5 ms·

What other languages besides PHP have you used? I think a lot of us dislike PHP because we're putting it in the context of better designed languages.

chez17 14y ago
I've played around with Python and Ruby (more specifically rails), nothing serious though. I enjoy trying new things, but never found them worth delving into for my purposes. I 100% admit this a reflection on me and not those languages. I have nothing bad to say about them. I just didn't find anything in them that was worth switching.
kamaal 14y ago
Unfortunately what many would define as 'better designed' doesn't always translate to useful software.
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  Can you give an example?
  - Maascamp 14y ago
    Haskell
  - batista 14y ago
    Any major websites done on Lisp, Smalltalk or Haskell? Besides Viaweb? Now count > 1m visits per day websites done in PHP.
    - kintamanimatt 14y ago
      You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users). There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. It's like comparing the number of millionaires in the US with the number of millionaires in Canada; the US has a bigger population compared to Canada, and all things being more or less equal, it's reasonable to expect that the US would have more millionaires simply because of its shear size.
      - batista 14y ago
        >You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. Yes, me and all Analytics and SEO guys. You either sell ads or stuff. In both cases you want as many eyeballs and wallets as possible. >The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users). There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. Yes, but your logic is circular. The question is WHY are there "more websites with foundations in PHP", and not just trivial amateur personal stuff but highly successful ones too. You seem to assume PHPs expanse as just a fact of life, totally arbitrary, and thats why you say we must not draw conclusions based on it. >You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. Sure I can. Here are some ways: - Php is easy for newstarters, so got more adoption. - Php is trivial to deploy, so got more adoption. - Php was there, targetting the web specifically (with libs and features), in 199x, while Haskell, CL, what have you were not yet. - Php, because of the above, had amassed a huge ecosystem of projects and engines (Nuke, Wordpress, Drupal, EE, etc). - Php, because of that, has alo got huge adoption. - Because of th adoption it built a huge ecosystem of programmers, projects, tools, books, etc. And, putting it all together, what makes PHP more likely to power most high ranking sites, is that you can easily find components and engines to base your site on, AND you can easily find tons of programmers to employ, AND you can easily find support for it, etc. All those make it a no brainer for a lot of uses. And all of those are interdependent, based on some initial language attributes, not arbitrary like the US vs Canada population argument (which is not that arbitrary and size based itself, but thats another story)
        kintamanimatt 14y ago
        > You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. I wasn't disagreeing, and in fact I didn't even express an opinion regarding this. Success means a lot of different things to people; I was stating your definition of success for clarity. The user doesn't care whether I write a website's back end in PHP, Ruby, Python, Haskell, C++, Ada, Clojure, or even Erlang. The success depends on how useful the site is and how well it's marketed. This isn't circular reasoning. There are more websites written in PHP because PHP is an easy language for beginners and therefore more common compared to Ruby or Python, for example. It's an absolutely untenable position to assert that the programming language itself affects how much traffic an site receives, which is what you originally defined as "success".
    - anonymoushn 14y ago
      > Any major websites done on Lisp Does Hacker News count?
      - batista 14y ago
        Note the use of the word "major"
        xyzzyz 14y ago
        Note the use of "true" in "no true Scotsman".
        batista 14y ago
        Note that I specifically wrote >1m visits per day. Note also that the mention of one site is too literal and meaningless interpretation of my question, which is more rhetorical, and should be read like: "There are TONS of high volume PHP sites and very very very few high volume Lisp sites". That said: the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy is only a fallacy half of the time, like most of those so-called logical fallacies. They assume a perfectly logical world, where you have infinite information at your disposal and infinite time to check it. E.g I'd rather listen to my doctor on my medical condition over a random guy on the subway, even if that's "appeal to authority". Similar cracks in the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. There ARE cases where a category/taxonomy is used badly, and no true member of said taxonomy would so something. That is, membership in a taxonomy is not always 100% solid, and you can have true and less true (fuzzy) membership. E.g - No KKK member would attend a NWA concert. - But I just saw a KKK member rocking it at a NWA concert. - Well, no _TRUE KKK member_ would ever attend one. It's obvious that the first guy is correct: no TRUE KKK would ever attend a NWA concert. Now, a random KKK member could possibly attend one (say, out of curiosity). The "no TRUE" argument in this case, says not so much the impossibility of an event happening, but that it is against the very concept of the taxonomy under discussion for it to happen. Hackers shouldn't touch the "logical fallacy" stuff with a ten foot pole. They presuppose that conversations and argumentation can just go "by numbers", without examining each individual case.
