4 ms·
Cool, but seems unwise. If you are smart enough to do this to PHP, then you are hopefully smart enough to know you should probably not be writing your large sy
by pmb 14y ago
Cool, but seems unwise.
If you are smart enough to do this to PHP, then you are hopefully smart enough to know you should probably not be writing your large system in PHP. There are many better base languages, as opposed to one which has the consistency of perl combined with the string handling power of C (a mild exaggeration, but not by as much as I wish it were). PHP's main advantage is that it is installed everywhere and just works. This breaks that, and therefore renders PHP's main advantage moot.
- nikic 14y agoThe article wasn't really meant as "Patch your own PHP and break compatibility". Rather it was intended as "Contribute new language features to the main PHP distribution" :) I wouldn't advise anyone to run PHP with patched syntax ^^
- brlewis 14y agoI voted your comment up, but I think it would be more effective if you deleted everything before "PHP's main advantage is..." The first part invites a language war. I don't want to see a language war here unless it includes examples of how other languages extend their syntax.
- pbiggar 14y ago> "PHP's main advantage is ..." I wrote out a list of PHP's main advantages a while ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347956 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347956), but I don't think there's just one.
- pmb 14y agoThose are what its advantages were. Now its main advantages seem to be: (1) Omnipresence and (2) Easy to migrate from a static site (I missed that one in my prior comment, and it's an important one - thanks!). All the others are relative to the environment of its birth, rather than today's environment. Today we have choices other than Perl, C, and PHP - and many of those choices are free and Free and have great docs and large healthy communities and have languages and libraries with a better design. When people get good enough at programming to understand why global variables are bad, they should generally not be choosing PHP for new projects unless they need one of the above two features.
- pbiggar 14y agoIndeed, fair point. But I think PHP's omnipresence is no longer the great advantage it once was. Its so easy to learn Ruby and deploy to heroku.
- stephenr 14y agoOne hosting site that's backed by another hosting company that has a history of huge, extended outages does not make ruby or rails "omnipresent" I seriously question anyone who uses heroku for production anything.
- pbiggar 14y agoRight, but you're not using shared hosting for production either.
- stephenr 14y agoPlenty of php based web sites (not web apps, sites) use shared hosting
- jasonlotito 14y agoI have sites hosting on shared hosting providers that have better uptime then Heroku. They aren't big sites. Hell, they are little sites, with barely a trickle of traffic. But that traffic results in real, paying customers.
- pbiggar 14y agoI don't know where this idea of heroku having poor uptime is from. Heroku has excellent uptime - even during the ec2 outage most sites had very little actual downtime.
- jasonlotito 14y ago> I don't know where this idea of heroku having poor uptime is from. Heroku's uptime.