8 ms·

PHP is the right tool for the job (for all the wrong reasons)

87 points by samuellevy 14y ago

mqzaidi 14y ago
Try dropping files in an environment where apache / php is not installed, or where db drivers or gd bindings are missing. Or try to set it up with nginx and php5-fpm. There is a big difference in being ubiquitious and being easy to use, and lets not infer casuality where there is none. Most popular PHP projects come with a good installer, but go to sourceforge and try a lesser known project. Or go back to the 90s and see if installing drupal or wordpress was as easy. I can argue that shell scripting is the best programming language by this logic.
ollybee 14y ago
"the only language that makes deploying a website effectively idiot-proof" I work for a large web host and can assure you this is not the case.
- coldtea 14y ago
  Have you compared to idiots installing RoR and Java apps on same host? If not, then you're not assuring him at all.
- samuellevy 14y ago
  I've worked for a reasonably sized (business) host myself, and yes - anything that's idiot proof is just waiting for a bigger idiot, but PHP is far easier to deploy for a non-programmer than anything else.
mwcampbell 14y ago
How cheap does the shared hosting need to be? DigitalOcean offers virtual machines starting at $5/month. At a somewhat higher level of abstraction, WebFaction offers shared hosting for $9.50/month with a broad selection of technology stacks.
- andyroid 14y ago
  When doing freelance jobs, I've rarely had the chance to choose the hosting provider for the client as they in most cases already have a web site which they need to extend with certain functionality (web shop, blog, etc). Convincing them to switch hosting provider without obvious (to them) benefits is pretty pointless. Of course, your point still stands if the job entails creating a platform from scratch.
rywalker 14y ago
When people complain about McDonalds being horrible food, not fit for human consumption, they will often talk about the health benefits of their favorite foods. And you know what? They're right. But McDonald's is still better food. Imagine a programmer from a top software company writing long-winded rants about how horrible PHP is; how PHP should cease to exist. Everyone would roll their eyes, and say "Well that's the bloody point of PHP, you idiot!" McDonald's caters to poor people, especially those who don't have their own cooking skills. This is the challenge for all the people who want to complain about McDonalds - if your chosen food is so much better, then make it accessible in the way that McDonald's is. -- "The easy path is often not the best path." -Me
- alexjeffrey 14y ago
  "best" is a very subjective term. PHP is not the best language for making in-house web app stacks like many people on HN build, but it is the best language to deploy a basic marketing web page for the chip shop down the road. That's the point I believe this article is trying to make, and basically just boils down to "the right tool for the right job".
DoubleCluster 14y ago
Exactly. I detest PHP, but I've used it to quickly build a sign-up website for an event. If you pair PHP with an interface library like Bootstrap and an ORM like Paris/Idiorm you can have something up and running cheaply and quickly. Is it maintainable? No, but that's not important in this case. edit: let me clarify, I don't assert that ALL php code is unmaintainable, just the quick site I built. Though if you're in the mood to argue: statically typed languages are infinitely more maintainable than dynamically typed ones in my opinion.
- jordan_clark 14y ago
  > Is it maintainable? No I think that's an exaggeration. Also, I have something to say about JIT.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  "Is it maintainable? No" Anyone who has worked with codebases in multiple languages for any length of time realizes that's a wrong statement. Maintainable is, to some degree, in the eye of the beholder (and often author), but you can write unmaintainable code in any platform. Everyone seems to love RoR - I inherited a Rails 1 app written over 18 months that still didn't work right, and was essentially unupgradeable - every piece of advice from every Ruby person I talked to was "just start over in Rails 2 and port some of the old logic over". OK - so now I'm talking 'upgradeable' vs 'maintainable'. Try to 'maintain' a Rails 1 app in 2011 - simply searching for how to do certain things in Rails 1 is pretty hard to do, because the docs are wrong/outdated or simply gone. But hey - "Ruby is maintainable, PHP sucks", right? Give me a well-thought out Zend Framework app written by a senior developer with experience writing good code vs Rails hacked together by someone with 2 weeks of udemy lessons under their belt any day.
- jtreminio 14y ago
  "I don't assert that ALL php code is unmaintainable, just the quick site I built. " Sounds like you're the problem here.
bradwestness 14y ago
This is what the team behind Discourse is attempting to address somewhat, making Ruby software as idiot-proof to set up as PHP applications. Whether they will end up succeeding is yet to be seen, but this does definitely seem like an area where competition will benefit the greater good, as displacing PHP with any one of the better designed languages out there would benefit the internet as a whole. I do wonder though: is the procedural nature of PHP equally responsible for it's adoption by inexperienced developers? Sure, PHP is cheap and widely available, but you also don't need to understand the concepts behind object orientation to hack together a "dynamic" website with a few includes. And at that point you're just familiar enough with PHP to favor it for future development.
- samuellevy 14y ago
  I think that's a chicken/egg situation there.
  - corry 14y ago
    Agreed. As is often brought up in PHP threads, the biggest thing is universal adoption of PHP in web hosting. People learning how to stitch together web pages aren't going to grab a VPS, learn the complexity of managing the server, and use something complex like Rails (where there's a language, a framework, and MVC to learn). With PHP --> the newbie just has to FTP the files up and it works. Fewer variables to manage, fewer things to learn. You go from 0 to 60 much faster. Now, you probably will go from 60 to 100 much much slower than with a different stack, but that's a different discussion...
  - bradwestness 14y ago
    I agree, and I think that means it will be very difficult for any language that requires more understanding of OOP concepts to get started with will have a hard time competing with PHP in this arena.
- dubcanada 14y ago
  Good luck! But that's going to be hard. LAMP on Windows is as easy as downloading a exe file and running it. LAMR (or what ever you want) will never be that simple. It's the nature of the language. They are completely different. I'd like to believe maybe one day someone will commit the 6 months to make such a thing happen. But I really doubt it.
grimborg 14y ago
I disagree. Deploying a Python site, for example, is equally easy.
- scribu 14y ago
  So, you're saying that you can buy cheap shared hosting with a Python server set up, where you only need to upload the files via FTP and it will just work?
  - rywalker 14y ago
    Deploying with FTP is harder than deploying with git.
    - IgorPartola 14y ago
      Don't deploy with git. Have a build process which isolates your VCS from your deployed code. fab/Makefile/etc. make this easy.
