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PHP is a "crumbling foundation" in exactly the same way DOS, Windows, COBOL, and C and C++ were, are, "crumbling foundations". I don't see how you are disagreei

by lbrandy 13y ago

PHP is a "crumbling foundation" in exactly the same way DOS, Windows, COBOL, and C and C++ were, are, "crumbling foundations". I don't see how you are disagreeing with me. You are proving the point. You aren't actually going to claim that Windows was well-conceived and theoretically well-founded, are you? Windows has been a never ending refinement on exceptionally shaky ground.

Silhouette 13y ago
It seems like you're now arguing that PHP isn't a crumbling foundation -- a point that reasonable people could debate -- rather than that building atop crumbling foundations is by far the most successful ways to accomplish anything in computing, which was the claim I challenged. Incidentally, my point about languages like C or operating systems like Windows was not that they are theoretically wonderful under the hood, merely that they provided a reliable foundation. C has been standardised for a long time and is widely portable. Code that was designed for early incarnations of Windows will often run with little modification even on today's systems because the essential underlying models and APIs have been diligently preserved over the years even as many other changes were going on around them.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  I'm curious just what definition you're using for "crumbling foundation". Is it that old software doesn't break on it, in which case PHP/HHVM/Hack isn't a crumbling foundation either - Facebook is built on it, and Facebook is clearly still running. Or is it that maintenance is difficult and programmers will run into all sorts of ugly corner cases and features that are just grafted onto each other? Because those apply to C and C++ and Win32 and Google and basically every other large software system as well. That's the point the grandparent is making - if you look at pretty much any successful, evolving software system under the hood, you'll see a byzantine mess of complexity, and it's a wonder that it ever works.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term". Clearly this isn't an absolute scale. As our industry evolves and we develop more reliable ways to achieve our goals, something that we regarded as being a relatively stable foundation in the past may no longer be regarded as such in the future when our standards have risen. Moreover, what constitutes "long term" might vary wildly among different projects. I suppose my basic objection to the original claim (that building atop crumbling foundations is by far the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing) is that significant achievements in computing tend not to happen overnight but rather to develop over time, and the more stable your foundations, the better chance your project has of developing far enough to achieve significant things.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      If you define "crumbling foundations" as "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term", then your conclusion is circular. Of course no long-term products will be built on crumbling foundations, because if a technology stack has long-term successes then, by your definition, it is not a crumbling foundation. I think the other posters are using a definition of "crumbling foundation" as "one which most engineers hate, which slows them down through excess complexity". And by that definition, almost all successful projects are built on crumbling foundations, because the fact that the project was successful leads you to add features to it, and adapt it in ways that the original architecture didn't anticipate. This process only ends when the software becomes so complex that all further attempts at modification fail, at which point everybody hates the codebase and it is, by pretty much any definition, a "crumbling foundation".
      - dasil003 13y ago
        I think it's funny that this whole thread is based on the initial haphazard word choice of reikonomusha yet he is not even a participant in the debate.
      - 13y ago
- vidarh 13y ago
  > It seems like you're now arguing that PHP isn't a crumbling foundation I think you need to go back and read the message you replied to. He is not arguing that at all. He's pointing to a long range of other things that he is asserting are also crumbling foundations.
dscrd 13y ago
I'm appalled and little bit insulted that you group PHP in the same group with COBOL, C and C++ in terms of their foundation. COBOL and C were designed by some of the greatest pioneers of the field, and indeed PHP is built on C.
- jroesch 13y ago
  Just because they are remembered as being first doesn't mean they were well designed, or actually pioneers. At the same time C was being written others were working on Lisp, and ML. It has taken nearly half a century for some of their innovations to be recognized as good ideas and taken up by main stream languages, while C was a small improvement upon existing language design.
- pekk 13y ago
  In the sense that any software written in C is built on C.
  - dscrd 13y ago
    True, but a lot of PHP's ... design also reflects C, only that they warped it.
    - wvenable 13y ago
      A few of the complaints about PHP (the inconsistent function library, for example) exist because PHP was originally a very thin scripting language layer for using existing C libraries.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  C designers choose deliberately to ignore the other system level programming languages at the time, which already offered more memory safe constructs, in their quest for a portable macro assembler. PHP could have been easily done in any language with native compiler toolchains.
- adamlett 13y ago
  Why would you feel insulted? Did you personally create any of those languages? In fact, did you personally create any language? If not, maybe you should't be quite so dismissive of the accomplishment it was to create PHP. Sure, it's not the best language out there, and valid criticisms can be levelled at it, but as they say: It's better to have tried and failed...
discreteevent 13y ago
"Windows has been a never ending refinement on exceptionally shaky ground." No. Windows NT was a complete rewrite and it was " well-conceived and theoretically well- founded"
- DeGuerre 13y ago
  What you say is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. However, fewer than 1% of Windows programmers ever talk to NTOSKRNL, and probably an order of magnitude fewer do it regularly. Most of the time, you're talking to Win32/64 or high-level services based on DCOM or .NET, where the "well-conceived" and "theoretically well-founded" stuff doesn't turn up. You can go your whole career without knowing that there's a well-designed kernel under all that cruft. I'd guess that less than half of Windows developers could say what the object manager does.
  - AaronFriel 13y ago
    For more than half of Windows developers, if you told them there was an object manager, they would ask how you can turn off that service to improve performance.
  - frozenport 13y ago
    This isn't true. Every Linux users encounters problems with drivers. By integrating them into the kernel we have an eco system where drivers are out of reach of many users and OEMs. Consider the difficultly in making a desktop scanner for linux. Additionally kernel changes can break a driver with little recourse on the OEMs side, you must simply bend to Linus's will. At the end of the day we suffer from Linux's driver architecture.
    - dingdingdang 13y ago
      So true. Windows' services and drivers system may not be beautiful but it full on works most of the time and it allows even non pro Windows users to change basic stuff with far greater ease than Linux which is a real shame given Linux' potential for transparent usability (a potential it has had since the late 1990s but I have personally given up waiting for it to come true)

