8 ms·

LOL at adding PHP support to app engine almost 5 years later. PHP gets a lot of bashing but you can't deny its popularity, as evidenced by the number of stars.

• astrodust 13y ago
  PHP is only popular because many hosting providers support it. Many hosting providers only support it because it's popular. At no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself factor in.
  • yogo 13y ago
    Yet they didn't support it for years and now they are. I only found it funny because within the HN ecosystem you get the impression that it's really dying (rightfully so given the better options out there). Now another platform provider is supporting it, which will only increase its popularity according to your statements.
    • cramsdale 13y ago
      For many applications they require a CMS and PHP clearly owns the market space here with Wordpress and Drupal -- strategic in terms of driving growth and new business. We also believe that since App Engine was built with multitenancy in mind from day one that it's a more secure, hardened environment -- better for developers. Finally, and to my point above, the majority of the internet has been built with PHP whether folks like it or not. We want to bring the benefits of cloud to this large corpus of developers -- advancing computing rather than stagnating it.
  • iguana 13y ago
    PHP is popular because it's incredibly easy to get started for someone used to doing things with HTML. An HTML page can be renamed to .php, and that is a valid PHP page. For someone trying to go from HTML/CSS to the server side, PHP presents the path of least resistance. When using PHP, a lot of the basic data structure transforms are implemented in the core language. You can integrate simple server side functionality into a static HTML page in just a few minutes, and it will work on 99%+ of hosting providers, and requires no fees and no tools. For pedantic hackers like us, sure, it's garbage, but for the average person that just wants to get things done, it is pure gold. Also, WordPress, while the biggest POS in almost every possible way, has a vast community of users, designers, plugin makers, and a marketplace for various extensions and themes. Google just opened up a huge chunk of the web app / CMS market.
    • umsm 13y ago
      > For pedantic hackers like us, sure, it's garbage, but for the average person that just wants to get things done, it is pure gold. I disagree. The developers of Wordpress are not "the average person". There are too many production sites that run on PHP to say it's garbage.
      • TheHydroImpulse 13y ago
        Wordpress is garbage. Just because there are a lot of production sites built or using Wordpress doesn't mean it's good. Wordpress is popular because of it's community, use of PHP which allows you to host it on many providers, and a ton of themes and plugins. Wordpress is probably the worst spaghetti code I've ever seen (we'll, close).
        • umsm 13y ago
          Most of the arguments are biased opinions and can't really be defended. But... if you don't like wordpress, why not assess projects such as Symfony2 or Drupal?
          • jtreminio 13y ago
            Because quality projects like symphony Symfony 2 does not fit into his works view of php.
            • astrodust 13y ago
              If Symfony is so amazing, why does nobody use it? I mean nobody in the almost literal sense. Stack Overflow serves as a rough barometer of popularity and either Symfony users have no questions, use another support platform, or they don't make up a significant population. The #1 problem with the PHP community is it's complete anarchy and filled with people that should not be developing web apps, or at least should not be developing the way they're going about it. Maybe Symfony could fix that, but there's a lot of work to be done here.
  • camus 13y ago
    PHP is popular because users know it is a good compromise between javaish stuffs ( type hinting in functions and methods , private,protected,public members, interfaces,and abstract classes ) and some whatever dynamic stuff out there ( dynamic , weak typing ) and some weird/functional stuffs ( pointers , closures , callbacks ). Yes PHP has a lot of bad parts. But its good parts are really really good. Most hosting providers dont allow serious php development anyway , so it makes little difference. You need a vps or a PAAS to do serious PHP development , like any other solution out there. I love python and ruby. But I really miss type hinting everytime i use one of these.
    • TheHydroImpulse 13y ago
      PHP has just mixed and matched a ton of different features from other languages without having consistency. For example, many of the core functions have different naming conventions and many of it's OOP features are after thoughts.
  • chromatic 13y ago
    At no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself factor in. ... except for "easy to deploy", which is a merit.
    • iguana 13y ago
      * Easy to deploy * Cheap to deploy * Easy to find programmers to help you * Affordable programmers * Code is easy to read for non-programmers who understand HTML * Ton of free code available to reuse Inconsistency, poorly thought out OO, lack of purity, and disdain by hipsters are a small price to pay for those merits.
      • krapp 13y ago
        ... disdain by hipsters is a bonus in my book.
        • astrodust 13y ago
          So you're a hipster, basically. "Hating PHP? That's so mainstream. Personally, I'm hating on Haskell and NodeJS."
          • krapp 13y ago
            I plan to hate Python once I learn enough of it.
            • brokenparser 13y ago
              Significant whitespace.
      • eevee 13y ago
        So you're saying that, as a programmer, it's in my best interests to learn something other than PHP so I'll be less affordable...?
        • 13y ago
• tekacs 13y ago
  Popularity, yes. I'd argue it largely comes from amateurish developers, though. It can be used at scale, of course[1] but surely it's popularity is as a result of the hordes of amateur developers and shoddy PHP apps, hacks, script repositories and general, unmaintainable spaghetti code? braces for downvotes (I did try to be fairly balanced, to be fair) [1]: the wisdom of doing this left to the reader. Thought: ah, my sibling commenter managed to put it better than me (and less controversially).
  • JoeKM 13y ago
    I never understood the simultaneous hate of PHP and praising of JavaScript. They're both awful languages that are popular because amauteur programmers can easily get started and churn apps. There is just as much, if not more, horribly written spaghetti JavaScript out there, even by Rails and Python developers, as there is horrible PHP code. The only reason people don't belittle JavaScript (as much) is because there are no other options. If there were, I think JavaScript would easily be the next PHP (and for good reason).
    • TheHydroImpulse 13y ago
      JavaScript has a mixed praise. Some people hate it but still use it because it's the only option, while other people love it to death. I think once people know how to use JavaScript appropriately and uses it's strengths then it's a much better language. Back in the day I found JavaScript weird and messy but that was partly how I used it. The prototype pattern is extremely powerful and JavaScript is a multi-paradigm language, which is great. OOP or Functional, it's your choice. With the rise of really good front-end frameworks (they're getting better), the quality of JavaScript applications is getting better and better and Node.js has also done a really good job at boosting JavaScripts rep. I do think the standards body is greatly flawed and all the different browser implementations are increasingly frustrating. The ability to use new features is extremely little, unless you use JavaScript as an embedded language in another application (i.e HTML5 App in a native context). I don't think JavaScript will be the next PHP.
    • mikeash 13y ago
      There's awful, and then there's PHP. JavaScript isn't a great language, but it's OK. Maybe "awful", but lots of languages are. PHP, on the other hand, is in a class of its own, far worse than JavaScript or any other mainstream language I've experienced.
• MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  Google IO 2014: App Engine now supports ColdFusion.
  • yogo 13y ago
    I don't see it :). ColdFusion is both hated and relatively unpopular, PHP has popularity going for it.
• jasonhanley 13y ago
  PHP is a solid workhorse. Quick to prototype, and once a PHP app is up and running, it just works. Wikipedia, Facebook, MailChimp, WordPress, tons more -- they all load fast and are hardly ever down. You can argue all day about the fine details of programming languages, but PHP is popular for good reasons.
  • TheHydroImpulse 13y ago
    You attribute high availability to the infrastructure entirely, not just a front facing programming language. Facebook has a massive architecture and only it's front-end stuff (views, data retrieval) are done in PHP. Everything else are separate services written in Java (or some other JVM language) and communicate through Thrift. PHP isn't accredited with Facebook's high availability and Facebook doesn't even serve PHP, it serves compile C++ code that was compiled from PHP.