    - scribu 14y ago
      Maybe, but even so, learning to use FTP is a heck of a lot easier than learning to use git.
- knieveltech 14y ago
  So you're saying you can FTP a full featured CMS to commodity hosting and it just works?
- jonascopenhagen 14y ago
  Deploying a PHP site can be done with the use of one or two apt-get commands. In Python I'd need to do that plus write WSGI-related stuff in a script, alter the Apache configuration, etc. Check out the instructions for Flask or Django if you don't know what I mean.
conradfr 14y ago
I'd love to use Python or Go or whatever. But everyone wants to pay me to code PHP on some mediocre stack. So be it ... At least I home I am free to use whatever I want. So I use Symphony2 ;) ... which adds verbosity and complexity to a language that still can't decide if 0 is something empty or just the number 0.
- nkozyra 14y ago
  But this is a different issue altogether. If someone asks for product X without a language specification, you're probably free to create it in any language you're comfortable (although admittedly it would be stupid for a client to allow this). PHP is not faster to write, debug and deploy than most other languages. It is faster to write, debug and deploy if you know PHP well and language X not as well.
  - conradfr 14y ago
    I guess it goes hand in hand. PHP is good enough for most of the jobs, cheaper/easier to host, and you get cheaper and easier-to-find developers
- borplk 14y ago
  "a language that still can't decide if 0 is something empty or just the number 0" Beautiful.
nkozyra 14y ago
I don't see PHP as any more easily deployable than Node, Rails or even self-contained Go/Gorilla. Python, maybe, but even that's trivial to get going. Most of these - save Go - are installed on shared servers anyway. What this sounds like to me is "I'm most comfortable with PHP, thus it's faster (read: cheaper) for me to create freelance projects in it." Which might be true; there is a cost associated with learning and thus becoming comfortable in another language. But that's a very different argument than you're making here, Sam. If someone asked a freelance programmer to make X and you can make it in PHP, Python or Ruby ... the actual cost of development should be relatively even. What you're factoring in is an inherent time cost for your lack of comfort in the other languages.
- samuellevy 14y ago
  Not quite; I'm also factoring in support costs (both to me, and the client), as well as the ability to sell a higher-costing hosting solution to the client. I'm quite comfortable deploying python projects, and I've done it for a number of clients, but the problems I'm faced with are: - Sometimes the client comes with hosting for a previous site, and insist that it has to be hosted in the same location - There isn't much in the way of reliable, cheap hosting where the client will get support for anything other than PHP. - I am not going to manage a client's server for them. They do not pay me enough to justify waking up in the middle of the night to restart a linode that crashed. I am not in the hosting business (I used to be), and I like it this way. I will often try to push the client towards managed business hosting, where there's a bit more freedom to move, but even then, it's an uphill battle. PHP is a (the) reality of my line of work.
  - nkozyra 14y ago
    Right, but you're still confused. In these cases, it's not that PHP is a tool for the project, it's that PHP is a part of the project. Honestly, shared hosting rarely even handles PHP - I don't know many hosting places that will support the code you write. I can't see going to your host and complaining that your site is down because you wrote a script with an infinite loop that's eating up Apache.
donutdan4114 14y ago
If you use a decent web framework for your project, I think PHP isn't a terrible solution. It will be maintainable, organized, thoughtful, and documented. Obviously in the end, it's still PHP, but a good framework makes those more complex PHP applications understandable. If you're building a website (in any language) without a framework, you're doing it wrong...
- papsosouid 14y ago
  If you are using a framework, then you've lost the "advantage" PHP had to begin with: simplicity. Once you are using a framework, everything is just as complex as with rails or django, so why not just use one of those? And your last statement is terribly ignorant. There's tons of web sites and apps that are better off built without a framework.
  - donutdan4114 14y ago
    I'm sure if you think of any successful web site/app they use some type of framework, even if they made it themselves.
    - papsosouid 14y ago
      I'm sure you are very wrong. Again, tons of sites a framework is counter-productive, not helpful. Do you think a framework makes sense for a 99% static site that just wants to use include($header) and have an email contact form? Or any of the tons of random admin interfaces people need to write for things that don't fit in to the assumed database backed web app mold?
netmute 14y ago
Simply not true. Have you ever tried to install and setup PHP on a fresh server? It's almost as painful as writing code in PHP. The article is talking about managed hosting, were that might still be true (Admins are incredibly conservative and stubborn individuals). But for everything else? PHP doesn't work 'out of the box'. It's due to the work of a poor admin somewhere that you can just upload your crap and it runs. In contrast, I can install and setup a complete Ruby server in about 15 minutes.
- knotty66 14y ago
  Is it really that difficult? The last time I had to install LAMP stack was on Ubuntu and it was something like: $ sudo tasksel install lamp-server
- jstalin 14y ago
  Really? apt-get install nginx php5 php5-fpm php-pear php5-common php5-mcrypt php5-cli php5-gd Takes about 2 minutes.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    If you want to pretend that is all that is involved, then your argument suggests web development with haskell is just as easy to setup as with PHP: $ pkg_add snap Well, that was easy.
- IgorPartola 14y ago
  apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5, edit create/edit your vhost file, upload PHP files to wherever you pointed the vhost file, reload apache?
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  apt-get install apache apt-get install mod-php5 apt-get install php5-pdo-mysql whatever the packages are - there's about 4-5 core packages (yum/apt/whatever) or other packages like xampp that set up a default environment in about 5 minutes on most modern systems. There's certainly a lot of configuration that can be done, but getting a LAMP system set up to allow PHP/MySQL to work is trivial these days compared to 2000. Cue the puppet and chef supporters who would suggest scripted recipes for everything anyway. :)
IgorPartola 14y ago
