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It is interesting, I experienced a similar feeling to: I don’t want to get caught up in the weeds again, building tools for something I never manage to mak
by wbond 13y ago
It is interesting, I experienced a similar feeling to:
I don’t want to get caught up in the weeds again, building tools for something I never manage to make.
when moving away from PHP as my first language to master. I built large swaths of library code for projects that I was going to build - from encryption code to a diffing algorithm, a full-featured ORM and more. I did learn a ton along the way - the most useful being the protocols, algorithms and other things I interacted with in PHP.
However, I ended up moving to other languages for what I was "making". First using Python, but now also venturing into native development using C. I guess part of it was wanting to not have limitations on what I could build. PHP was limiting in dealing with crappy hosts, Python less so, but the sky is the limit with C.
- frik 13y agoWhat kind of limitations? Everything you can do in Python, can be done in PHP too. For long running processes you can use libevent, and for threading (web server) you can use libcurl. You can write native C or C++ extensions for both Python and PHP. Facebook's HHVM PHP JIT VM is very scalable and there is PyPy (Python JIT).
- wbond 13y agoI specifically mentioned dealing with crappy hosts. PHP's biggest strength is that it is available to almost everyone for cheap. Unfortunately most of those cheap hosts don't support sane extensions. And you certainly aren't going to get custom ones on there. Or even a recent version of PHP. Python has some similar issues. Ensuring that an end-user application written in Python is going to have access the the appropriate version of Python with the packages you need is still a challenge. Asking Joe user to install virtualenv and Python 3.3 is not viable. Currently I'm working on an app that uses Python, but is written in C and embeds Python for some of the cross-platform components.