP where it is: - The language has been made and (poorly?) designed around the web. While PHP is a language itself, it usually has no purpose outside the web, while Python and Ruby do not address the same problems the same way. - Deployment is easy. And yet, it seems all these articles fail at noticing these two simple things.
foolinator 15y ago
Like it or hate it, PHP stack is easy to start coding webpages if all you know is HTML. PHP is an easy to enter arena. Memorizing APIs is easier than Computer Science. But PHP works fine with CS concepts. But it also offers a shit ton of commands that allow for both styles to mingle (often times, not nicely). I'm sick of "your language sucks" arguments. There's good in all of them.
guelo 15y ago
The TIOBE index shows PHP's popularity began declining two years ago. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.html
- kdizza 15y ago
  Apparently Ruby peaked 3 years ago: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html And I don't know what to make of Python: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Python.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Python.html
dasil003 15y ago
PHP is the textbook example of worse is better. It shows two important things: 1. The success of a programming language has nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with raw capability, ie. what does the language make dramatically easier. 2. Technical warts will not prevent great things from being done in a language. It's certainly true that Haskell will not allow you write as broken a piece of software as PHP, but in many cases you can write something just as elegant in PHP as you can in Haskell (laziness/pattern-matching/type-inference notwithstanding). Now, personally I will do my best to ever write any PHP again, and if someone asks me my opinion I'll tell them that I believe using PHP exclusively will stunt your growth as a software craftsmen. But those are just opinions. I don't feel the need to go out and advocate against PHP because the software communities where I devote my attention are doing just fine. If somebody likes PHP then more power to them, it certainly won't prevent them from doing great things.
olavk 15y ago
Many both pro and con PHP articles are missing the point about PHP. PHP is a great success in spite of its obvious shortcomings because it supports iterative development. (Saying that language choice is less important for a project than other factors doesn't explain anything - all other things being equal, a language with fewer traps and idiosyncrasies would be the better choice.) The killer feature of PHP is that you can FTP to the server and start adding arbitrary code to a static html file by adding a single tag. Other frameworks deliberately makes this more complicated with more overhead, because they want to promote a better architecture with separation of concerns and so on. Basically these frameworks have "encoded" the waterfall-method, because they assume you know from the start that you need a complex site. PHP supports iterative improvement from the simplest site (static HTML files on a server) to arbitrary complex code, without requiring major speedbumps where you have to rethink the whole app. This also mirrors how many web developers have learnt to code - starts out with making html/css, then gradually learn php by inserting simple snippets of code to make banner rotate and so on. (The "right way" of course would be to take a pause for a few years to get a CS degree before adding the banner rotator.) When an app grows beyond a certain level of complexity, changing to a better platform might improve quality, but then you have already made an investment in existing code.
- crazygringo 15y ago
  Thank you! Iterative development is key. Out of any language I've ever used, PHP has most allowed me to just get stuff done fast. It certainly isn't elegant, but it works. And even as you grow and scale up, as long as you constantly refactor at critical moments, you can avoid spaghetti code just fine.
nl 15y ago
PHP is like English: a mutated fugly cockroach of a language that defies logical explanation, contains more exceptions to any syntax rule than the rule covers and yet its very ugliness is also its strength: you can always, always find someone who can work in it. Don't underestimate how useful it is that anyone can come along and hate your codebase just as much as you do in a very short period of time.
NameNickHN 15y ago
I don't see why a couple of badly named functions can make a whole language crappy. All those people bashing PHP suffer from some kind of superior complex. It's like bullies beating up the ugly nerdy kid that has glasses and pimples. Or maybe it's just envy that something, that might not win the next language design contest can be so popular. To all the PHP haters out there: hate away. I don't care. All the other PHP programmers making a living don't care. Mark Zuckerberg clearly doesn't care. It's time to grow up, people.
FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