One thing I really like about PHP is it's execution model. Here, every request is mapped to a single static .php file which is executed by a single PHP interpreter process. The execution is essentially stateless (aside from any bugs in the interpreter which from what I've seen tend to be few when it comes to this issue). Essentially, every request gets its own execution environment and does not have to worry about anything outside of itself. You also get code reloading: requests currently in progress are handled by old code. New requests are handled by new code after you replace the .php file. Contrast this with RoR/Django/nodejs/etc. Here you have to be the one controlling the process/thread. You can mess up and create a dirty execution environment. In your requests you have to be aware of what the other requests might be doing at the same time. Moreover, running two simultaneous applications requires two different execution environments (apache processes, nodejs processes, etc.) The common solution to this is to either provide some environment isolation by running one set of interpreters per application or to have a whole virtual server dedicated to every application, incurring the overhead of an OS per app. Don't get me wrong, I detest writing code in PHP for many reasons, but the execution model is efficient: if you want more power for your applications, just increase the number of available interpreters. Moreover, every interpreter is the same, so by doubling your total number of available interpreters, you double the concurrency of all of your applications. This is the pinnacle of cloud apps: you have a simple single toggle that controls how many requests you can process concurrently. This is why shared hosting now costs $2/month while Heroku is an order of magnitude more expensive.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  The terms I've heard for this is "shared nothing" - no state is shared or stored between requests.
- montecarl 14y ago
  Isn't this true for any CGI program? I know that PHP is typically run via mod_php, but what you have described is true for any CGI program. It is somewhat expensive to startup a new interpreter process per http connection. This can be alleviated by using FastCGI, but then the interpreters are long lived and are no longer completely independent.
darkxanthos 14y ago
Why is PHP so threatening to so many developers? Don't use it. Don't take jobs where it's the primary tool. The complaining that it's a poor tool while many people create tons of value with it leads me to believe there's a disconnect between the two camps that I don't get.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  >Why is PHP so threatening to so many developers Because we inherit the horrible mess of shit PHP developers leave behind when the company finally releases they've painted themselves into a corner and can no longer move forward because every time they try to fix a bug in their software they add two more. >Don't take jobs where it's the primary tool. It is so widely used that even avoiding jobs where it is the primary tool, you will still almost certainly be stuck dealing with some PHP mess.
  - dubcanada 14y ago
    "horrible mess of shit PHP developers" has nothing to do with anything. Horrible mess of shit Ruby developers can be just as ugly if not more.
    - papsosouid 14y ago
      There is a strong correlation. PHP makes it very difficult to write correct code. An app written in a language that goes out of its way to help you create more bugs is going to have, on average, more bugs than one written in a language that does not.
    - jeltz 14y ago
      It can be but in my anecdotal experience the mess left by PHP developers is the worst. Especially when it comes to blatant XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities PHP holds a clear lead.
  - deleted 14y ago
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nnq 14y ago
Can you spot the outliers here?: "where PHP has excelled with projects like Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, Magento, Moodle, PHPBB, and so many more.". Some projects "swing the PHP-way" and they are "retarded" but easy to use and fix and keep with the "fail fast, fail cheap" philosophy. Otoh, things like Drupal or Magento "swim against the tide", are hypocritically claiming to be newbie/weekend-warrior friendly, and basing your project on them lands you over-time and over-budget 90% of the time, ending up costing more than a custom made Rails app - unless you have the rare mystical creatures called "real Drupal (or Magento) gurus" working for you. It's a very weird jungle the PHP ecosystem nowadays, and lots of the creatures in it byte hard!. If you stick to riding a gentle sloth like WordPress, you're fine... but I'd suggest rapidly switching languages and technologies (something like Django + django-cms is almost as cheap and can be deployed even on dirt-cheap shared hosts) as soon as you grow over WordPress level, otherwise something will end up biting you hard!
- ThomPete 14y ago
  That can be claimed for many other environments too. Ever tried to go outside the beaten path of Community Server? It's an inherent issue with frameworks not with any particular language IMHO.
- dubcanada 14y ago
  Not sure where you work, but where I work the entire reason we are able to do websites quickly and efficiently is because of Drupal, Wordpress. We are very very rarely over budget/time. Sure they have problems, but so does Rails, and Django.
- bhughes 14y ago
  Based on experience, I would agree with you on the Magento front (as my perpetually-in-the-planning-stages blog "I Hate Magento" will attest), but I have yet to find anything more usable (and customizable) for larger scale operations. I know there must be something less bad. Thoughts, anyone?
  - meaty 14y ago
    Agreed - its a stinking turd, but at least it's not oscommerce :)
btbuildem 14y ago
> It works, out of the box, for people who don't know what they're doing here's the worst of all the bad reasons right here..
- coldtea 14y ago
  Absolutely nothing bad about it. It's called empowering people.
- pettazz 14y ago
  Because only experts should be allowed to write code and try to build things? I'm sure you were writing shitty broken apps before at one point in your life, just to learn by experience and get better.
kennu 14y ago
I would note that the article doesn't consider having to install any custom PEAR/PECL packages that your PHP application might require. Sometimes they need to be installed on the command line (as root), or sometimes as OS packages. If you're using managed web hosting, you will probably need to email the administrators and ask them to install the needed packages, and they might refuse. In this context Ruby on Rails wins because of its standardized Gemfile approach. Every RoR application always specifies the dependencies in a standard way and their installation is always part of the deployment process. PHP has nothing like this. The same applies to asset pipelines. When your application contains SASS/SCSS or CoffeeScript files, you need to worry about how they're going to be compiled, optimized and deployed. Ruby on Rails also standardizes this so that all you need is the same basic RoR application layout that you generated in the beginning. So, as long as the web hosting provider supports Ruby on Rails, I think it's currently the simplest way to deploy full-featured web applications. Using PHP will require you to either 1) not use many modern web technologies or 2) build your own deployment processes to support them.
- graywh 14y ago
  This cuts both ways. My RoR apps use gems that require other non-ruby libraries to be installed.
- byroot 14y ago
  While I agree with you, I don't think PEAR/PECL a good exemple. Even with a good Gemfile if the libxml2-dev is not installed you will not be able to bundle your Rails app which use Nokogiri. Where the argument of PHP run on any cheap shared hosting fail for me is more about the php.ini config. You can't rely only on the PHP version to know if your app will run.
