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PHP is cheap to host, cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers and quick to code in if you know what you’re doing and at the end of the day what doe

by VMG 15y ago

PHP is cheap to host, cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers and quick to code in if you know what you’re doing and at the end of the day what does your client truly care about; If that statement is correct (I don't know), it is an argument to not do PHP professionally if you are concerned about income. Better target a market with a lower suppy.

Xylakant 15y ago
From my experience neither is true. > PHP is cheap to host This used to be true in some respects. Free webhosts often offered PHP as the only scripting language but the offers were often severely limited in which extensions were available and in other respects. Deploying a moderately complex application often was work for a day [1] - which translates to at least two years of paid hosting on a decent hoster. Ruby on the contrary used to require specialized hosting or a dedicated server. With the rise of heroku, this point became moot. > cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers The lesson I took from being technical lead for a 50+ dev team is that it's easy to find cheap php developers, but they often turn out to be Net Negative Programmers. Decent PHP programmers take decent salaries (just as decent ruby/python/java programmers) and - as every decent programmer - are quite well capable of picking up other languages in a short amount of time. If you're just doing "standard websites" cheap developers might be just what you need though (you could go for cheap rails developers as well, they exist). > quick to code in if you know what you’re doing There were times when I considered myself a skilled php programmer, but compared to what I can churn out in ruby, php flat out looses. There are too many beartraps and tarpits that you can step in, borked php configurations or stupid bugs ruining your whole day [2]. [1] figuring out how the borked configuration influenced the application, finding workarounds, ... [2] I recall this one costing me hours and hours of head-scratching https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691 (I love the "This is intended behavior" comment)

by VMG 15y ago

Xylakant 15y ago

From my experience neither is true. > PHP is cheap to host This used to be true in some respects. Free webhosts often offered PHP as the only scripting language but the offers were often severely limited in which extensions were available and in other respects. Deploying a moderately complex application often was work for a day [1] - which translates to at least two years of paid hosting on a decent hoster. Ruby on the contrary used to require specialized hosting or a dedicated server. With the rise of heroku, this point became moot. > cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers The lesson I took from being technical lead for a 50+ dev team is that it's easy to find cheap php developers, but they often turn out to be Net Negative Programmers. Decent PHP programmers take decent salaries (just as decent ruby/python/java programmers) and - as every decent programmer - are quite well capable of picking up other languages in a short amount of time. If you're just doing "standard websites" cheap developers might be just what you need though (you could go for cheap rails developers as well, they exist). > quick to code in if you know what you’re doing There were times when I considered myself a skilled php programmer, but compared to what I can churn out in ruby, php flat out looses. There are too many beartraps and tarpits that you can step in, borked php configurations or stupid bugs ruining your whole day [2]. [1] figuring out how the borked configuration influenced the application, finding workarounds, ... [2] I recall this one costing me hours and hours of head-scratching https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691 (I love the "This is intended behavior" comment)