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I've been using PHP for well over 10 years, and I love this thing. It seems like most commenters take this as a snub to PHP, I don't see it that way at all. Not

by roel_v 15y ago

I've been using PHP for well over 10 years, and I love this thing. It seems like most commenters take this as a snub to PHP, I don't see it that way at all. Note that the guy who made this is also a PHP dev and has been for a long time.

nikhildaga 15y ago
http://news.php.net/php.internals/58385 http://news.php.net/php.internals/58385
- evoxed 15y ago
  I would prepare for some pictures of "duct tape and bailing wire... [that] we love it for...", if only I could imagine it could be done as creatively as the above hammer. But you know, the more I read these analogies the more I'm beginning to like PHP, not as something to work with but as that second cousin you met once at a family gathering and remember as being odd but nice and a funny guy.
maratd 15y ago
> I've been using PHP for well over 10 years, and I love this thing. You're not alone. There are many of us. PHP powers the Internet, period. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. You can whine all you want about this and that, but you can't argue with success. As far as hammers go, I had my wife make me a stuffed PHP elephant! It's on my desk right now.
- chrisbroadfoot 15y ago
  Period? C powers the Internet, period. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. You can whine all you want about this and that, but you can't argue with success.
  - skrebbel 15y ago
    Yeah yeah smart kid. And x86 machine code, and transistors, and electrons. And sand, and don't forget about the high-tech machines that were used to make the chips.
    - ktizo 15y ago
      Kittens power the internet, everybody knows that.
  - maratd 15y ago
    > C powers the Internet, period. PHP is written in C. So, yeah, I guess that's true.
    - SimHacker 15y ago
      Hey stop unfairly dissing C! It's perfectly possible to implement well designed programming languages in C. Blame the programmer, not the implementation language, for PHP's atrocities. It's not Dennis Ritchie's fault -- Rasmus Lerdorf deserves the blame.
- buu700 15y ago
  PHP powers the Internet, period. That's a bit strong; I would even say it borders on being outright false no matter how you meant it. PHP is convenient for bashing out quick server-side scripts, but it doesn't "power the Internet" any more than any other language does. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. You can whine all you want about this and that, but you can't argue with success. "Success"? You say it as though the use of PHP were in any way consequential to the success of those projects. Wordpress and Drupal, maybe, but Wikipedia and Facebook are squarely business successes more than anything. I'm not saying PHP is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be (though I personally think it is), but the fact that a company like Facebook uses PHP (and in fact has poured millions into desperately engineering around its many faults) isn't exactly a shining testament to the virtue of the language (any more than a hypothetical Company X using COBOL internally would make COBOL a better language). See: * http://www.quora.com/Would-Facebooks-maintenance-costs-be-lower-if-it-had-been-coded-in-Python-or-Ruby-rather-than-PHP http://www.quora.com/Would-Facebooks-maintenance-costs-be-lo... * http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choose-Python-for-its-development http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choo... * http://www.quora.com/Do-Facebook-engineers-enjoy-programming-in-PHP http://www.quora.com/Do-Facebook-engineers-enjoy-programming...
  - SimHacker 15y ago
    Most people who praise the fact that Wikipedia and other software is written in PHP have never actually taken a good look at the source code and tried to do anything with it. Care to discuss the design and architecture of the Mediawiki parser and template system, and what its history and future look like?
    - neilk 15y ago
      Oh, I will! I am a proud colleague and friend of the guy that made this hammer. The future of MediaWiki's parser and templating system won't be PHP. It will be Node.JS. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid
- jhuni 15y ago
  There are many of us. PHP powers the Internet, period. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. There is a difference between the web and the internet. The Internet is powered by computer networking hardware, on the on the other hand, the web is powered by utter crap like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and of course PHP.