- davedevelopment 14y ago
  Composer (getcomposer.org) and Packagist (packagist.org) are largely a popular replacement for PEAR, though once you need a C extension (PECL), you're right, it does become a pain.
- dubcanada 14y ago
  You really shouldn't be deploying SASS/SCSS/CS/what ever. You should be compiling that locally and deploying JS/CSS.
JonnieCache 14y ago
I don't understand why "low-skilled people can use it" is constantly trumpeted as an upside. If you can't work out how to set up the DB by hand (for example), there's little chance you're going to be able to get through the rest of the job without making a horrible mess which you (more likely your client) will come to regret. Imagine if we took this attitude in civil engineering, or medical science. Not good. Obviously not every web project is as important as those two things, but "the barrier to entry for foot-shooting is low!" should never be a plus point for a technology. Especially when it's not your foot. There's obviously a need for a tool for low(er) skilled people to make websites, but perhaps it should be less powerful to match? It should at least have abstractions that don't leak so much. I'm happy to be lectured to about why this is wrong.
- bradwestness 14y ago
  I don't think it's so much that it's considered an upside, but rather that it's basically impossible to displace PHP with something better unless the thing you want to replace it with is equally easy, or easier, to implement.
- nayefc 14y ago
  Maybe "low-skilled people" can just stick to Wordpress?
- ojr 14y ago
  Low(er) skilled or people with not a lot of computer language experience as I see it, should be using the language that makes them the most productive, in most cases this is PHP thats the simple truth, I have a programming assignment due in my college data structures in java class, if you really want to see a horrible mess
  - JonnieCache 14y ago
    The question is, are we defining productivity as "the developer can bill and move on as quickly and easily as possible" or is it "the client's business needs are served as well as possible"?
dicroce 14y ago
My opinion on the success of PHP has more to do with how it integrates with Apache... All of the other languages were designed as languages first, then web development was bolted on... HTTP is fundamentally request / response oriented and PHP provides brain dead access to GET and POST vars via simple to understand global variables... In addition, the same mechanism is provided for session state...
robomartin 14y ago
These threads always get "interesting" don't they? A common problem I see in these kinds of discussions is engineers. Yup, you and me. In my case it took me years to move away from being a typical clueless egocentric engineer. I am sure I still am to some extent. Whatever is left pales in comparison to my younger self. What made the change? Business. And the realities of the insanely simple business equation coupled with actually launching and running them with my own money. There's a huge difference between holding a cat by the tail and watching someone else do it from afar. Huge. Where I am going with this is that we (engineers and technical folk) tend to focus on, and talk about, FEATURES almost at the expense of BENEFITS. The reality of business is that the value of the former pales in comparison with that of the latter. I love Python. However, when faced with having to do a benefits analysis it is almost impossible to not choose PHP these days. Liking it has nothing to do with making the choice. Well, it shouldn't. I wish engineers could see what they sound like from the vantage point of a business person. You see this all the time at pitch events. There's an absolutely abysmal difference between presentations from "virgin" engineers and those who have had even a few business scars.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  >However, when faced with having to do a benefits analysis it is almost impossible to not choose PHP these days For what? We were already heavily invested in PHP, but still our benefit analysis had it second last, only ahead of javascript. What benefits were we missing?
  - robomartin 14y ago
    Each organization is going to be different. If you have a team that already rocks on PHP, migrating people to Python is likely to be a problem. Depending on where you are located, finding good Python programmers could be difficult (stats: over 10x more PHP programmers than Python. If your project is pretty far along, translating to Python might carry with it a non-trivial cost. In general terms I think it might be easier/cheaper to launch an MVP in PHP with a sensible framework (like Yii) and then migrate to Python + web2py or Django for the "real" product. I prefer Python, but it is hard to ignore job market statistics when considering what it might take to put together a team. I'll go out on a limb and piss off a bunch of people in the process. I'll venture the thought that most PHP-only programmers are really bad programmers. Someone not formally educated in CS or having no experience in a variety of languages (and paradigms) before adopting PHP will probably be "challenged" as a programmer in more than one way. I have a feeling that, because of the nature of the language, a larger percentage of Python programmers are really good "traditional" programmers with a good balance between theoretical and practical knowledge. Let the flaming begin.
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gnuvince 14y ago
I guess that if "can be deployed my a non-technical user through FTP" weighs heavier than all other technical considerations put together, then I guess PHP is the right choice. Or you could just CGI.
mwcampbell 14y ago
The one technology that's nearly as ubiquitous on shared hosts as PHP is CGI. Plain, one-shot process-per-request CGI. So if we want a language that can displace PHP in its niche, perhaps we should choose a language that's amenable to short-lived CGI processes. For this, I think a language that can be compiled ahead-of-time to fast-starting native code is appropriate. By fast-starting, I mean that startup should consist of little more than the kernel's exec routine. I think the Go language would be a good fit. So the next time you need to write a web app that should be easy to deploy on a shared host, try writing it in Go, using a web framework that supports FastCGI, which can then degrade to plain CGI. Then compile the app on a Linux box, upload it to the shared host, and thanks to the self-contained nature of executables produced by the Go toolchain, the app should be ready to go with no fuss.
- sneak 14y ago
  Except that my web host runs freebsd.
mnazim 14y ago
Only way to "idiot proof" anything is to not let idiots build your software. Regardless of the tools, idiots will create a mess.
taproot 14y ago
Its sad no other languages have noticed this. PHP is a natural progression from HTML for beginners. Learn HTML, sprinkle a bit of inline PHP here and there, and bam you have a "dynamic" website. An incredibly bad and impossible to maintain website, but a "dynamic" website none the less. From there, ramping learning up to MVC / Frameworks / caching / templates / optimizers is all small leaps from the initial understanding of "put html here, sprinkle php here". Nothing else really has this apart from maybe ASP.