by lbrandy 13y ago

Silhouette 13y ago

It seems like you're now arguing that PHP isn't a crumbling foundation -- a point that reasonable people could debate -- rather than that building atop crumbling foundations is by far the most successful ways to accomplish anything in computing, which was the claim I challenged. Incidentally, my point about languages like C or operating systems like Windows was not that they are theoretically wonderful under the hood, merely that they provided a reliable foundation. C has been standardised for a long time and is widely portable. Code that was designed for early incarnations of Windows will often run with little modification even on today's systems because the essential underlying models and APIs have been diligently preserved over the years even as many other changes were going on around them.

nostrademons 13y ago
I'm curious just what definition you're using for "crumbling foundation". Is it that old software doesn't break on it, in which case PHP/HHVM/Hack isn't a crumbling foundation either - Facebook is built on it, and Facebook is clearly still running. Or is it that maintenance is difficult and programmers will run into all sorts of ugly corner cases and features that are just grafted onto each other? Because those apply to C and C++ and Win32 and Google and basically every other large software system as well. That's the point the grandparent is making - if you look at pretty much any successful, evolving software system under the hood, you'll see a byzantine mess of complexity, and it's a wonder that it ever works.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term". Clearly this isn't an absolute scale. As our industry evolves and we develop more reliable ways to achieve our goals, something that we regarded as being a relatively stable foundation in the past may no longer be regarded as such in the future when our standards have risen. Moreover, what constitutes "long term" might vary wildly among different projects. I suppose my basic objection to the original claim (that building atop crumbling foundations is by far the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing) is that significant achievements in computing tend not to happen overnight but rather to develop over time, and the more stable your foundations, the better chance your project has of developing far enough to achieve significant things.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    If you define "crumbling foundations" as "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term", then your conclusion is circular. Of course no long-term products will be built on crumbling foundations, because if a technology stack has long-term successes then, by your definition, it is not a crumbling foundation. I think the other posters are using a definition of "crumbling foundation" as "one which most engineers hate, which slows them down through excess complexity". And by that definition, almost all successful projects are built on crumbling foundations, because the fact that the project was successful leads you to add features to it, and adapt it in ways that the original architecture didn't anticipate. This process only ends when the software becomes so complex that all further attempts at modification fail, at which point everybody hates the codebase and it is, by pretty much any definition, a "crumbling foundation".
    - dasil003 13y ago
      I think it's funny that this whole thread is based on the initial haphazard word choice of reikonomusha yet he is not even a participant in the debate.
    - 13y ago
vidarh 13y ago
> It seems like you're now arguing that PHP isn't a crumbling foundation I think you need to go back and read the message you replied to. He is not arguing that at all. He's pointing to a long range of other things that he is asserting are also crumbling foundations.