It does matter when you have to work on an existing PHP project that makes throwing yourself off a bridge seem an attractive proposition. Yeah, it's not entirely the language that is to blame - the language didn't design and code the project after all - but its own design makes it too easy to create stuff that will really punish more seasoned developers later on. That it powers some popular products or websites isn't entirely relevant, unless we're saying that Wordpress, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc. are popular because they were written in PHP.
LoneWolf 15y ago
After reading through the comments I have to leave my comment about PHP. I have been developing in PHP, Java, and a little of C#, I also have done a few things with Python. From my exprience it does not matter what language I'm using, it's just a matter of syntax and knowing the language. My personal preference goes to PHP or Java, and while Python is nice I can't stand the whitespace thing, I like to be able to write my code without thinking about how it looks, only after its written I care about the look for later reading (in my case tell my IDE to make it pretty, by hand its boring but easy too). While C# as a language is good for me, the msdn documentation sometimes seems rather lacking when compared to PHP or Java and in the case of Java the exceptions it thrown (btw if someone knows where there is a reference for the exceptions a method throws in C# please tell me, I can't find them in msdn). Yes PHP has its frustrations and quirks, but it is possible to write well structured code for web applications and separating everything using MVC. Same applies to Java or C#, Python etc. Don't like it? Stop caring about it.
hcarvalhoalves 15y ago
When you say Wikipedia, Digg, Wordpress, Facebook, et all were all written in PHP, it doesn't mean a thing. All those use PHP simply because when they started PHP was the best thing available. Nowadays this is not a matter of "it gets the job done" anymore (e.g., Facebook paid $1b for a site that runs of Django).
debacle 15y ago
As someone who has written PHP for years, I would say it's starting to matter. The inability for PHP to adapt in a speedy fashion to new programming trends, the continuous implementation of features in a half-assed fashion (namespaces, anonymous functions, etc), and the unwillingness to even attempt to clean up the standard library have begun to marginalize PHP. It's now easier and faster to get up and running with JavaScript or even Ruby, and these languages have more internal consistency than PHP, meaning that long-term they will see more skilled developers using them and thus will eventually have more and better libraries than PHP. In addition, the JVM has reached a point where languages like Scala can compete, and apart from the initial cost, C#/.NET will actually save you money in the long term. So, in short, while PHP is just fine as a language and I use and abuse it every day, I have a feeling that we will be seeing its twilight sooner rather than later, unless something like HPHP takes center stage, breaks backwards compatibility, and shakes up the ecosystem enough to revitalize the language.
howeyc 15y ago
"If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?" The same reason that Excel vba sucks so badly but is powering so much of internal company "applications." A lot of these sites are first started by a small group of people, looking to get something working ASAP. They do what is easiest, setup LAMP and get hacking. At the time, it's the quickest way to getting something workable. Inevitably, you end up with a similar situation as you do when your BA takes it upon himself to create an indespensible excel vba spreadsheet. The cost of redoing it in something better is hard to justify, because atleast the current application works. Even though you know it has reached a point where having it as a real application would probably be best since so much of your company relies on its information and analysis. So here we are, stuck with a shitload of crap written in PHP and Excel VBA, but it doesn't matter. Because all that crap works, and that's the goal. Not maintainability, elegance, programming cred, etc.
PaulHoule 15y ago
Any critic of PHP who advocates other languages, like Ruby, Python or Java has to answer a question "Where are the apps?" PHP has accomplished code reuse on the app level: applications like Wordpress and Drupal are world class and you just can't find installable web apps in other languages that have reached anywhere near the level of success. Occasionally you find an app in another language and generally it doesn't have the fit-and-finish that the successful PHP apps have. Other languages, on the other hand, grow frameworks like cancer cells, and I wonder what disease they have that prevents these frameworks from being actually usable to build apps.
- Pewpewarrows 15y ago