87 points by samuellevy 14y ago

Try dropping files in an environment where apache / php is not installed, or where db drivers or gd bindings are missing. Or try to set it up with nginx and php5-fpm. There is a big difference in being ubiquitious and being easy to use, and lets not infer casuality where there is none. Most popular PHP projects come with a good installer, but go to sourceforge and try a lesser known project. Or go back to the 90s and see if installing drupal or wordpress was as easy. I can argue that shell scripting is the best programming language by this logic.

ollybee 14y ago

"the only language that makes deploying a website effectively idiot-proof" I work for a large web host and can assure you this is not the case.

coldtea 14y ago
Have you compared to idiots installing RoR and Java apps on same host? If not, then you're not assuring him at all.
samuellevy 14y ago
I've worked for a reasonably sized (business) host myself, and yes - anything that's idiot proof is just waiting for a bigger idiot, but PHP is far easier to deploy for a non-programmer than anything else.

mwcampbell 14y ago

How cheap does the shared hosting need to be? DigitalOcean offers virtual machines starting at $5/month. At a somewhat higher level of abstraction, WebFaction offers shared hosting for $9.50/month with a broad selection of technology stacks.

andyroid 14y ago
When doing freelance jobs, I've rarely had the chance to choose the hosting provider for the client as they in most cases already have a web site which they need to extend with certain functionality (web shop, blog, etc). Convincing them to switch hosting provider without obvious (to them) benefits is pretty pointless. Of course, your point still stands if the job entails creating a platform from scratch.

rywalker 14y ago

When people complain about McDonalds being horrible food, not fit for human consumption, they will often talk about the health benefits of their favorite foods. And you know what? They're right. But McDonald's is still better food. Imagine a programmer from a top software company writing long-winded rants about how horrible PHP is; how PHP should cease to exist. Everyone would roll their eyes, and say "Well that's the bloody point of PHP, you idiot!" McDonald's caters to poor people, especially those who don't have their own cooking skills. This is the challenge for all the people who want to complain about McDonalds - if your chosen food is so much better, then make it accessible in the way that McDonald's is. -- "The easy path is often not the best path." -Me

alexjeffrey 14y ago
"best" is a very subjective term. PHP is not the best language for making in-house web app stacks like many people on HN build, but it is the best language to deploy a basic marketing web page for the chip shop down the road. That's the point I believe this article is trying to make, and basically just boils down to "the right tool for the right job".

DoubleCluster 14y ago

Exactly. I detest PHP, but I've used it to quickly build a sign-up website for an event. If you pair PHP with an interface library like Bootstrap and an ORM like Paris/Idiorm you can have something up and running cheaply and quickly. Is it maintainable? No, but that's not important in this case. edit: let me clarify, I don't assert that ALL php code is unmaintainable, just the quick site I built. Though if you're in the mood to argue: statically typed languages are infinitely more maintainable than dynamically typed ones in my opinion.

jordan_clark 14y ago
> Is it maintainable? No I think that's an exaggeration. Also, I have something to say about JIT.
mgkimsal 14y ago
"Is it maintainable? No" Anyone who has worked with codebases in multiple languages for any length of time realizes that's a wrong statement. Maintainable is, to some degree, in the eye of the beholder (and often author), but you can write unmaintainable code in any platform. Everyone seems to love RoR - I inherited a Rails 1 app written over 18 months that still didn't work right, and was essentially unupgradeable - every piece of advice from every Ruby person I talked to was "just start over in Rails 2 and port some of the old logic over". OK - so now I'm talking 'upgradeable' vs 'maintainable'. Try to 'maintain' a Rails 1 app in 2011 - simply searching for how to do certain things in Rails 1 is pretty hard to do, because the docs are wrong/outdated or simply gone. But hey - "Ruby is maintainable, PHP sucks", right? Give me a well-thought out Zend Framework app written by a senior developer with experience writing good code vs Rails hacked together by someone with 2 weeks of udemy lessons under their belt any day.
jtreminio 14y ago
"I don't assert that ALL php code is unmaintainable, just the quick site I built. " Sounds like you're the problem here.

bradwestness 14y ago

This is what the team behind Discourse is attempting to address somewhat, making Ruby software as idiot-proof to set up as PHP applications. Whether they will end up succeeding is yet to be seen, but this does definitely seem like an area where competition will benefit the greater good, as displacing PHP with any one of the better designed languages out there would benefit the internet as a whole. I do wonder though: is the procedural nature of PHP equally responsible for it's adoption by inexperienced developers? Sure, PHP is cheap and widely available, but you also don't need to understand the concepts behind object orientation to hack together a "dynamic" website with a few includes. And at that point you're just familiar enough with PHP to favor it for future development.

samuellevy 14y ago
I think that's a chicken/egg situation there.
- corry 14y ago
  Agreed. As is often brought up in PHP threads, the biggest thing is universal adoption of PHP in web hosting. People learning how to stitch together web pages aren't going to grab a VPS, learn the complexity of managing the server, and use something complex like Rails (where there's a language, a framework, and MVC to learn). With PHP --> the newbie just has to FTP the files up and it works. Fewer variables to manage, fewer things to learn. You go from 0 to 60 much faster. Now, you probably will go from 60 to 100 much much slower than with a different stack, but that's a different discussion...
- bradwestness 14y ago
  I agree, and I think that means it will be very difficult for any language that requires more understanding of OOP concepts to get started with will have a hard time competing with PHP in this arena.
dubcanada 14y ago
Good luck! But that's going to be hard. LAMP on Windows is as easy as downloading a exe file and running it. LAMR (or what ever you want) will never be that simple. It's the nature of the language. They are completely different. I'd like to believe maybe one day someone will commit the 6 months to make such a thing happen. But I really doubt it.

grimborg 14y ago

I disagree. Deploying a Python site, for example, is equally easy.

