4 ms·

>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 defini

by 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!

kintamanimatt 14y ago
> 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". You misread what I wrote in that case. I said "There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes." This isn't circular reasoning, and let me show you why: Lets pretend I'm superhuman and create 10,100 unique, high quality websites in one day. Let's assume also that my skill and experience remains constant throughout building these 10,100 websites; I'll get no better at marketing, design, etc and all my decisions are of equal quality. The only difference is the programming language I use to develop some of the sites. For the sake of this example, let's assume that 1% of websites created, on average, end up with one million page views per month after six months. In this fictitious example, let's say that for grins I build 100 sites in Lisp and 10,000 sites in Perl. 1% of my Lisp sites will be successful (a grand total of one successful site) and 1% of my Perl sites will be successful (100). From this data you're erroneously concluding that Perl is more likely to result in a successful site. This is wrong, because the number of sites created in each language varies wildly, but the odds of hitting "traffic gold" are still 1% with everything else being equal. The language, therefore, doesn't impact success rate. Seeing something built in PHP doesn't make it a good choice, just a common one, just like smoking in the 1970s was a common choice, just not a good one. Facebook, while it's mostly written in PHP, is actually transcompiled to C++ (HipHop compiler) because PHP was insufficient. They're not actually running any PHP code in production. Also I keep hearing that their codebase is an unholy mess and that the only reason it hasn't been re-written in another language is that the codebase is just now too big to rewrite. Zuckerberg wrote Facebook in PHP because it was the language he knew, not because it was the best tool for the job. Marketing and user experience made the site successful, not the language. Don't just look at PHP and say "huh, it's common!" and conclude it's good. It just doesn't make sense and it's a logical error to do so.

by batista 14y ago

kintamanimatt 14y ago

> 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". You misread what I wrote in that case. I said "There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes." This isn't circular reasoning, and let me show you why: Lets pretend I'm superhuman and create 10,100 unique, high quality websites in one day. Let's assume also that my skill and experience remains constant throughout building these 10,100 websites; I'll get no better at marketing, design, etc and all my decisions are of equal quality. The only difference is the programming language I use to develop some of the sites. For the sake of this example, let's assume that 1% of websites created, on average, end up with one million page views per month after six months. In this fictitious example, let's say that for grins I build 100 sites in Lisp and 10,000 sites in Perl. 1% of my Lisp sites will be successful (a grand total of one successful site) and 1% of my Perl sites will be successful (100). From this data you're erroneously concluding that Perl is more likely to result in a successful site. This is wrong, because the number of sites created in each language varies wildly, but the odds of hitting "traffic gold" are still 1% with everything else being equal. The language, therefore, doesn't impact success rate. Seeing something built in PHP doesn't make it a good choice, just a common one, just like smoking in the 1970s was a common choice, just not a good one. Facebook, while it's mostly written in PHP, is actually transcompiled to C++ (HipHop compiler) because PHP was insufficient. They're not actually running any PHP code in production. Also I keep hearing that their codebase is an unholy mess and that the only reason it hasn't been re-written in another language is that the codebase is just now too big to rewrite. Zuckerberg wrote Facebook in PHP because it was the language he knew, not because it was the best tool for the job. Marketing and user experience made the site successful, not the language. Don't just look at PHP and say "huh, it's common!" and conclude it's good. It just doesn't make sense and it's a logical error to do so.