5 ms·

Ewww, You Use PHP?

38 points by equilibrium 13y ago

jd007 13y ago
I have no doubt you can do a lot of powerful things with PHP, provided you have the experience and put in the man power + time. But this does not justify the use of PHP now (for new projects), it just means that if you happen to be stuck on PHP because of legacy code, you could make it work.
- krapp 13y ago
  But to be fair, wouldn't you also have to put in the manpower+time to get the experience to learn to do it in another language? PHP is not all procedural spaghetti code, it does have modern frameworks, some of which are quite nice. And despite it's flaws (yep... someone posted Veekun's thing, everybody take a shot) there are reasons for choosing it, such as low overhead for deployment, and ubiquitous availability.
  - slinkyavenger 13y ago
    Yeah, I posted Veekun's thing. Low overhead for deployment and ubiquitous availability are definite advantages for the beginning of a project. Unfortunately, those two advantages disappear when your site becomes successful. For a large user base, there's more overhead involved in keeping a PHP webapp running smoothly, and by that time you won't need ubiquitous availability because you'll be, hopefully, running and configuring your own servers.
    - krapp 13y ago
      I can only assume you're right because I have no experience with having a site that's successful by anyone's standards (much less doing it in Python or Rails), but to me that still leaves a lot of room at the bottom of the pyramid for sites and apps that might not have any reason to expect such a large userbase.
rkv 13y ago
So if you replicated their special and custom 'platform' in Ruby or Python and it exceeded PHP's performance by miles what would their reasoning for continuing to use PHP be?
- exarch 13y ago
  If they're honest, probably something akin to, "solidified lava is hard to chisel up and replace with pavement".
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  They might not like Ruby, or Python. They might genuinely enjoy PHP.
- greensand 13y ago
  and if it wouldn't, what would your reaction be ?
  - kodablah 13y ago
    This is a legitimate question due to speed comparisons I've seen between PHP and Python/Ruby. Also, it seems like the obligatory "if you replicated their special and custom 'platform' in C and it exceeded Ruby or Python's performance by miles what would their reasoning for continuing to use Ruby or Python be?" People like the language, deal with it...
- yareally 13y ago
  Because they're costs in replacing an entire infrastructure that go beyond simply making the choice to switch to something else. - How knowledgeable your current employees are with it (and willingness to adapt and switch, as well as how long it will take to be as productive after the switch) - Time taken redo all your servers to support it and pay someone to do it - Subtle bugs that may appear related to the platform switch and not being as knowledgeable about it at first. - As someone else mentioned, they may actually like PHP. That may seem hard to understand for some, but heck, there are even people like that like Java. We might not fall under either case, but for the same reasons people like other things that people may find inferior (certain car brands, TVs, PCs components, etc), people apply the same logic to programming languages.
static_typed 13y ago
Hey, it works, you shipped a working product and that's all that really counts. I wonder, if all the endless man (and woman) hours spent on this site, masturbating over whether people should use Go, or why Go is the new hotness, or why don't people grok Haskell, or the latest Rails security fails, if instead people actually, you know, built stuff, even with PHP, then the conversation could be a bit more stimulating.
addlepate 13y ago
While I sympathize with the situation MailChimp is in, I am getting tired of this anti-elitist attitude of PHPers. Of course, part of the reason why I feel that way is because I think PHP actually is crappy, but putting that aside doesn't change much. There's this notion that programming languages are all really the same, and devs are just a bunch of prima donnas chasing the newest thing. It couldn't possibly be that we have used PHP before and have good reasons for not wanting to use it anymore. No, instead we must be a bunch of groupthinking prigs, scoffing at PHP because we're afraid to let our peers see us using such a shameful thing. You can tell they think that by the title of the post. I guess what I'm wondering is, at what point will they consider using PHP to be too costly? If: - they already have a limited talent pool due to location and the business they're in, - PHP only serves to reduce that pool even further, - presumably software development is important to the future of their business, - and they're not changing markets or locations anytime soon, when will it get too expensive to continue using it? What rankles is the digging in of heels, the attitude of "oh, if only devs could see how clean and great our PHP code is!" They see a tons of developers not interested in using the tool they use, and decide that all those people are simply mistaken, and just need to be convinced otherwise. The problem couldn't be on the other side of the table, no sir.
slinkyavenger 13y ago
I wouldn't want to go back to programming PHP due to its many issues[1]. I especially wouldn't want to work somewhere that spends development energy on BobX[2] to make PHP easier to work with. That means I have to use two technologies that won't give me any way to advance in the industry, and will most likely hinder me at this point. [1] http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... [2] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/We-Use-BobX.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/We-Use-BobX.aspx
- krazymelvin 13y ago
  People really need to stop posting that fractal article. Any PHP dev worth their salt would be able to tell you that guy clearly has no major experience with PHP (or any understanding of OOP for that matter). Here's a few discussions on just how wrong [1] and clueless he really is [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177516 [2] http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal-of-bad-design-hardly-929746.html http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal...
epoxyhockey 13y ago
This article was written in Oct 2010, but it looks like they still use PHP.
bdcravens 13y ago
What I'm confused by, is why is this even a conversation? PHP is possibly the most used language in the world. I'd presume that there's tons of highly qualified engineers to choose from, who are already bought in to the value of the language.
- qompiler 13y ago
  There is a lot of stroke inducing legacy PHP code out there in the wild. A lot of people have had a really bad experience working on projects that used PHP. The ease of entry allowed flocks of inexperienced software developers to grow PHP projects like mushrooms throughout the world. I think it's largely bad rep due to the ease of misuse and dodgy frameworks.