scribu 14y ago
So, you're saying that you can buy cheap shared hosting with a Python server set up, where you only need to upload the files via FTP and it will just work?
- rywalker 14y ago
  Deploying with FTP is harder than deploying with git.
  - IgorPartola 14y ago
    Don't deploy with git. Have a build process which isolates your VCS from your deployed code. fab/Makefile/etc. make this easy.
  - scribu 14y ago
    Maybe, but even so, learning to use FTP is a heck of a lot easier than learning to use git.
knieveltech 14y ago
So you're saying you can FTP a full featured CMS to commodity hosting and it just works?
jonascopenhagen 14y ago
Deploying a PHP site can be done with the use of one or two apt-get commands. In Python I'd need to do that plus write WSGI-related stuff in a script, alter the Apache configuration, etc. Check out the instructions for Flask or Django if you don't know what I mean.

conradfr 14y ago

I'd love to use Python or Go or whatever. But everyone wants to pay me to code PHP on some mediocre stack. So be it ... At least I home I am free to use whatever I want. So I use Symphony2 ;) ... which adds verbosity and complexity to a language that still can't decide if 0 is something empty or just the number 0.

nkozyra 14y ago
But this is a different issue altogether. If someone asks for product X without a language specification, you're probably free to create it in any language you're comfortable (although admittedly it would be stupid for a client to allow this). PHP is not faster to write, debug and deploy than most other languages. It is faster to write, debug and deploy if you know PHP well and language X not as well.
- conradfr 14y ago
  I guess it goes hand in hand. PHP is good enough for most of the jobs, cheaper/easier to host, and you get cheaper and easier-to-find developers
borplk 14y ago
"a language that still can't decide if 0 is something empty or just the number 0" Beautiful.

nkozyra 14y ago

I don't see PHP as any more easily deployable than Node, Rails or even self-contained Go/Gorilla. Python, maybe, but even that's trivial to get going. Most of these - save Go - are installed on shared servers anyway. What this sounds like to me is "I'm most comfortable with PHP, thus it's faster (read: cheaper) for me to create freelance projects in it." Which might be true; there is a cost associated with learning and thus becoming comfortable in another language. But that's a very different argument than you're making here, Sam. If someone asked a freelance programmer to make X and you can make it in PHP, Python or Ruby ... the actual cost of development should be relatively even. What you're factoring in is an inherent time cost for your lack of comfort in the other languages.

samuellevy 14y ago
Not quite; I'm also factoring in support costs (both to me, and the client), as well as the ability to sell a higher-costing hosting solution to the client. I'm quite comfortable deploying python projects, and I've done it for a number of clients, but the problems I'm faced with are: - Sometimes the client comes with hosting for a previous site, and insist that it has to be hosted in the same location - There isn't much in the way of reliable, cheap hosting where the client will get support for anything other than PHP. - I am not going to manage a client's server for them. They do not pay me enough to justify waking up in the middle of the night to restart a linode that crashed. I am not in the hosting business (I used to be), and I like it this way. I will often try to push the client towards managed business hosting, where there's a bit more freedom to move, but even then, it's an uphill battle. PHP is a (the) reality of my line of work.
- nkozyra 14y ago
  Right, but you're still confused. In these cases, it's not that PHP is a tool for the project, it's that PHP is a part of the project. Honestly, shared hosting rarely even handles PHP - I don't know many hosting places that will support the code you write. I can't see going to your host and complaining that your site is down because you wrote a script with an infinite loop that's eating up Apache.

donutdan4114 14y ago

If you use a decent web framework for your project, I think PHP isn't a terrible solution. It will be maintainable, organized, thoughtful, and documented. Obviously in the end, it's still PHP, but a good framework makes those more complex PHP applications understandable. If you're building a website (in any language) without a framework, you're doing it wrong...

papsosouid 14y ago
If you are using a framework, then you've lost the "advantage" PHP had to begin with: simplicity. Once you are using a framework, everything is just as complex as with rails or django, so why not just use one of those? And your last statement is terribly ignorant. There's tons of web sites and apps that are better off built without a framework.
- donutdan4114 14y ago
  I'm sure if you think of any successful web site/app they use some type of framework, even if they made it themselves.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    I'm sure you are very wrong. Again, tons of sites a framework is counter-productive, not helpful. Do you think a framework makes sense for a 99% static site that just wants to use include($header) and have an email contact form? Or any of the tons of random admin interfaces people need to write for things that don't fit in to the assumed database backed web app mold?

netmute 14y ago

Simply not true. Have you ever tried to install and setup PHP on a fresh server? It's almost as painful as writing code in PHP. The article is talking about managed hosting, were that might still be true (Admins are incredibly conservative and stubborn individuals). But for everything else? PHP doesn't work 'out of the box'. It's due to the work of a poor admin somewhere that you can just upload your crap and it runs. In contrast, I can install and setup a complete Ruby server in about 15 minutes.

knotty66 14y ago
Is it really that difficult? The last time I had to install LAMP stack was on Ubuntu and it was something like: $ sudo tasksel install lamp-server
jstalin 14y ago
Really? apt-get install nginx php5 php5-fpm php-pear php5-common php5-mcrypt php5-cli php5-gd Takes about 2 minutes.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  If you want to pretend that is all that is involved, then your argument suggests web development with haskell is just as easy to setup as with PHP: $ pkg_add snap Well, that was easy.
IgorPartola 14y ago
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5, edit create/edit your vhost file, upload PHP files to wherever you pointed the vhost file, reload apache?
mgkimsal 14y ago
apt-get install apache apt-get install mod-php5 apt-get install php5-pdo-mysql whatever the packages are - there's about 4-5 core packages (yum/apt/whatever) or other packages like xampp that set up a default environment in about 5 minutes on most modern systems. There's certainly a lot of configuration that can be done, but getting a LAMP system set up to allow PHP/MySQL to work is trivial these days compared to 2000. Cue the puppet and chef supporters who would suggest scripted recipes for everything anyway. :)

