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> Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS Most companies/clients, particularly outside of the SV/SF bubble, value a working solution over technical

> Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS Most companies/clients, particularly outside of the SV/SF bubble, value a working solution over technical elegance. They're not irrationally ideological about programming languages, and they don't want to pay $120,000/year or $125/hour to a developer with two years of experience. Given the supply of developers of various skill levels who can build working solutions using PHP, and the number of existing commercial and open-source applications based on PHP, it's no surprise that PHP is thriving. > But the question is, why should PHP still be easier to deploy than Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, Node/Express (or Metro)? It's interesting that the author grouped Ruby, Python and Node with frameworks for his comparison to PHP sans framework. Incidentally, I think one of the advantages of PHP is that a lot of PHP developers, especially those who have been working with PHP for some time, didn't get started with a framework. Heck, before there were mature frameworks, many PHP developers rolled their own frameworks and micro-frameworks, a valuable exercise. Third party frameworks are great, but they can easily become a crutch, and when you don't know anything but the framework, they can be downright dangerous. What percentage of Ruby on Rails developers who started their careers with Ruby on Rails are capable of building a moderately complex Ruby application without Rails?

mmahemoff 13y ago
"It's interesting that the author grouped Ruby, Python and Node with frameworks for his comparison to PHP sans framework." Mainly because people rarely talk about pure Ruby/Python/Node CGI development. They're almost always run through an app server. I realise there are indeed some excellent PHP frameworks nowadays, but to my knowledge, most can still be run in a basic CGI environment. And more to the point, probably the majority of quick hacks in PHP are still done without any framework. [BTW I meant Meteor, not Metro.]
Iftheshoefits 13y ago
I agree that there is an absurd, nearly worshipful view of certain technologies in the "SV/SF bubble." That, however, is irrelevant. Your final comment regarding frameworks is also something I'd tend to agree with; frameworks are great for solving problems within the domain they're built for, but their applicability outside those domains is limited. This, however, is going to be an unpopular opinion amongst the PHP crowd, but I can distill the rest of your comment into the following statement: "PHP is thriving because companies are cheap, don't care about quality as much as cost, and there is an over-abundant labor supply of poorly skilled, mainly self-taught PHP 'developers' who are willing to work for peanuts and get the job done to an adequate level." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but trying to turn it on its head by implying developers skilled with, e.g. Ruby/Rails frameworks (see note below), are essentially overpaid and narrow-minded is just absurd. Note: I especially am not a fan of Ruby, so don't take this as a defense of the language or its developer-adherents. I'm actually fairly language agnostic; "right tool for the right job" and all that.
- 7Figures2Commas 13y ago
  > This, however, is going to be an unpopular opinion amongst the PHP crowd, but I can distill the rest of your comment into the following statement: "PHP is thriving because companies are cheap, don't care about quality as much as cost, and there is an over-abundant labor supply of poorly skilled, mainly self-taught PHP 'developers' who are willing to work for peanuts and get the job done to an adequate level." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but trying to turn it on its head by implying developers skilled with, e.g. Ruby/Rails frameworks (see note below), are essentially overpaid and narrow-minded is just absurd. That's an interesting reading of my comment. A less cynical reading might be that companies tend to: 1. Value cost-efficiency. 2. Understand that the constraints of time, cost and quality are all related and must be balanced based on business and project need. 3. Recognize that a smaller labor pool tends to increase cost and risk, sometimes unacceptably. Most companies simply don't have the luxury of, without regard to cost and schedule, writing blank checks for development, demanding perfection (elegant code, the technologies du jour, premature optimization, etc.) and limiting their employee/contractor pool to rockstar engineers with CS degrees from top universities.
shitlord 13y ago
> They're not irrationally ideological about programming languages, and they don't want to pay $120,000/year or $125/hour to a developer with two years of experience. I worked for a typical megacorporation for a few months (in Maryland). This is consistent with what I've observed. the company's main goal is to do what's required as cheaply as possible. That said, Rails is starting to become more popular among the enterprise crowd. The main reason for it is that developers are more productive with Rails (given that they are working on a nontrivial project and have prior experience). > What percentage of Ruby on Rails developers who started their careers with Ruby on Rails are capable of building a moderately complex Ruby application without Rails? I think the main problem is that a lot of people try to learn Rails before learning Ruby. We end up having a lot of people who are experienced with a particular framework (Rails, jQuery, whatever)... but they know basically nothing outside that framework.

mmahemoff 13y ago

"It's interesting that the author grouped Ruby, Python and Node with frameworks for his comparison to PHP sans framework." Mainly because people rarely talk about pure Ruby/Python/Node CGI development. They're almost always run through an app server. I realise there are indeed some excellent PHP frameworks nowadays, but to my knowledge, most can still be run in a basic CGI environment. And more to the point, probably the majority of quick hacks in PHP are still done without any framework. [BTW I meant Meteor, not Metro.]

Iftheshoefits 13y ago

I agree that there is an absurd, nearly worshipful view of certain technologies in the "SV/SF bubble." That, however, is irrelevant. Your final comment regarding frameworks is also something I'd tend to agree with; frameworks are great for solving problems within the domain they're built for, but their applicability outside those domains is limited. This, however, is going to be an unpopular opinion amongst the PHP crowd, but I can distill the rest of your comment into the following statement: "PHP is thriving because companies are cheap, don't care about quality as much as cost, and there is an over-abundant labor supply of poorly skilled, mainly self-taught PHP 'developers' who are willing to work for peanuts and get the job done to an adequate level." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but trying to turn it on its head by implying developers skilled with, e.g. Ruby/Rails frameworks (see note below), are essentially overpaid and narrow-minded is just absurd. Note: I especially am not a fan of Ruby, so don't take this as a defense of the language or its developer-adherents. I'm actually fairly language agnostic; "right tool for the right job" and all that.

7Figures2Commas 13y ago
> This, however, is going to be an unpopular opinion amongst the PHP crowd, but I can distill the rest of your comment into the following statement: "PHP is thriving because companies are cheap, don't care about quality as much as cost, and there is an over-abundant labor supply of poorly skilled, mainly self-taught PHP 'developers' who are willing to work for peanuts and get the job done to an adequate level." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but trying to turn it on its head by implying developers skilled with, e.g. Ruby/Rails frameworks (see note below), are essentially overpaid and narrow-minded is just absurd. That's an interesting reading of my comment. A less cynical reading might be that companies tend to: 1. Value cost-efficiency. 2. Understand that the constraints of time, cost and quality are all related and must be balanced based on business and project need. 3. Recognize that a smaller labor pool tends to increase cost and risk, sometimes unacceptably. Most companies simply don't have the luxury of, without regard to cost and schedule, writing blank checks for development, demanding perfection (elegant code, the technologies du jour, premature optimization, etc.) and limiting their employee/contractor pool to rockstar engineers with CS degrees from top universities.

shitlord 13y ago

> They're not irrationally ideological about programming languages, and they don't want to pay $120,000/year or $125/hour to a developer with two years of experience. I worked for a typical megacorporation for a few months (in Maryland). This is consistent with what I've observed. the company's main goal is to do what's required as cheaply as possible. That said, Rails is starting to become more popular among the enterprise crowd. The main reason for it is that developers are more productive with Rails (given that they are working on a nontrivial project and have prior experience). > What percentage of Ruby on Rails developers who started their careers with Ruby on Rails are capable of building a moderately complex Ruby application without Rails? I think the main problem is that a lot of people try to learn Rails before learning Ruby. We end up having a lot of people who are experienced with a particular framework (Rails, jQuery, whatever)... but they know basically nothing outside that framework.