- bigiain 15y ago
  "… but you can't argue with success." McDonalds sells more meals than French Laundry. I don't think Thomas Keller cares. PHP certainly has it's niche, and like the "fast food" niche, it can be adequately nutritious and fullfilling for the customers, and hugely profitable for the sellers. There are _certainly_ other ways to do things though, and without doubt ways of measuring results that are more or less flattering to PHP. I'm not personally any more enamored with "Enterprise Java" as as web development tool, but there's clearly people selling those solutions who've got a _very_ convincing sales pitch. (But yeah, I can see why PHP specialists might be "over" HN's typical attitude towards PHP…)
SimHacker 15y ago
You can't hate PHP properly unless you use it. But you also can't hate PHP properly unless you use other languages. If you don't use PHP first hand, then you don't know it well enough to appreciate what's truly wrong with it. And if you don't use and know other languages well enough, then you don't appreciate how much better PHP could have been if it wasn't so horribly designed. So thinking PHP is horrible without ever having ever used it is as bad as thinking PHP is good without ever having used anything better.
- sho_hn 15y ago
  Aye, while reading the epic Eevee's epic PHP rant recently it struck me how much it heightened my appreciation for all the things better-designed languages managed to get right, and all the things they managed to avoid. The amount of sheer genericity, that is consistent reuse of concepts and freedom of expression stemming from wide application of simple rules, in something like Python is staggering compared to the myriad problems he lists with things like PHP's object model, built-in types, assignment mechanics, etc. I started out doing web development in PHP in the 90s and then eventually graduated to desktop application work in C++ and finally added Python (on the desktop and also again for the web) to the mix in the last half-decade, and while I realized quickly that these were better languages and that they were much more fun to use due to the features they offer and the way things just click into place, Eevee's post was a fun tour of all the little whys. Then again, Python 2.x's ordering rules - falling back to alphabetical collation of the type names when objects can't be ordered otherwise - almost smells of PHP-style implicitness :). Good thing that was made more strict in Python 3.
  - roel_v 15y ago
    Not to make this into a 'my language is better than yours' debate because we all know how annoying those are, but imo once one has used enough languages, one realizes that all of them have good and bad things. Like you I'm mostly a C++ developer nowadays, and C++ has plenty of warts, but like PHP, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages (for me). Now one can say that I picked the two worst languages as examples (and to base my career on), and certainly PHP and C++ are the two languages that are most crapped upon nowadays, but at the same time they're also the most popular ones. Other languages that I've used all show not so nice aspects, even after not all that intensive use. To take your Python example: I recently wrote a small Python application because in that context, Python was the obvious choice. Turns out that instantiating an object of a variable class name is quite non-intuitive (I don't even remember how it was done, it was typically something you need to look up every time you use, much like the syntax of calling a member function through a function pointer in C++ - I looked that up so often that I know by heart now that it's on page 219 of the 2nd edition of the Stroustrup - but I disgress...). Whereas in PHP it's simply $classname = 'AClass'; $a = new $classname(); . Completely obvious and in line with the way everything else works in PHP. Again this is not to diss Python, I like some of the things of it that it does differently than other languages and there are many people doing great things with it. It may even well be that in the aggregate, Python has less 'annoyances' or rough parts than PHP, I don't know. It's just an example to illustrate that things are never black or white, and IMO the whole 'I hate XYZ' is widely overblown, because really, life is too short to get one's panties in a bunch over a stupid programming language, of all things. Sure I am annoyed with bad tools, but hating them and spending hours and hours crusading against them... That's the ultimate waste of time, im (maybe not even so h) o.