    - greyfade 14y ago
      Amazon.com was famously put together by mostly Lisp engineers. They more recently switched to C++ and apparently experienced a lot of growing pains as they had to learn how to scale up C++ to match what they had been doing in Lisp for years.
Mikushi 14y ago
Way to talk down to people. I use PHP as my main language for web development, but also am a frequent C user. I have done projects in C# and Python. While I like C# and Python - actually for scripting I tend to go for Python rather than PHP, prefer the CLI modules of Python- , I found that in context of web dev PHP still get the job done faster and in a maintainable manner. As for C, I use it for writing PHP extension -or generally fucking around with PHP source code- and writing non web stuff, so not as relevant. The difference between people like me and people like you, is I don't go around constantly mocking other language. It is pointless, I'd rather spend my time and energy delivering products, or actually doing something productive.
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  I'm not talking down to anybody. Based on experience I asserted that many programmers feel that PHP is an inferior language because they've experienced "cleaner" languages such as Ruby. It's not wholly unreasonable that chez17 had only programmed using PHP, as PHP is commonly a programmer's first language. I therefore wanted to find out if chez17 had used other languages and to see what their thoughts are on PHP vs those other languages. I also don't go around "constantly mocking" other languages. Why did you make that assumption?
  - Mikushi 14y ago
    Good, just the way it read. As for constantly mocking other languages, that was not directly pointed at you, but at the constant swarm of people always going about php sucks, php this, php that... We got it, you people don't like PHP, try to see if I care.
    - nessus42 14y ago
      Why shouldn't engineers "mock" the things that they think are badly designed? But by "mock" I mean criticize. In fact, as an engineer, it's one's professional duty to criticize bad design, as good design is essential to the endeavor of engineering progress. Good engineering design vs bad engineering design is what prevents bridges from collapsing or Mars landers from crashing. But I hear you: sure it's quite possible to do arithmetic using Roman numerals, and if that's what you're used to, you probably don't want to hear that you've been doing it suboptimally. And all these people clamoring for a change to decimal are just an unbearable nuisance.
chez17 14y ago
Sorry to respond twice to your post, but I realized this was a great opportunity to learn something. Given my basic example in my post, what language would you recommend I try to accomplish this task? I like to stay away from frameworks so basically I'm asking you to not suggest Rails, however don't be afraid to suggest ruby. If you feel like typing something out, let me know why you suggest it and what advantages it has over PHP.
- j_baker 14y ago
  Just try something. I don't doubt that PHP has its good points, but how can you appreciate them without having something to measure them against? Ruby or Python would probably be the best choices if you don't have anything else in mind.
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  Ruby. It's the cleanest language with the most sensible standard library I've come across to date. Ruby doesn't necessarily mean Rails, and in fact I'm not a fan of Rails' overly prescriptive paradigm. (As an aside, any time you hear Rails is an MVC framework, discount it because it's really an MVA framework.) One of the things you'll find coming from the world of PHP is Ruby has consistent method signatures. For this and a lot of other reasons you'll almost certainly be happier with Ruby. Aside from happiness, there are things that make Ruby more powerful. For example, you can cleanly implement the reactor pattern (think: NodeJS) with EventMachine and with EM-Synchrony you can avoid the callback hell that comes with NodeJS. If you want, you can look at Sinatra to provide the common functionality that the PHP framework provides. With Sinatra you're not all-but-forced to use an ORM like you are with Rails, as Sinatra doesn't include one. If you really want, you can go closer to the metal and look directly at Rack, which is middleware between web servers (Apache, Nginx, etc) and the actual application. There's really no right way to do it, but the best thing is to learn and explore. Some people will recommend Python, and while it's a decent language, it's got some things I consider to be rough edges -- lack of useful language features, such as switch/case statements, and badly implemented parts of its standard library that handle network requests. The next language on my learning list is Go. I've heard nothing but good things about it, but I'll reserve my judgment until I have some experience with it.