  The only reason Wordpress and Drupal became successful is because PHP is present on basically every shared host you can find on the internet. They stayed successful by building a community of plugins and themes. The actual internals of both are a complete mess, and trying to get them to do anything outside of trivial blog hosting and content management is a nightmare. Just because you don't know of any Python/Ruby/Java "apps" doesn't mean they don't exist. Jenkins, Redmine, Trac, etc.
  - PaulHoule 15y ago
    Note that all three examples of yours are software project management systems. That's a very narrow segment of the market. You've also got to ask the question of why PHP is so widespread compared to the others.
hackermom 15y ago
Too much comp-sci attitude, too little coder attitude.
j45 15y ago
The religious wars over the interpretation of languages needs some serious self-reflection. There is so much confusion between a language and a framework. Blindingly. The religions of one language compare their experience, due to a framework, with another language without using a framework. How does this make sense? As a non day to day PHP developer: - The Web, as a platform is relatively a baby, compared to platforms like PCs, going back to mainframes. - I feel for too many devs, the relationship to production code that is more than a few years old seems foreign, especially to those who have joined the Web in the past 5 to 7 years. - Most languages used on the web, were not designed for the Web, first. Instead, most languages have a framework to extend a language to the Web. On Languages: - Having seen sites built without a framework in many languages leads me to wonder: Why do we act horrified at old code? It seems reasonable that our old ways of thinking would improve, maybe even be expected for the level of intelligence on hn. - Most languages now a days have capable Web frameworks. Instead of focusing on advocating for the use of a framework, we keep the discussion at a much more surface level, like which language. - Language is merely syntax. Granted some languages are interpreted to be more eloquent/elegant/efficient than others. Yet the language we all speak, English is the most universal and in a way quite hacked up. Yet we don't take any upfront to bash fellow developers instead of supporting the use of frameworks today so in 5 years, the next batch of people who know lots don't look back and find less fault in todays perfection. - I'm at a loss to try and argue one language is the way. It isn't. Nor is one framework. But if your language of choice is not natively made for the Web, make sure you use a framework. Add a beginner it might be one kind, advanced developers can likely pick something else. - A mess can be made in every language. What's our point, really, when we can't see the forest while so obsessed with the trees? On Code: - All code older than a year starts to become legacy. - I'm not sure if we really understand old code was often written with less foresight than we have today. It didn't make the tools obsolete, as much as old thinking obsolete. - There will be new things coming out all the time, few last. As much as it's fun to go on a language witch hunt, we have our own skeletons waiting for us as our projects live on longer and longer. - with the Web in it's infancy, is be surprised if 30% of developers have a relationship with 10 year old code at all let alone with code that still is in use on the Web. It's great that we can do things the new way, but we'll always have a growing history of code to maintain a relationship with. - PHP might suck along with a lot of other languages, but I hope we consider whether the lens we live we see ourselves thought couldn't use some improvement. On Frameworks: - Every problem someone had with a language is more likely a problem with not having used a framework, instead of the language itself. - For those learning coding, learn it from someone who had good habits and thought processes, those are the things that are the most important to have as the language de jour makes it's rounds. Having the transferable skills of decently evolving application design between languages and frameworks will forever leaving. From where I see it, most languages now have capable frameworks, and all languages have capable developers. Please stop the witch hunts. The amount of vile filth spread about others preferences compared to your preferences based on 10 year old experience and hearsay of a particular language to this developer, is akin to believing and propagating a nasty stereotype about a particular culture or nationality without learning for yourself. It's not that much different than being that ignant. Developers, let's continue discussing, but more importantly educating and spreading the wisdom of good practices in all the communities we participate in so there's more of us. Let's spend less time talking trash about others based in hearsay, interpretation and preferences in language, and instead build stuff people want, because we really can make the world a better place with software. 0.05
robwgibbons 15y ago
YouTube is actually written mostly in Python.