by roel_v 15y ago

nikhildaga 15y ago

http://news.php.net/php.internals/58385 http://news.php.net/php.internals/58385

evoxed 15y ago
I would prepare for some pictures of "duct tape and bailing wire... [that] we love it for...", if only I could imagine it could be done as creatively as the above hammer. But you know, the more I read these analogies the more I'm beginning to like PHP, not as something to work with but as that second cousin you met once at a family gathering and remember as being odd but nice and a funny guy.

maratd 15y ago

> I've been using PHP for well over 10 years, and I love this thing. You're not alone. There are many of us. PHP powers the Internet, period. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. You can whine all you want about this and that, but you can't argue with success. As far as hammers go, I had my wife make me a stuffed PHP elephant! It's on my desk right now.

chrisbroadfoot 15y ago
Period? C powers the Internet, period. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. You can whine all you want about this and that, but you can't argue with success.
- skrebbel 15y ago
  Yeah yeah smart kid. And x86 machine code, and transistors, and electrons. And sand, and don't forget about the high-tech machines that were used to make the chips.
  - ktizo 15y ago
    Kittens power the internet, everybody knows that.
- maratd 15y ago
  > C powers the Internet, period. PHP is written in C. So, yeah, I guess that's true.
  - SimHacker 15y ago
    Hey stop unfairly dissing C! It's perfectly possible to implement well designed programming languages in C. Blame the programmer, not the implementation language, for PHP's atrocities. It's not Dennis Ritchie's fault -- Rasmus Lerdorf deserves the blame.
buu700 15y ago
PHP powers the Internet, period. That's a bit strong; I would even say it borders on being outright false no matter how you meant it. PHP is convenient for bashing out quick server-side scripts, but it doesn't "power the Internet" any more than any other language does. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. You can whine all you want about this and that, but you can't argue with success. "Success"? You say it as though the use of PHP were in any way consequential to the success of those projects. Wordpress and Drupal, maybe, but Wikipedia and Facebook are squarely business successes more than anything. I'm not saying PHP is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be (though I personally think it is), but the fact that a company like Facebook uses PHP (and in fact has poured millions into desperately engineering around its many faults) isn't exactly a shining testament to the virtue of the language (any more than a hypothetical Company X using COBOL internally would make COBOL a better language). See: * http://www.quora.com/Would-Facebooks-maintenance-costs-be-lower-if-it-had-been-coded-in-Python-or-Ruby-rather-than-PHP http://www.quora.com/Would-Facebooks-maintenance-costs-be-lo... * http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choose-Python-for-its-development http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choo... * http://www.quora.com/Do-Facebook-engineers-enjoy-programming-in-PHP http://www.quora.com/Do-Facebook-engineers-enjoy-programming...
- SimHacker 15y ago
  Most people who praise the fact that Wikipedia and other software is written in PHP have never actually taken a good look at the source code and tried to do anything with it. Care to discuss the design and architecture of the Mediawiki parser and template system, and what its history and future look like?
  - neilk 15y ago
    Oh, I will! I am a proud colleague and friend of the guy that made this hammer. The future of MediaWiki's parser and templating system won't be PHP. It will be Node.JS. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid
jhuni 15y ago
There are many of us. PHP powers the Internet, period. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. There is a difference between the web and the internet. The Internet is powered by computer networking hardware, on the on the other hand, the web is powered by utter crap like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and of course PHP.
bigiain 15y ago
"… but you can't argue with success." McDonalds sells more meals than French Laundry. I don't think Thomas Keller cares. PHP certainly has it's niche, and like the "fast food" niche, it can be adequately nutritious and fullfilling for the customers, and hugely profitable for the sellers. There are _certainly_ other ways to do things though, and without doubt ways of measuring results that are more or less flattering to PHP. I'm not personally any more enamored with "Enterprise Java" as as web development tool, but there's clearly people selling those solutions who've got a _very_ convincing sales pitch. (But yeah, I can see why PHP specialists might be "over" HN's typical attitude towards PHP…)

SimHacker 15y ago

You can't hate PHP properly unless you use it. But you also can't hate PHP properly unless you use other languages. If you don't use PHP first hand, then you don't know it well enough to appreciate what's truly wrong with it. And if you don't use and know other languages well enough, then you don't appreciate how much better PHP could have been if it wasn't so horribly designed. So thinking PHP is horrible without ever having ever used it is as bad as thinking PHP is good without ever having used anything better.

sho_hn 15y ago
Aye, while reading the epic Eevee's epic PHP rant recently it struck me how much it heightened my appreciation for all the things better-designed languages managed to get right, and all the things they managed to avoid. The amount of sheer genericity, that is consistent reuse of concepts and freedom of expression stemming from wide application of simple rules, in something like Python is staggering compared to the myriad problems he lists with things like PHP's object model, built-in types, assignment mechanics, etc. I started out doing web development in PHP in the 90s and then eventually graduated to desktop application work in C++ and finally added Python (on the desktop and also again for the web) to the mix in the last half-decade, and while I realized quickly that these were better languages and that they were much more fun to use due to the features they offer and the way things just click into place, Eevee's post was a fun tour of all the little whys. Then again, Python 2.x's ordering rules - falling back to alphabetical collation of the type names when objects can't be ordered otherwise - almost smells of PHP-style implicitness :). Good thing that was made more strict in Python 3.
- roel_v 15y ago
  Not to make this into a 'my language is better than yours' debate because we all know how annoying those are, but imo once one has used enough languages, one realizes that all of them have good and bad things. Like you I'm mostly a C++ developer nowadays, and C++ has plenty of warts, but like PHP, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages (for me). Now one can say that I picked the two worst languages as examples (and to base my career on), and certainly PHP and C++ are the two languages that are most crapped upon nowadays, but at the same time they're also the most popular ones. Other languages that I've used all show not so nice aspects, even after not all that intensive use. To take your Python example: I recently wrote a small Python application because in that context, Python was the obvious choice. Turns out that instantiating an object of a variable class name is quite non-intuitive (I don't even remember how it was done, it was typically something you need to look up every time you use, much like the syntax of calling a member function through a function pointer in C++ - I looked that up so often that I know by heart now that it's on page 219 of the 2nd edition of the Stroustrup - but I disgress...). Whereas in PHP it's simply $classname = 'AClass'; $a = new $classname(); . Completely obvious and in line with the way everything else works in PHP. Again this is not to diss Python, I like some of the things of it that it does differently than other languages and there are many people doing great things with it. It may even well be that in the aggregate, Python has less 'annoyances' or rough parts than PHP, I don't know. It's just an example to illustrate that things are never black or white, and IMO the whole 'I hate XYZ' is widely overblown, because really, life is too short to get one's panties in a bunch over a stupid programming language, of all things. Sure I am annoyed with bad tools, but hating them and spending hours and hours crusading against them... That's the ultimate waste of time, im (maybe not even so h) o.