IgorPartola 14y ago

One thing I really like about PHP is it's execution model. Here, every request is mapped to a single static .php file which is executed by a single PHP interpreter process. The execution is essentially stateless (aside from any bugs in the interpreter which from what I've seen tend to be few when it comes to this issue). Essentially, every request gets its own execution environment and does not have to worry about anything outside of itself. You also get code reloading: requests currently in progress are handled by old code. New requests are handled by new code after you replace the .php file. Contrast this with RoR/Django/nodejs/etc. Here you have to be the one controlling the process/thread. You can mess up and create a dirty execution environment. In your requests you have to be aware of what the other requests might be doing at the same time. Moreover, running two simultaneous applications requires two different execution environments (apache processes, nodejs processes, etc.) The common solution to this is to either provide some environment isolation by running one set of interpreters per application or to have a whole virtual server dedicated to every application, incurring the overhead of an OS per app. Don't get me wrong, I detest writing code in PHP for many reasons, but the execution model is efficient: if you want more power for your applications, just increase the number of available interpreters. Moreover, every interpreter is the same, so by doubling your total number of available interpreters, you double the concurrency of all of your applications. This is the pinnacle of cloud apps: you have a simple single toggle that controls how many requests you can process concurrently. This is why shared hosting now costs $2/month while Heroku is an order of magnitude more expensive.

mgkimsal 14y ago
The terms I've heard for this is "shared nothing" - no state is shared or stored between requests.
montecarl 14y ago
Isn't this true for any CGI program? I know that PHP is typically run via mod_php, but what you have described is true for any CGI program. It is somewhat expensive to startup a new interpreter process per http connection. This can be alleviated by using FastCGI, but then the interpreters are long lived and are no longer completely independent.

darkxanthos 14y ago

Why is PHP so threatening to so many developers? Don't use it. Don't take jobs where it's the primary tool. The complaining that it's a poor tool while many people create tons of value with it leads me to believe there's a disconnect between the two camps that I don't get.

papsosouid 14y ago
>Why is PHP so threatening to so many developers Because we inherit the horrible mess of shit PHP developers leave behind when the company finally releases they've painted themselves into a corner and can no longer move forward because every time they try to fix a bug in their software they add two more. >Don't take jobs where it's the primary tool. It is so widely used that even avoiding jobs where it is the primary tool, you will still almost certainly be stuck dealing with some PHP mess.
- dubcanada 14y ago
  "horrible mess of shit PHP developers" has nothing to do with anything. Horrible mess of shit Ruby developers can be just as ugly if not more.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    There is a strong correlation. PHP makes it very difficult to write correct code. An app written in a language that goes out of its way to help you create more bugs is going to have, on average, more bugs than one written in a language that does not.
  - jeltz 14y ago
    It can be but in my anecdotal experience the mess left by PHP developers is the worst. Especially when it comes to blatant XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities PHP holds a clear lead.
- deleted 14y ago
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nnq 14y ago

Can you spot the outliers here?: "where PHP has excelled with projects like Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, Magento, Moodle, PHPBB, and so many more.". Some projects "swing the PHP-way" and they are "retarded" but easy to use and fix and keep with the "fail fast, fail cheap" philosophy. Otoh, things like Drupal or Magento "swim against the tide", are hypocritically claiming to be newbie/weekend-warrior friendly, and basing your project on them lands you over-time and over-budget 90% of the time, ending up costing more than a custom made Rails app - unless you have the rare mystical creatures called "real Drupal (or Magento) gurus" working for you. It's a very weird jungle the PHP ecosystem nowadays, and lots of the creatures in it byte hard!. If you stick to riding a gentle sloth like WordPress, you're fine... but I'd suggest rapidly switching languages and technologies (something like Django + django-cms is almost as cheap and can be deployed even on dirt-cheap shared hosts) as soon as you grow over WordPress level, otherwise something will end up biting you hard!

ThomPete 14y ago
That can be claimed for many other environments too. Ever tried to go outside the beaten path of Community Server? It's an inherent issue with frameworks not with any particular language IMHO.
dubcanada 14y ago
Not sure where you work, but where I work the entire reason we are able to do websites quickly and efficiently is because of Drupal, Wordpress. We are very very rarely over budget/time. Sure they have problems, but so does Rails, and Django.
bhughes 14y ago
Based on experience, I would agree with you on the Magento front (as my perpetually-in-the-planning-stages blog "I Hate Magento" will attest), but I have yet to find anything more usable (and customizable) for larger scale operations. I know there must be something less bad. Thoughts, anyone?
- meaty 14y ago
  Agreed - its a stinking turd, but at least it's not oscommerce :)

btbuildem 14y ago

> It works, out of the box, for people who don't know what they're doing here's the worst of all the bad reasons right here..

coldtea 14y ago
Absolutely nothing bad about it. It's called empowering people.
pettazz 14y ago
Because only experts should be allowed to write code and try to build things? I'm sure you were writing shitty broken apps before at one point in your life, just to learn by experience and get better.

kennu 14y ago

I would note that the article doesn't consider having to install any custom PEAR/PECL packages that your PHP application might require. Sometimes they need to be installed on the command line (as root), or sometimes as OS packages. If you're using managed web hosting, you will probably need to email the administrators and ask them to install the needed packages, and they might refuse. In this context Ruby on Rails wins because of its standardized Gemfile approach. Every RoR application always specifies the dependencies in a standard way and their installation is always part of the deployment process. PHP has nothing like this. The same applies to asset pipelines. When your application contains SASS/SCSS or CoffeeScript files, you need to worry about how they're going to be compiled, optimized and deployed. Ruby on Rails also standardizes this so that all you need is the same basic RoR application layout that you generated in the beginning. So, as long as the web hosting provider supports Ruby on Rails, I think it's currently the simplest way to deploy full-featured web applications. Using PHP will require you to either 1) not use many modern web technologies or 2) build your own deployment processes to support them.

graywh 14y ago
This cuts both ways. My RoR apps use gems that require other non-ruby libraries to be installed.
byroot 14y ago
While I agree with you, I don't think PEAR/PECL a good exemple. Even with a good Gemfile if the libxml2-dev is not installed you will not be able to bundle your Rails app which use Nokogiri. Where the argument of PHP run on any cheap shared hosting fail for me is more about the php.ini config. You can't rely only on the PHP version to know if your app will run.
davedevelopment 14y ago
Composer (getcomposer.org) and Packagist (packagist.org) are largely a popular replacement for PEAR, though once you need a C extension (PECL), you're right, it does become a pain.
dubcanada 14y ago
You really shouldn't be deploying SASS/SCSS/CS/what ever. You should be compiling that locally and deploying JS/CSS.

