3 ms·

I don't see PHP on there...

by jastanton_ 14y ago

groovy2shoes 14y ago
There are a few things I can think of that are missing. See the guidelines for additions at the bottom of the page.
- jastanton_ 14y ago
  I was being sarcastic :) the list was "groundbreaking new languages" and I was trying to spur up PHP haters out there for a good laugh. It's not funny when I explain it.
  - SeanDav 14y ago
    Just a tip. Being sarcastic/ironic/humorous on HN is not generally well received unless you actually have something to add to the thread.
mdaniel 14y ago
I did see your followup that you were just razzing folks, but I thought about whether I would include PHP in that list and I think the answer is yes, with a Barry Bonds-esque asterisk. I actually think that PHP, like Basic, was simple enough for the Everyone to grasp, and came with a good-enough standard library (always important). But I think what made it the swiss-army knife of web developers is that it was deployed _everywhere_. One cannot login to [hosting provider du jour] and run Lisp, and let's not even discuss the devops horrors of trying to get a JVM to run on a server, let alone one shared by 50 of your closest friends. But you can edit index.php in notepad, ftp it to your hosting provider, and voilà: you have created your first dynamic content on the web. I thought perhaps there might be some chicken-and-egg at work here, that if Wordpress had been written in Python (for example) that shared Python installs would be the default. But I realized that Python is a software engineering language. It has structure and enforces its use. But PHP allows, for good or bad, one to use whatever kind of crazy syntax style they like, in just about any filename they want, and it's likely still going to parse. In that way, it is very Perlish. But unlike Perl, normal folks can read it, which fosters a copy-paste-and-improve development cycle. I do not, in any seriousness, understand why Facebook uses PHP; hell, uses? Built a damn compiler for it. But if I recall correctly, the answer at the time was "it works for us," which is all the justification that the outside world needs, I guess.
- Androsynth 14y ago
  Just because you don't like the language doesn't mean its not important. It has been the gateway programming language for the web. Sure, experienced devs move over to python or ruby, but that doesn't make php any less important. edit: seriously, its groundbreaking in the fact that it made dynamic website development accessible to everyone! That easily makes it more groundbreaking than half the languages on the list.

I don't see PHP on there...

groovy2shoes 14y ago

There are a few things I can think of that are missing. See the guidelines for additions at the bottom of the page.

jastanton_ 14y ago
I was being sarcastic :) the list was "groundbreaking new languages" and I was trying to spur up PHP haters out there for a good laugh. It's not funny when I explain it.
- SeanDav 14y ago
  Just a tip. Being sarcastic/ironic/humorous on HN is not generally well received unless you actually have something to add to the thread.

mdaniel 14y ago

I did see your followup that you were just razzing folks, but I thought about whether I would include PHP in that list and I think the answer is yes, with a Barry Bonds-esque asterisk. I actually think that PHP, like Basic, was simple enough for the Everyone to grasp, and came with a good-enough standard library (always important). But I think what made it the swiss-army knife of web developers is that it was deployed _everywhere_. One cannot login to [hosting provider du jour] and run Lisp, and let's not even discuss the devops horrors of trying to get a JVM to run on a server, let alone one shared by 50 of your closest friends. But you can edit index.php in notepad, ftp it to your hosting provider, and voilà: you have created your first dynamic content on the web. I thought perhaps there might be some chicken-and-egg at work here, that if Wordpress had been written in Python (for example) that shared Python installs would be the default. But I realized that Python is a software engineering language. It has structure and enforces its use. But PHP allows, for good or bad, one to use whatever kind of crazy syntax style they like, in just about any filename they want, and it's likely still going to parse. In that way, it is very Perlish. But unlike Perl, normal folks can read it, which fosters a copy-paste-and-improve development cycle. I do not, in any seriousness, understand why Facebook uses PHP; hell, uses? Built a damn compiler for it. But if I recall correctly, the answer at the time was "it works for us," which is all the justification that the outside world needs, I guess.

Androsynth 14y ago
Just because you don't like the language doesn't mean its not important. It has been the gateway programming language for the web. Sure, experienced devs move over to python or ruby, but that doesn't make php any less important. edit: seriously, its groundbreaking in the fact that it made dynamic website development accessible to everyone! That easily makes it more groundbreaking than half the languages on the list.