6 ms·

You put it very lightly. It is not pedantry or elitist hackers, it is computer science. A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with

by pestaa 13y ago

You put it very lightly. It is not pedantry or elitist hackers, it is computer science. A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all.

camus 13y ago
Because no engineer out there use php to develop anything ? right ? those folks at dailymotion , (the only youtube real competitor that yahoo wanted to purchase ), they are such insane engineers using php... i bet you are better than them hey , what did you build that is famous and used by millions of people around the world ?
toomuchtodo 13y ago
Facebook. Wikipedia. Yahoo.
- eropple 13y ago
  Were either of the first two started by "a sane engineer with a bit of experience"? Inertia is powerful.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Doesn't matter what your site is coded in if it isn't revenue positive/have funding/etc.
    - eropple 13y ago
      I'm not sure where you got that from my post. Though, to be honest, I don't think that using Play (today) or Rails/Django (yesterday) is sufficiently less productive to merit the technical debt you almost certainly will incur starting with a PHP stack. (And I am an ex-PHP person, to the point of hacking around in PHP core...that's a few months I'd love to have back.)
- Legion 13y ago
  pestaa's comment needs to be amended. It should read: "A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all in 2013." Facebook's former CTO has said that the only reason Facebook is still on PHP still today is legacy. It wouldn't be written in PHP if it were started today. PHP once was the right tool for the job, but those years have passed. We have many better options now.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    We have many technically cleaner solutions, but in the real world other factors, such as ability to quickly hire sufficient number of reasonably priced developers, often means a lot more than technical purity. A sane engineer considers the full pictures before picking a solution rather than pick their pet languages just because it's nice and clean.
- astrodust 13y ago
  Facebook could write their stuff in COBOL and it wouldn't matter to anyone else. Remember MySpace? It was written in ColdFusion, so I guess ColdFusion is a great idea! Wikipedia's Mediawiki software is awful, and serves as a great example of how not to build an application. It makes WordPress look like a precision engineered Swiss watch. Yahoo uses PHP because, like Facebook, they could make FORTRAN work in production if they wanted to.
vidarh 13y ago
Engineering is not computer science. A sane engineer don't pick technology based on what is most theoretically pure, but based on what can deliver on the requirements on time and on budget. If you are building a simple CRUD style application, for example, there's likely nothing in your technical requirements that precludes PHP in any way. Then the question turns to ease of deployment and maintenance, operational costs, cost and availability of developer time, and there PHP tends to score quite well, not least because there's a huge pool of relatively skilled engineers that know it. I personally prefer Ruby and don't like writing PHP at all, but I'd be a horrible engineer if I wrote it off in situations, where, e.g., it is hard to hire Ruby developers at a reasonable price, or there's a lot of existing PHP knowledge within a team that is already in place.
- iguana 13y ago
  Cost and availability of developer time is much more of a factor in platform choice than a lot of people think, especially engineers who don't have to worry about the business end. If you can find RoR developers, they are not cheap. If you're building a v1 product on a limited budget, and don't want to spend 80 hours per week writing it yourself, PHP is an excellent choice. Having to read the code with a clothespin on your nose is a small price to pay.
- astrodust 13y ago
  For the question "I want to build a web application", PHP is not the answer. It is the worst in nearly every category you cite. Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously. What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting? If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of a few that are generally crappy. Cost and developer time are non-factors since the time you'd need to learn PHP is probably higher than other languages that make more sense and aren't filled with anachronisms you will spend half your time working around. You can train someone up in Ruby on Rails in two weeks. Django or Node would take about double that time, but only because the platforms aren't by default as feature complete and the tooling will vary from project to project.
eli 13y ago
So the apps I wrote in PHP are scientifically worse than the ones I wrote in Ruby? I had no idea!

by pestaa 13y ago

You put it very lightly. It is not pedantry or elitist hackers, it is computer science. A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all.

camus 13y ago

Because no engineer out there use php to develop anything ? right ? those folks at dailymotion , (the only youtube real competitor that yahoo wanted to purchase ), they are such insane engineers using php... i bet you are better than them hey , what did you build that is famous and used by millions of people around the world ?

toomuchtodo 13y ago

Facebook. Wikipedia. Yahoo.

eropple 13y ago
Were either of the first two started by "a sane engineer with a bit of experience"? Inertia is powerful.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Doesn't matter what your site is coded in if it isn't revenue positive/have funding/etc.
  - eropple 13y ago
    I'm not sure where you got that from my post. Though, to be honest, I don't think that using Play (today) or Rails/Django (yesterday) is sufficiently less productive to merit the technical debt you almost certainly will incur starting with a PHP stack. (And I am an ex-PHP person, to the point of hacking around in PHP core...that's a few months I'd love to have back.)
Legion 13y ago
pestaa's comment needs to be amended. It should read: "A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all in 2013." Facebook's former CTO has said that the only reason Facebook is still on PHP still today is legacy. It wouldn't be written in PHP if it were started today. PHP once was the right tool for the job, but those years have passed. We have many better options now.
- vidarh 13y ago
  We have many technically cleaner solutions, but in the real world other factors, such as ability to quickly hire sufficient number of reasonably priced developers, often means a lot more than technical purity. A sane engineer considers the full pictures before picking a solution rather than pick their pet languages just because it's nice and clean.
astrodust 13y ago
Facebook could write their stuff in COBOL and it wouldn't matter to anyone else. Remember MySpace? It was written in ColdFusion, so I guess ColdFusion is a great idea! Wikipedia's Mediawiki software is awful, and serves as a great example of how not to build an application. It makes WordPress look like a precision engineered Swiss watch. Yahoo uses PHP because, like Facebook, they could make FORTRAN work in production if they wanted to.

vidarh 13y ago

Engineering is not computer science. A sane engineer don't pick technology based on what is most theoretically pure, but based on what can deliver on the requirements on time and on budget. If you are building a simple CRUD style application, for example, there's likely nothing in your technical requirements that precludes PHP in any way. Then the question turns to ease of deployment and maintenance, operational costs, cost and availability of developer time, and there PHP tends to score quite well, not least because there's a huge pool of relatively skilled engineers that know it. I personally prefer Ruby and don't like writing PHP at all, but I'd be a horrible engineer if I wrote it off in situations, where, e.g., it is hard to hire Ruby developers at a reasonable price, or there's a lot of existing PHP knowledge within a team that is already in place.

iguana 13y ago
Cost and availability of developer time is much more of a factor in platform choice than a lot of people think, especially engineers who don't have to worry about the business end. If you can find RoR developers, they are not cheap. If you're building a v1 product on a limited budget, and don't want to spend 80 hours per week writing it yourself, PHP is an excellent choice. Having to read the code with a clothespin on your nose is a small price to pay.
astrodust 13y ago
For the question "I want to build a web application", PHP is not the answer. It is the worst in nearly every category you cite. Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously. What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting? If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of a few that are generally crappy. Cost and developer time are non-factors since the time you'd need to learn PHP is probably higher than other languages that make more sense and aren't filled with anachronisms you will spend half your time working around. You can train someone up in Ruby on Rails in two weeks. Django or Node would take about double that time, but only because the platforms aren't by default as feature complete and the tooling will vary from project to project.

eli 13y ago

So the apps I wrote in PHP are scientifically worse than the ones I wrote in Ruby? I had no idea!