chez17 14y ago

I've played around with Python and Ruby (more specifically rails), nothing serious though. I enjoy trying new things, but never found them worth delving into for my purposes. I 100% admit this a reflection on me and not those languages. I have nothing bad to say about them. I just didn't find anything in them that was worth switching.

kamaal 14y ago

Unfortunately what many would define as 'better designed' doesn't always translate to useful software.

kintamanimatt 14y ago
Can you give an example?
- Maascamp 14y ago
  Haskell
- batista 14y ago
  Any major websites done on Lisp, Smalltalk or Haskell? Besides Viaweb? Now count > 1m visits per day websites done in PHP.
  - kintamanimatt 14y ago
    You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users). There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. It's like comparing the number of millionaires in the US with the number of millionaires in Canada; the US has a bigger population compared to Canada, and all things being more or less equal, it's reasonable to expect that the US would have more millionaires simply because of its shear size.
    - batista 14y ago
      >You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. Yes, me and all Analytics and SEO guys. You either sell ads or stuff. In both cases you want as many eyeballs and wallets as possible. >The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users). There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. Yes, but your logic is circular. The question is WHY are there "more websites with foundations in PHP", and not just trivial amateur personal stuff but highly successful ones too. You seem to assume PHPs expanse as just a fact of life, totally arbitrary, and thats why you say we must not draw conclusions based on it. >You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. Sure I can. Here are some ways: - Php is easy for newstarters, so got more adoption. - Php is trivial to deploy, so got more adoption. - Php was there, targetting the web specifically (with libs and features), in 199x, while Haskell, CL, what have you were not yet. - Php, because of the above, had amassed a huge ecosystem of projects and engines (Nuke, Wordpress, Drupal, EE, etc). - Php, because of that, has alo got huge adoption. - Because of th adoption it built a huge ecosystem of programmers, projects, tools, books, etc. And, putting it all together, what makes PHP more likely to power most high ranking sites, is that you can easily find components and engines to base your site on, AND you can easily find tons of programmers to employ, AND you can easily find support for it, etc. All those make it a no brainer for a lot of uses. And all of those are interdependent, based on some initial language attributes, not arbitrary like the US vs Canada population argument (which is not that arbitrary and size based itself, but thats another story)
      - kintamanimatt 14y ago
        > You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. I wasn't disagreeing, and in fact I didn't even express an opinion regarding this. Success means a lot of different things to people; I was stating your definition of success for clarity. The user doesn't care whether I write a website's back end in PHP, Ruby, Python, Haskell, C++, Ada, Clojure, or even Erlang. The success depends on how useful the site is and how well it's marketed. This isn't circular reasoning. There are more websites written in PHP because PHP is an easy language for beginners and therefore more common compared to Ruby or Python, for example. It's an absolutely untenable position to assert that the programming language itself affects how much traffic an site receives, which is what you originally defined as "success".
  - anonymoushn 14y ago
    > Any major websites done on Lisp Does Hacker News count?
    - batista 14y ago
      Note the use of the word "major"
      - xyzzyz 14y ago
        Note the use of "true" in "no true Scotsman".
        batista 14y ago
        Note that I specifically wrote >1m visits per day. Note also that the mention of one site is too literal and meaningless interpretation of my question, which is more rhetorical, and should be read like: "There are TONS of high volume PHP sites and very very very few high volume Lisp sites". That said: the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy is only a fallacy half of the time, like most of those so-called logical fallacies. They assume a perfectly logical world, where you have infinite information at your disposal and infinite time to check it. E.g I'd rather listen to my doctor on my medical condition over a random guy on the subway, even if that's "appeal to authority". Similar cracks in the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. There ARE cases where a category/taxonomy is used badly, and no true member of said taxonomy would so something. That is, membership in a taxonomy is not always 100% solid, and you can have true and less true (fuzzy) membership. E.g - No KKK member would attend a NWA concert. - But I just saw a KKK member rocking it at a NWA concert. - Well, no _TRUE KKK member_ would ever attend one. It's obvious that the first guy is correct: no TRUE KKK would ever attend a NWA concert. Now, a random KKK member could possibly attend one (say, out of curiosity). The "no TRUE" argument in this case, says not so much the impossibility of an event happening, but that it is against the very concept of the taxonomy under discussion for it to happen. Hackers shouldn't touch the "logical fallacy" stuff with a ten foot pole. They presuppose that conversations and argumentation can just go "by numbers", without examining each individual case.
  - greyfade 14y ago
    Amazon.com was famously put together by mostly Lisp engineers. They more recently switched to C++ and apparently experienced a lot of growing pains as they had to learn how to scale up C++ to match what they had been doing in Lisp for years.

