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I strongly dislike how people look to github as an example, its the highest appeal to authority. I know facebook uses mysql, but I also know that it is a basta

by dijit 3y ago

I strongly dislike how people look to github as an example, its the highest appeal to authority. I know facebook uses mysql, but I also know that it is a bastardised custom version that has known constraints and has limited use (no foreign keys for example). I spoke to the DBA who first deployed MySQL at Github and the vibe I got from him immediately was that he had doubled down on his prejudice: which is fine, but its not ok to ignore that it can be a lot of effort to work around issues with any given technology. For a great example of what I mean: most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project (despite it having improved majorly) - the appeal to authority there is to say “it works for Facebook” without mentioning “Hack” or the myriad of internal processes to avoid the warts of PHP. That a large headcount company can use something does not make it immune from criticism.

capableweb 3y ago
> most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project Is this really true? I used to be a full-time PHP developer but I personally don't touch that language anymore. But it's still very popular around the world, I've seen multiple projects start this year use PHP, because that's the language the founders/most developers in the company are familiar with. Probably depends a lot on where in the world you're located. Last Stack Overflow survey had ~20% of the people answering the survey saying that they still use PHP in some capacity.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sroussey 3y ago
  The beauty of PHP is that it is stateless and the end of the run, everything is freed. It is difficult to have memory leaks. Personally, I like using Typescript/Javascript on both front end and backend, but I don’t look down at PHP backends at all. And it’s come a long way as a language. I’ve been a fan of rolling your own stdlib as the semantics there are old and weird, but vscode tells you so who cares anymore.
stephenr 3y ago
> most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project Most people on HN, or most developers in the world? PHP is still very popular, and plenty of people start new projects in it all the time. > does not make it immune from criticism Show me a technology without critics and I'll show you a technology zero people use.
- dijit 3y ago
  I mean, outside of HN too: new projects are less and less commonly PHP based. https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3
  - stephenr 3y ago
    I don't think that data is particularly meaningful, unless you're also going to claim that both JavaScript and Ruby are "less and less commonly" used, because they've both had much bigger drops, according to that data. Pulls, Pushes, Issues and GitHub stars are terrible ways to gauge the popularity of a language.
    - dijit 3y ago
      ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There is no better measure I'm aware of, and I'll take any measure you supply. I would definitely also argue that Ruby is in pretty significant decline, the majority of Ruby projects were sysadminy projects from the 2010 era and most sysadminy types learned it as an alternative to perl. Web developers who learned it were mostly using Rails which has fallen somewhat out of favour. YMMV obviously, but I can understand it's decline as Python has concretely taken over the working space and devops tools like Chef/Puppet are not en-vogue any longer as Go and Kubernetes/CNCF stuff took the lions share. Equally: javascript (node, really) is less favourable to many JS devs than Typescript. If you aggregate TS and JS then you'll see that the ecosystem is growing but many people who are JS folks have switched to TS. I'm taken aback by what you seem to suggest though; Would you seriously claim that most new projects ARE using PHP? I would happily argue that point with any data you supply, it's completely contrary to my experience and understanding of things and I have a pretty wide and disparate social circle in tech companies.

by dijit 3y ago

capableweb 3y ago

> most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project Is this really true? I used to be a full-time PHP developer but I personally don't touch that language anymore. But it's still very popular around the world, I've seen multiple projects start this year use PHP, because that's the language the founders/most developers in the company are familiar with. Probably depends a lot on where in the world you're located. Last Stack Overflow survey had ~20% of the people answering the survey saying that they still use PHP in some capacity.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sroussey 3y ago
The beauty of PHP is that it is stateless and the end of the run, everything is freed. It is difficult to have memory leaks. Personally, I like using Typescript/Javascript on both front end and backend, but I don’t look down at PHP backends at all. And it’s come a long way as a language. I’ve been a fan of rolling your own stdlib as the semantics there are old and weird, but vscode tells you so who cares anymore.

stephenr 3y ago

> most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project Most people on HN, or most developers in the world? PHP is still very popular, and plenty of people start new projects in it all the time. > does not make it immune from criticism Show me a technology without critics and I'll show you a technology zero people use.

dijit 3y ago
I mean, outside of HN too: new projects are less and less commonly PHP based. https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3
- stephenr 3y ago
  I don't think that data is particularly meaningful, unless you're also going to claim that both JavaScript and Ruby are "less and less commonly" used, because they've both had much bigger drops, according to that data. Pulls, Pushes, Issues and GitHub stars are terrible ways to gauge the popularity of a language.
  - dijit 3y ago
    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There is no better measure I'm aware of, and I'll take any measure you supply. I would definitely also argue that Ruby is in pretty significant decline, the majority of Ruby projects were sysadminy projects from the 2010 era and most sysadminy types learned it as an alternative to perl. Web developers who learned it were mostly using Rails which has fallen somewhat out of favour. YMMV obviously, but I can understand it's decline as Python has concretely taken over the working space and devops tools like Chef/Puppet are not en-vogue any longer as Go and Kubernetes/CNCF stuff took the lions share. Equally: javascript (node, really) is less favourable to many JS devs than Typescript. If you aggregate TS and JS then you'll see that the ecosystem is growing but many people who are JS folks have switched to TS. I'm taken aback by what you seem to suggest though; Would you seriously claim that most new projects ARE using PHP? I would happily argue that point with any data you supply, it's completely contrary to my experience and understanding of things and I have a pretty wide and disparate social circle in tech companies.