If you showed me things like this in Ruby or Java I would go just as crazy. Yes, PHP has its issues (so do all languages). But, if you are a good developer, you can write good code. Many people writing PHP apps aren't good developers.

vicobt 15y ago
"Many people writing php apps are not good developers" whats your definition of a good developer. I think different tools (langs) hv their strengths and weakness. The questn we should be asking is that why did we wait so long before d "php is broken" debate. Chosin d ryt tools 4 d ryt job is one way of knwin hw good a developer is but then again, hw does one chose d ryt tools wat r d tel tale signs.
vicobt 15y ago
"Many people writing php apps are not good developers" whats your definition of a good developer. I think different tools (langs) hv their strengths and weakness. The questn we should be asking is that why did we wait so long before d "php is broken" debate. Chosin d ryt tools 4 d ryt job is one way of knwin hw good a developer is but then again, hw does one chose d ryt tools wat r d tel tale signs.

polemic 15y ago

Note that this is a response to: EDIT: refer https://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/189571656522534913 https://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/18957165652253491... - Jeff's 4 year old response is still valid. http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... Jeff gets it right - the language is poorly designed, but it hasn't stopped PHP powering many of the biggest most important sites on the internet today. Banging on about the language's flaws [again] is not very interesting. What would be fascinating would be an attempt to understand why PHP remains so dominant despite the well-known flaws. Seriously - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php throws up so many pearls of WTF that you wonder how PHP could possibly be so important. And yet! Time to stop the PHP bashing. It's like comp.lang.js complaining about the flaws of jQuery (and, indeed, any JS library) and expounding the many and various reasons you should never use a third party library. The reality is: when the keyboard meets the road, stuff has to get done, and these are the tools that seem to work.

bigiain 15y ago
Note that Jeff's blogpost is almost 4 years old. Posting this to HN might have been a response to the veekun.com article, but that's not what it was written for…
- polemic 15y ago
  Thanks, noted.
cageface 15y ago
This is the wrong way to think about it. Just because people can hop on one leg across the finish line doesn't mean that's a smart way to run a race. Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP? I think not. Javascript is different because we're stuck with it for historical reasons but there are so many better choices on the back end that there is absolutely no excuse to start new work in PHP. Similar negligence would be considered unprofessional in any other engineering discipline.
- rimantas 15y ago
  > Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen > PHP? I think not. Can you elaborate, why you think so? PHP worked OK for Facebook and Wikipedia.
  - cageface 15y ago
    The time you don't waste fighting with the language and coding around its deficiencies is time you can spend improving existing features and adding new ones. If you're trying to run a lean startup with only three backend people like Instagram these effects are very important. Those three engineers could have coded something similar in PHP but I'll guarantee you it wouldn't have been as good. Facebook can afford to throw money at the problem and nobody's really trying to compete with Wikipedia so they can get away with it.
    - 15y ago

tangue 15y ago

"building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language." Amen.

ngokevin 15y ago

Sure, Facebook and Wikipedia are built on PHP, and they serve to very many happy users. But are the developers very happy? PHP works, but for most cases, there are better solutions, and we should strive for better. Just because some sites were successful in doing it doesn't mean 'PHP sucks' isn't a valid argument.

JohnnyFlash 15y ago
I'm fairly happy as a PHP developer. It pay's the bills... there are times when I am presented with a mess which makes me want to shoot myself in the face. However I am sure such messes can easily be created in other languages. PHP has a history of Spaghetti code and when I was learning it mashing mysql, php and html into the same file was 'the way to do it'. Today though PHP development revolves much more about OOP frameworks like Symfony and a good application structure. The thing that bugs me most is inconsistency in core functions. Is it functionname or function_name. Is it ($needle, $haystack) or ($haystack, $needle). However, it is a minor annoyance negated by a decent IDE.

nchuhoai 15y ago

>But the converse is also true: sufficiently talented coders >can write great applications in terrible languages, too. >It's a painful lesson, but an important one. >Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it. I'd say life is too short to write in terrible languages. Yes, PHP was once the language of choice and now that it glorious days are beginning to set, I don't think a little PHP bashing is too inappropriate. Speaking of PHP popularity, are there any notable startups that launched recently (<1 year) that used PHP? Given the popularity of Rails, Django, Node etc. it feels completely dead. On that side note, let me get back to my Java Server Pages assignment in college (I'm not even kidding).

it 15y ago

The article claims that YouTube is written in PHP. As someone who worked there, I can tell you it's not. YouTube is written mostly in Python plus some Go. Some of it is a mess, but that's beside the point.