Mikushi 14y ago

Way to talk down to people. I use PHP as my main language for web development, but also am a frequent C user. I have done projects in C# and Python. While I like C# and Python - actually for scripting I tend to go for Python rather than PHP, prefer the CLI modules of Python- , I found that in context of web dev PHP still get the job done faster and in a maintainable manner. As for C, I use it for writing PHP extension -or generally fucking around with PHP source code- and writing non web stuff, so not as relevant. The difference between people like me and people like you, is I don't go around constantly mocking other language. It is pointless, I'd rather spend my time and energy delivering products, or actually doing something productive.

kintamanimatt 14y ago
I'm not talking down to anybody. Based on experience I asserted that many programmers feel that PHP is an inferior language because they've experienced "cleaner" languages such as Ruby. It's not wholly unreasonable that chez17 had only programmed using PHP, as PHP is commonly a programmer's first language. I therefore wanted to find out if chez17 had used other languages and to see what their thoughts are on PHP vs those other languages. I also don't go around "constantly mocking" other languages. Why did you make that assumption?
- Mikushi 14y ago
  Good, just the way it read. As for constantly mocking other languages, that was not directly pointed at you, but at the constant swarm of people always going about php sucks, php this, php that... We got it, you people don't like PHP, try to see if I care.
  - nessus42 14y ago
    Why shouldn't engineers "mock" the things that they think are badly designed? But by "mock" I mean criticize. In fact, as an engineer, it's one's professional duty to criticize bad design, as good design is essential to the endeavor of engineering progress. Good engineering design vs bad engineering design is what prevents bridges from collapsing or Mars landers from crashing. But I hear you: sure it's quite possible to do arithmetic using Roman numerals, and if that's what you're used to, you probably don't want to hear that you've been doing it suboptimally. And all these people clamoring for a change to decimal are just an unbearable nuisance.

chez17 14y ago

Sorry to respond twice to your post, but I realized this was a great opportunity to learn something. Given my basic example in my post, what language would you recommend I try to accomplish this task? I like to stay away from frameworks so basically I'm asking you to not suggest Rails, however don't be afraid to suggest ruby. If you feel like typing something out, let me know why you suggest it and what advantages it has over PHP.

j_baker 14y ago
Just try something. I don't doubt that PHP has its good points, but how can you appreciate them without having something to measure them against? Ruby or Python would probably be the best choices if you don't have anything else in mind.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
Ruby. It's the cleanest language with the most sensible standard library I've come across to date. Ruby doesn't necessarily mean Rails, and in fact I'm not a fan of Rails' overly prescriptive paradigm. (As an aside, any time you hear Rails is an MVC framework, discount it because it's really an MVA framework.) One of the things you'll find coming from the world of PHP is Ruby has consistent method signatures. For this and a lot of other reasons you'll almost certainly be happier with Ruby. Aside from happiness, there are things that make Ruby more powerful. For example, you can cleanly implement the reactor pattern (think: NodeJS) with EventMachine and with EM-Synchrony you can avoid the callback hell that comes with NodeJS. If you want, you can look at Sinatra to provide the common functionality that the PHP framework provides. With Sinatra you're not all-but-forced to use an ORM like you are with Rails, as Sinatra doesn't include one. If you really want, you can go closer to the metal and look directly at Rack, which is middleware between web servers (Apache, Nginx, etc) and the actual application. There's really no right way to do it, but the best thing is to learn and explore. Some people will recommend Python, and while it's a decent language, it's got some things I consider to be rough edges -- lack of useful language features, such as switch/case statements, and badly implemented parts of its standard library that handle network requests. The next language on my learning list is Go. I've heard nothing but good things about it, but I'll reserve my judgment until I have some experience with it.