dscrd 13y ago

I'm appalled and little bit insulted that you group PHP in the same group with COBOL, C and C++ in terms of their foundation. COBOL and C were designed by some of the greatest pioneers of the field, and indeed PHP is built on C.

jroesch 13y ago
Just because they are remembered as being first doesn't mean they were well designed, or actually pioneers. At the same time C was being written others were working on Lisp, and ML. It has taken nearly half a century for some of their innovations to be recognized as good ideas and taken up by main stream languages, while C was a small improvement upon existing language design.
pekk 13y ago
In the sense that any software written in C is built on C.
- dscrd 13y ago
  True, but a lot of PHP's ... design also reflects C, only that they warped it.
  - wvenable 13y ago
    A few of the complaints about PHP (the inconsistent function library, for example) exist because PHP was originally a very thin scripting language layer for using existing C libraries.
pjmlp 13y ago
C designers choose deliberately to ignore the other system level programming languages at the time, which already offered more memory safe constructs, in their quest for a portable macro assembler. PHP could have been easily done in any language with native compiler toolchains.
adamlett 13y ago
Why would you feel insulted? Did you personally create any of those languages? In fact, did you personally create any language? If not, maybe you should't be quite so dismissive of the accomplishment it was to create PHP. Sure, it's not the best language out there, and valid criticisms can be levelled at it, but as they say: It's better to have tried and failed...

discreteevent 13y ago

"Windows has been a never ending refinement on exceptionally shaky ground." No. Windows NT was a complete rewrite and it was " well-conceived and theoretically well- founded"

DeGuerre 13y ago
What you say is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. However, fewer than 1% of Windows programmers ever talk to NTOSKRNL, and probably an order of magnitude fewer do it regularly. Most of the time, you're talking to Win32/64 or high-level services based on DCOM or .NET, where the "well-conceived" and "theoretically well-founded" stuff doesn't turn up. You can go your whole career without knowing that there's a well-designed kernel under all that cruft. I'd guess that less than half of Windows developers could say what the object manager does.
- AaronFriel 13y ago
  For more than half of Windows developers, if you told them there was an object manager, they would ask how you can turn off that service to improve performance.
- frozenport 13y ago
  This isn't true. Every Linux users encounters problems with drivers. By integrating them into the kernel we have an eco system where drivers are out of reach of many users and OEMs. Consider the difficultly in making a desktop scanner for linux. Additionally kernel changes can break a driver with little recourse on the OEMs side, you must simply bend to Linus's will. At the end of the day we suffer from Linux's driver architecture.
  - dingdingdang 13y ago
    So true. Windows' services and drivers system may not be beautiful but it full on works most of the time and it allows even non pro Windows users to change basic stuff with far greater ease than Linux which is a real shame given Linux' potential for transparent usability (a potential it has had since the late 1990s but I have personally given up waiting for it to come true)