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>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

by 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".
- batista 14y ago
  >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. Oh, alright. Thought you meant it was not a good metric. >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. Yes, that second argument is not circular reasoning because it searches for the causes. But the argument in your previous post, I read it as: "PHP is used by more of the popular sites because PHP is used by more sites in general" Which is kinda circular, mostly repeating "PHP is popular". >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". I did the opposite: the success of the site affects the programming language. That is, I am a pragmatist: I see every successful site built with a programming language as one more verification that said language is good for building sites with (whatever the reasons). If we have 200,000 high volume sites in PHP and 0 in X, as a pragmatist, I will avoid using X in my next high volume site project. Working from that, one can also see why it is so. For example: 1) it's because X is obscure, so I wouldn't be able to get a team easily. Perhaps even no one in my city, at least without adding the overhead of teaching them X first. 2) it's because X is more expensive to host. I'll need to get a VPS whereas I can just put PHP on a $10/year server. 3) it's because PHP has more libs and stuff. This DB/service API/etc I want to use does not have X drivers (or has a semi-abandoned project). 4) it's because PHP has Drupal/Wordpress and I can have a high traffic portal/news style site in minutes, whereas X has only ho-hum solutions for that, or I would have to build one from scratch. and so on. Surprisingly, many so called "scientists" and "engineers" choose to argue from first principles. "X is a bona fide academic language, and has all those meta programming features, higher-order types and such, so you are crazy to use PHP over X for your project". So, instead of reading the situation pragmatically, and finding the real pain points PHP eases and why it's used, they resort to idealistic rants about how masses are ignorant, "beating the averages", etc etc. Well, this Zuckerberg guy, with his average PHP, beat Viaweb's Lisp by about 100x better valuation. If, according to "beating the averages", ViaWeb's success was a pro-Lisp point, why isn't that a pro-PHP point? Or does it only work when Lisp wins (as in, "ViaWeb won because of Lisp but Facebook won despite of PHP"). Talk about having it both ways!

by batista 14y ago

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".

batista 14y ago
>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. Oh, alright. Thought you meant it was not a good metric. >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. Yes, that second argument is not circular reasoning because it searches for the causes. But the argument in your previous post, I read it as: "PHP is used by more of the popular sites because PHP is used by more sites in general" Which is kinda circular, mostly repeating "PHP is popular". >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". I did the opposite: the success of the site affects the programming language. That is, I am a pragmatist: I see every successful site built with a programming language as one more verification that said language is good for building sites with (whatever the reasons). If we have 200,000 high volume sites in PHP and 0 in X, as a pragmatist, I will avoid using X in my next high volume site project. Working from that, one can also see why it is so. For example: 1) it's because X is obscure, so I wouldn't be able to get a team easily. Perhaps even no one in my city, at least without adding the overhead of teaching them X first. 2) it's because X is more expensive to host. I'll need to get a VPS whereas I can just put PHP on a $10/year server. 3) it's because PHP has more libs and stuff. This DB/service API/etc I want to use does not have X drivers (or has a semi-abandoned project). 4) it's because PHP has Drupal/Wordpress and I can have a high traffic portal/news style site in minutes, whereas X has only ho-hum solutions for that, or I would have to build one from scratch. and so on. Surprisingly, many so called "scientists" and "engineers" choose to argue from first principles. "X is a bona fide academic language, and has all those meta programming features, higher-order types and such, so you are crazy to use PHP over X for your project". So, instead of reading the situation pragmatically, and finding the real pain points PHP eases and why it's used, they resort to idealistic rants about how masses are ignorant, "beating the averages", etc etc. Well, this Zuckerberg guy, with his average PHP, beat Viaweb's Lisp by about 100x better valuation. If, according to "beating the averages", ViaWeb's success was a pro-Lisp point, why isn't that a pro-PHP point? Or does it only work when Lisp wins (as in, "ViaWeb won because of Lisp but Facebook won despite of PHP"). Talk about having it both ways!