JohnnyFlash 15y ago
You should have finished the paragraph >> (Update: While YouTube was originally written in PHP, it migrated to Python fairly early on, per Matt Cutts and Guido van Rossum.)
evoxed 15y ago
This was actually the reason why I started learning Python for web development. I can't remember how long ago it was, but I had spent months/years burying myself in PHP and hoping to see the light... after having a short affair with rails, Python was the language that called out to me from... eh, usenet probably. It seemed so simple and pleasant, yet with the performance to be powering the 'Tube.
- sandwitch 15y ago
  do i understand you correctly - you found it harder to learn PHP because its so unorganized and inconsistent , and found Python easier to understand and learn than PHP ... anyone else here with similar experience ?
  - evoxed 15y ago
    Absolutely. I feel like I wasted some of my most able years fiddling with code that was complete garbage (my fault) and not learning much of anything because I was constantly looking for explanations of, well, everything. Granted, I was young, foolish, and accepted what everyone was saying ("All you need for webdev is PHP... shhhh shhhh"). I didn't really 'get' programming due to all that. But Python was a breath of fresh air, and while I'm no expert I feel much better for it even while going through snippets of PHP. Basically, I saw PHP as the pragmatic solution to programming for the web. Problem was I didn't really understand programming until Python showed me the light, and while I'm much happier now using and [still] learning C I found it to be an immense help.

ryannielsen 15y ago

Things that don't matter: - OS - Language - Compiler - Runtime - Editor - Testing process - Deployment process - Bug management systems The thing that does matter: - Building something successful that people want Frankly, I don't care what language you used to build it. I don't care what shoddy infrastructure supports it. I don't care what hacks you put into place to scale that infrastructure. You know why? Because your customers don't care. They just care that the thing you built works. So just build something successful that people want. And do it however you want.

pjmlp 15y ago
This is the right attitude. If you want to do business that is how it is supposed to work. The customer won't care less how the product was developed, and if he cares, he will be defining the tools anyway.
cageface 15y ago
These are two different questions: 1. Should I care what successful product X was written in? 2. What influence does my choice of language have on the success of my product.
Joeboy 15y ago
That's absolutely right. I've established that there's a market for digging trenches for subterranean cables, and my decision to use teaspoons instead of pneumatic drills and mechanical diggers has no bearing whatsoever on my venture's prospects.
- ryanwaggoner 15y ago
  That would be a very valid analogy if no other trenches had been dug with teaspoons, but a high percentage have, including some of the largest and most successful.
  - Joeboy 15y ago
    The analogy wasn't particularly about PHP, it was about tools. It might be true that the choice of tool is irrelevant to an end user, investor or other person that's not capable of or interested in judging the tool's merits, but if you're actually trying to build something the choice of tool matters quite a lot. The fact ryannielson doesn't know or care what I do all day doesn't help me get stuff done. Epilogue: The company I work for recently bought a Content Management System / web framework for half a million bucks, then spent another half a million bucks trying to make it work, then abandoned it in favour of the system we were running before. I think the decision to go with that tool was a poor one.

eurohacker 15y ago

do you know any NEW major startups that have been built with PHP, say the same age as Instagram - 2 years http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/rh3u2/any_new_major_startups_built_with_php/ http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/rh3u2/any_new_major_sta...

dageshi 15y ago

I've always thought that php was the script equivalent of c, in as much as it'll run anywhere and any library that's ever been written will probably have a version that works in it. Perhaps those two factors alone outweigh all the others?