38 points by equilibrium 13y ago

jd007 13y ago

I have no doubt you can do a lot of powerful things with PHP, provided you have the experience and put in the man power + time. But this does not justify the use of PHP now (for new projects), it just means that if you happen to be stuck on PHP because of legacy code, you could make it work.

krapp 13y ago
But to be fair, wouldn't you also have to put in the manpower+time to get the experience to learn to do it in another language? PHP is not all procedural spaghetti code, it does have modern frameworks, some of which are quite nice. And despite it's flaws (yep... someone posted Veekun's thing, everybody take a shot) there are reasons for choosing it, such as low overhead for deployment, and ubiquitous availability.
- slinkyavenger 13y ago
  Yeah, I posted Veekun's thing. Low overhead for deployment and ubiquitous availability are definite advantages for the beginning of a project. Unfortunately, those two advantages disappear when your site becomes successful. For a large user base, there's more overhead involved in keeping a PHP webapp running smoothly, and by that time you won't need ubiquitous availability because you'll be, hopefully, running and configuring your own servers.
  - krapp 13y ago
    I can only assume you're right because I have no experience with having a site that's successful by anyone's standards (much less doing it in Python or Rails), but to me that still leaves a lot of room at the bottom of the pyramid for sites and apps that might not have any reason to expect such a large userbase.

rkv 13y ago

So if you replicated their special and custom 'platform' in Ruby or Python and it exceeded PHP's performance by miles what would their reasoning for continuing to use PHP be?

exarch 13y ago
If they're honest, probably something akin to, "solidified lava is hard to chisel up and replace with pavement".
dkuntz2 13y ago
They might not like Ruby, or Python. They might genuinely enjoy PHP.
greensand 13y ago
and if it wouldn't, what would your reaction be ?
- kodablah 13y ago
  This is a legitimate question due to speed comparisons I've seen between PHP and Python/Ruby. Also, it seems like the obligatory "if you replicated their special and custom 'platform' in C and it exceeded Ruby or Python's performance by miles what would their reasoning for continuing to use Ruby or Python be?" People like the language, deal with it...
yareally 13y ago
Because they're costs in replacing an entire infrastructure that go beyond simply making the choice to switch to something else. - How knowledgeable your current employees are with it (and willingness to adapt and switch, as well as how long it will take to be as productive after the switch) - Time taken redo all your servers to support it and pay someone to do it - Subtle bugs that may appear related to the platform switch and not being as knowledgeable about it at first. - As someone else mentioned, they may actually like PHP. That may seem hard to understand for some, but heck, there are even people like that like Java. We might not fall under either case, but for the same reasons people like other things that people may find inferior (certain car brands, TVs, PCs components, etc), people apply the same logic to programming languages.

static_typed 13y ago

Hey, it works, you shipped a working product and that's all that really counts. I wonder, if all the endless man (and woman) hours spent on this site, masturbating over whether people should use Go, or why Go is the new hotness, or why don't people grok Haskell, or the latest Rails security fails, if instead people actually, you know, built stuff, even with PHP, then the conversation could be a bit more stimulating.

addlepate 13y ago

While I sympathize with the situation MailChimp is in, I am getting tired of this anti-elitist attitude of PHPers. Of course, part of the reason why I feel that way is because I think PHP actually is crappy, but putting that aside doesn't change much. There's this notion that programming languages are all really the same, and devs are just a bunch of prima donnas chasing the newest thing. It couldn't possibly be that we have used PHP before and have good reasons for not wanting to use it anymore. No, instead we must be a bunch of groupthinking prigs, scoffing at PHP because we're afraid to let our peers see us using such a shameful thing. You can tell they think that by the title of the post. I guess what I'm wondering is, at what point will they consider using PHP to be too costly? If: - they already have a limited talent pool due to location and the business they're in, - PHP only serves to reduce that pool even further, - presumably software development is important to the future of their business, - and they're not changing markets or locations anytime soon, when will it get too expensive to continue using it? What rankles is the digging in of heels, the attitude of "oh, if only devs could see how clean and great our PHP code is!" They see a tons of developers not interested in using the tool they use, and decide that all those people are simply mistaken, and just need to be convinced otherwise. The problem couldn't be on the other side of the table, no sir.

slinkyavenger 13y ago

I wouldn't want to go back to programming PHP due to its many issues[1]. I especially wouldn't want to work somewhere that spends development energy on BobX[2] to make PHP easier to work with. That means I have to use two technologies that won't give me any way to advance in the industry, and will most likely hinder me at this point. [1] http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... [2] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/We-Use-BobX.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/We-Use-BobX.aspx

krazymelvin 13y ago
People really need to stop posting that fractal article. Any PHP dev worth their salt would be able to tell you that guy clearly has no major experience with PHP (or any understanding of OOP for that matter). Here's a few discussions on just how wrong [1] and clueless he really is [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177516 [2] http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal-of-bad-design-hardly-929746.html http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal...

epoxyhockey 13y ago

This article was written in Oct 2010, but it looks like they still use PHP.

bdcravens 13y ago

What I'm confused by, is why is this even a conversation? PHP is possibly the most used language in the world. I'd presume that there's tons of highly qualified engineers to choose from, who are already bought in to the value of the language.

qompiler 13y ago
There is a lot of stroke inducing legacy PHP code out there in the wild. A lot of people have had a really bad experience working on projects that used PHP. The ease of entry allowed flocks of inexperienced software developers to grow PHP projects like mushrooms throughout the world. I think it's largely bad rep due to the ease of misuse and dodgy frameworks.