JonnieCache 14y ago

I don't understand why "low-skilled people can use it" is constantly trumpeted as an upside. If you can't work out how to set up the DB by hand (for example), there's little chance you're going to be able to get through the rest of the job without making a horrible mess which you (more likely your client) will come to regret. Imagine if we took this attitude in civil engineering, or medical science. Not good. Obviously not every web project is as important as those two things, but "the barrier to entry for foot-shooting is low!" should never be a plus point for a technology. Especially when it's not your foot. There's obviously a need for a tool for low(er) skilled people to make websites, but perhaps it should be less powerful to match? It should at least have abstractions that don't leak so much. I'm happy to be lectured to about why this is wrong.

bradwestness 14y ago
I don't think it's so much that it's considered an upside, but rather that it's basically impossible to displace PHP with something better unless the thing you want to replace it with is equally easy, or easier, to implement.
nayefc 14y ago
Maybe "low-skilled people" can just stick to Wordpress?
ojr 14y ago
Low(er) skilled or people with not a lot of computer language experience as I see it, should be using the language that makes them the most productive, in most cases this is PHP thats the simple truth, I have a programming assignment due in my college data structures in java class, if you really want to see a horrible mess
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  The question is, are we defining productivity as "the developer can bill and move on as quickly and easily as possible" or is it "the client's business needs are served as well as possible"?

dicroce 14y ago

My opinion on the success of PHP has more to do with how it integrates with Apache... All of the other languages were designed as languages first, then web development was bolted on... HTTP is fundamentally request / response oriented and PHP provides brain dead access to GET and POST vars via simple to understand global variables... In addition, the same mechanism is provided for session state...

robomartin 14y ago

These threads always get "interesting" don't they? A common problem I see in these kinds of discussions is engineers. Yup, you and me. In my case it took me years to move away from being a typical clueless egocentric engineer. I am sure I still am to some extent. Whatever is left pales in comparison to my younger self. What made the change? Business. And the realities of the insanely simple business equation coupled with actually launching and running them with my own money. There's a huge difference between holding a cat by the tail and watching someone else do it from afar. Huge. Where I am going with this is that we (engineers and technical folk) tend to focus on, and talk about, FEATURES almost at the expense of BENEFITS. The reality of business is that the value of the former pales in comparison with that of the latter. I love Python. However, when faced with having to do a benefits analysis it is almost impossible to not choose PHP these days. Liking it has nothing to do with making the choice. Well, it shouldn't. I wish engineers could see what they sound like from the vantage point of a business person. You see this all the time at pitch events. There's an absolutely abysmal difference between presentations from "virgin" engineers and those who have had even a few business scars.

papsosouid 14y ago
>However, when faced with having to do a benefits analysis it is almost impossible to not choose PHP these days For what? We were already heavily invested in PHP, but still our benefit analysis had it second last, only ahead of javascript. What benefits were we missing?
- robomartin 14y ago
  Each organization is going to be different. If you have a team that already rocks on PHP, migrating people to Python is likely to be a problem. Depending on where you are located, finding good Python programmers could be difficult (stats: over 10x more PHP programmers than Python. If your project is pretty far along, translating to Python might carry with it a non-trivial cost. In general terms I think it might be easier/cheaper to launch an MVP in PHP with a sensible framework (like Yii) and then migrate to Python + web2py or Django for the "real" product. I prefer Python, but it is hard to ignore job market statistics when considering what it might take to put together a team. I'll go out on a limb and piss off a bunch of people in the process. I'll venture the thought that most PHP-only programmers are really bad programmers. Someone not formally educated in CS or having no experience in a variety of languages (and paradigms) before adopting PHP will probably be "challenged" as a programmer in more than one way. I have a feeling that, because of the nature of the language, a larger percentage of Python programmers are really good "traditional" programmers with a good balance between theoretical and practical knowledge. Let the flaming begin.

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gnuvince 14y ago

I guess that if "can be deployed my a non-technical user through FTP" weighs heavier than all other technical considerations put together, then I guess PHP is the right choice. Or you could just CGI.

mwcampbell 14y ago

The one technology that's nearly as ubiquitous on shared hosts as PHP is CGI. Plain, one-shot process-per-request CGI. So if we want a language that can displace PHP in its niche, perhaps we should choose a language that's amenable to short-lived CGI processes. For this, I think a language that can be compiled ahead-of-time to fast-starting native code is appropriate. By fast-starting, I mean that startup should consist of little more than the kernel's exec routine. I think the Go language would be a good fit. So the next time you need to write a web app that should be easy to deploy on a shared host, try writing it in Go, using a web framework that supports FastCGI, which can then degrade to plain CGI. Then compile the app on a Linux box, upload it to the shared host, and thanks to the self-contained nature of executables produced by the Go toolchain, the app should be ready to go with no fuss.

sneak 14y ago
Except that my web host runs freebsd.

mnazim 14y ago

Only way to "idiot proof" anything is to not let idiots build your software. Regardless of the tools, idiots will create a mess.

taproot 14y ago

Its sad no other languages have noticed this. PHP is a natural progression from HTML for beginners. Learn HTML, sprinkle a bit of inline PHP here and there, and bam you have a "dynamic" website. An incredibly bad and impossible to maintain website, but a "dynamic" website none the less. From there, ramping learning up to MVC / Frameworks / caching / templates / optimizers is all small leaps from the initial understanding of "put html here, sprinkle php here". Nothing else really has this apart from maybe ASP.