Tichy 15y ago

What surprises me is that "they" can find talented programmers who are willing to code PHP.

greyfade 15y ago
They don't. They find a lot of "programmers" who can hammer out PHP. The talented programmers who end up writing PHP don't do it because it was their first choice. It was probably their tenth. Or twentieth. PHP is one of those tools that you can find a lot of people who know how to use it. Certainly not all of them are actually talented or even competent. But there's a lot of them. I think the article's conclusion is misguided.

hk_kh 15y ago

If you think about it, there are two noticeable motives that put PHP where it is: - The language has been made and (poorly?) designed around the web. While PHP is a language itself, it usually has no purpose outside the web, while Python and Ruby do not address the same problems the same way. - Deployment is easy. And yet, it seems all these articles fail at noticing these two simple things.

foolinator 15y ago

Like it or hate it, PHP stack is easy to start coding webpages if all you know is HTML. PHP is an easy to enter arena. Memorizing APIs is easier than Computer Science. But PHP works fine with CS concepts. But it also offers a shit ton of commands that allow for both styles to mingle (often times, not nicely). I'm sick of "your language sucks" arguments. There's good in all of them.

guelo 15y ago

The TIOBE index shows PHP's popularity began declining two years ago. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.html

kdizza 15y ago
Apparently Ruby peaked 3 years ago: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html And I don't know what to make of Python: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Python.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Python.html

dasil003 15y ago

PHP is the textbook example of worse is better. It shows two important things: 1. The success of a programming language has nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with raw capability, ie. what does the language make dramatically easier. 2. Technical warts will not prevent great things from being done in a language. It's certainly true that Haskell will not allow you write as broken a piece of software as PHP, but in many cases you can write something just as elegant in PHP as you can in Haskell (laziness/pattern-matching/type-inference notwithstanding). Now, personally I will do my best to ever write any PHP again, and if someone asks me my opinion I'll tell them that I believe using PHP exclusively will stunt your growth as a software craftsmen. But those are just opinions. I don't feel the need to go out and advocate against PHP because the software communities where I devote my attention are doing just fine. If somebody likes PHP then more power to them, it certainly won't prevent them from doing great things.

olavk 15y ago

Many both pro and con PHP articles are missing the point about PHP. PHP is a great success in spite of its obvious shortcomings because it supports iterative development. (Saying that language choice is less important for a project than other factors doesn't explain anything - all other things being equal, a language with fewer traps and idiosyncrasies would be the better choice.) The killer feature of PHP is that you can FTP to the server and start adding arbitrary code to a static html file by adding a single tag. Other frameworks deliberately makes this more complicated with more overhead, because they want to promote a better architecture with separation of concerns and so on. Basically these frameworks have "encoded" the waterfall-method, because they assume you know from the start that you need a complex site. PHP supports iterative improvement from the simplest site (static HTML files on a server) to arbitrary complex code, without requiring major speedbumps where you have to rethink the whole app. This also mirrors how many web developers have learnt to code - starts out with making html/css, then gradually learn php by inserting simple snippets of code to make banner rotate and so on. (The "right way" of course would be to take a pause for a few years to get a CS degree before adding the banner rotator.) When an app grows beyond a certain level of complexity, changing to a better platform might improve quality, but then you have already made an investment in existing code.

crazygringo 15y ago
Thank you! Iterative development is key. Out of any language I've ever used, PHP has most allowed me to just get stuff done fast. It certainly isn't elegant, but it works. And even as you grow and scale up, as long as you constantly refactor at critical moments, you can avoid spaghetti code just fine.

nl 15y ago

PHP is like English: a mutated fugly cockroach of a language that defies logical explanation, contains more exceptions to any syntax rule than the rule covers and yet its very ugliness is also its strength: you can always, always find someone who can work in it. Don't underestimate how useful it is that anyone can come along and hate your codebase just as much as you do in a very short period of time.

NameNickHN 15y ago

I don't see why a couple of badly named functions can make a whole language crappy. All those people bashing PHP suffer from some kind of superior complex. It's like bullies beating up the ugly nerdy kid that has glasses and pimples. Or maybe it's just envy that something, that might not win the next language design contest can be so popular. To all the PHP haters out there: hate away. I don't care. All the other PHP programmers making a living don't care. Mark Zuckerberg clearly doesn't care. It's time to grow up, people.

FuzzyDunlop 15y ago

It does matter when you have to work on an existing PHP project that makes throwing yourself off a bridge seem an attractive proposition. Yeah, it's not entirely the language that is to blame - the language didn't design and code the project after all - but its own design makes it too easy to create stuff that will really punish more seasoned developers later on. That it powers some popular products or websites isn't entirely relevant, unless we're saying that Wordpress, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc. are popular because they were written in PHP.

LoneWolf 15y ago

After reading through the comments I have to leave my comment about PHP. I have been developing in PHP, Java, and a little of C#, I also have done a few things with Python. From my exprience it does not matter what language I'm using, it's just a matter of syntax and knowing the language. My personal preference goes to PHP or Java, and while Python is nice I can't stand the whitespace thing, I like to be able to write my code without thinking about how it looks, only after its written I care about the look for later reading (in my case tell my IDE to make it pretty, by hand its boring but easy too). While C# as a language is good for me, the msdn documentation sometimes seems rather lacking when compared to PHP or Java and in the case of Java the exceptions it thrown (btw if someone knows where there is a reference for the exceptions a method throws in C# please tell me, I can't find them in msdn). Yes PHP has its frustrations and quirks, but it is possible to write well structured code for web applications and separating everything using MVC. Same applies to Java or C#, Python etc. Don't like it? Stop caring about it.

hcarvalhoalves 15y ago

When you say Wikipedia, Digg, Wordpress, Facebook, et all were all written in PHP, it doesn't mean a thing. All those use PHP simply because when they started PHP was the best thing available. Nowadays this is not a matter of "it gets the job done" anymore (e.g., Facebook paid $1b for a site that runs of Django).

debacle 15y ago

As someone who has written PHP for years, I would say it's starting to matter. The inability for PHP to adapt in a speedy fashion to new programming trends, the continuous implementation of features in a half-assed fashion (namespaces, anonymous functions, etc), and the unwillingness to even attempt to clean up the standard library have begun to marginalize PHP. It's now easier and faster to get up and running with JavaScript or even Ruby, and these languages have more internal consistency than PHP, meaning that long-term they will see more skilled developers using them and thus will eventually have more and better libraries than PHP. In addition, the JVM has reached a point where languages like Scala can compete, and apart from the initial cost, C#/.NET will actually save you money in the long term. So, in short, while PHP is just fine as a language and I use and abuse it every day, I have a feeling that we will be seeing its twilight sooner rather than later, unless something like HPHP takes center stage, breaks backwards compatibility, and shakes up the ecosystem enough to revitalize the language.

howeyc 15y ago

"If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?" The same reason that Excel vba sucks so badly but is powering so much of internal company "applications." A lot of these sites are first started by a small group of people, looking to get something working ASAP. They do what is easiest, setup LAMP and get hacking. At the time, it's the quickest way to getting something workable. Inevitably, you end up with a similar situation as you do when your BA takes it upon himself to create an indespensible excel vba spreadsheet. The cost of redoing it in something better is hard to justify, because atleast the current application works. Even though you know it has reached a point where having it as a real application would probably be best since so much of your company relies on its information and analysis. So here we are, stuck with a shitload of crap written in PHP and Excel VBA, but it doesn't matter. Because all that crap works, and that's the goal. Not maintainability, elegance, programming cred, etc.

PaulHoule 15y ago

Any critic of PHP who advocates other languages, like Ruby, Python or Java has to answer a question "Where are the apps?" PHP has accomplished code reuse on the app level: applications like Wordpress and Drupal are world class and you just can't find installable web apps in other languages that have reached anywhere near the level of success. Occasionally you find an app in another language and generally it doesn't have the fit-and-finish that the successful PHP apps have. Other languages, on the other hand, grow frameworks like cancer cells, and I wonder what disease they have that prevents these frameworks from being actually usable to build apps.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago
The only reason Wordpress and Drupal became successful is because PHP is present on basically every shared host you can find on the internet. They stayed successful by building a community of plugins and themes. The actual internals of both are a complete mess, and trying to get them to do anything outside of trivial blog hosting and content management is a nightmare. Just because you don't know of any Python/Ruby/Java "apps" doesn't mean they don't exist. Jenkins, Redmine, Trac, etc.
- PaulHoule 15y ago
  Note that all three examples of yours are software project management systems. That's a very narrow segment of the market. You've also got to ask the question of why PHP is so widespread compared to the others.

hackermom 15y ago

Too much comp-sci attitude, too little coder attitude.

j45 15y ago

The religious wars over the interpretation of languages needs some serious self-reflection. There is so much confusion between a language and a framework. Blindingly. The religions of one language compare their experience, due to a framework, with another language without using a framework. How does this make sense? As a non day to day PHP developer: - The Web, as a platform is relatively a baby, compared to platforms like PCs, going back to mainframes. - I feel for too many devs, the relationship to production code that is more than a few years old seems foreign, especially to those who have joined the Web in the past 5 to 7 years. - Most languages used on the web, were not designed for the Web, first. Instead, most languages have a framework to extend a language to the Web. On Languages: - Having seen sites built without a framework in many languages leads me to wonder: Why do we act horrified at old code? It seems reasonable that our old ways of thinking would improve, maybe even be expected for the level of intelligence on hn. - Most languages now a days have capable Web frameworks. Instead of focusing on advocating for the use of a framework, we keep the discussion at a much more surface level, like which language. - Language is merely syntax. Granted some languages are interpreted to be more eloquent/elegant/efficient than others. Yet the language we all speak, English is the most universal and in a way quite hacked up. Yet we don't take any upfront to bash fellow developers instead of supporting the use of frameworks today so in 5 years, the next batch of people who know lots don't look back and find less fault in todays perfection. - I'm at a loss to try and argue one language is the way. It isn't. Nor is one framework. But if your language of choice is not natively made for the Web, make sure you use a framework. Add a beginner it might be one kind, advanced developers can likely pick something else. - A mess can be made in every language. What's our point, really, when we can't see the forest while so obsessed with the trees? On Code: - All code older than a year starts to become legacy. - I'm not sure if we really understand old code was often written with less foresight than we have today. It didn't make the tools obsolete, as much as old thinking obsolete. - There will be new things coming out all the time, few last. As much as it's fun to go on a language witch hunt, we have our own skeletons waiting for us as our projects live on longer and longer. - with the Web in it's infancy, is be surprised if 30% of developers have a relationship with 10 year old code at all let alone with code that still is in use on the Web. It's great that we can do things the new way, but we'll always have a growing history of code to maintain a relationship with. - PHP might suck along with a lot of other languages, but I hope we consider whether the lens we live we see ourselves thought couldn't use some improvement. On Frameworks: - Every problem someone had with a language is more likely a problem with not having used a framework, instead of the language itself. - For those learning coding, learn it from someone who had good habits and thought processes, those are the things that are the most important to have as the language de jour makes it's rounds. Having the transferable skills of decently evolving application design between languages and frameworks will forever leaving. From where I see it, most languages now have capable frameworks, and all languages have capable developers. Please stop the witch hunts. The amount of vile filth spread about others preferences compared to your preferences based on 10 year old experience and hearsay of a particular language to this developer, is akin to believing and propagating a nasty stereotype about a particular culture or nationality without learning for yourself. It's not that much different than being that ignant. Developers, let's continue discussing, but more importantly educating and spreading the wisdom of good practices in all the communities we participate in so there's more of us. Let's spend less time talking trash about others based in hearsay, interpretation and preferences in language, and instead build stuff people want, because we really can make the world a better place with software. 0.05

robwgibbons 15y ago

YouTube is actually written mostly in Python.