4 ms·

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

by 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...
- yawboakye 13y ago
  What you just said is plain stupid. So our language designers can be critical of other languages? Bullshit! Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?) we should give reasons why we use C and not PHP. If they were equally crappy what would have been the cause of choice of one over the other? I can call PHP the worse language ever, and I don't need to have created a language already.
  - tesseractive 13y ago
    Given the widespread use of PHP for web programming, it seems obvious that in the domain of web programming, developers have voted with their feet for PHP.
    - yawboakye 13y ago
      Energetic amateurs. They've not reached maturity so that their votes should be counted.
      - tesseractive 13y ago
        Given that these supposed "energetic amateurs" have created an enormous percentage of the code that web applications across the internet run on, their votes automatically count. If PHP developers had never produced anything of value, that would be a different discussion.
  - coldtea 13y ago
coldtea 13y ago
C was not build by the "greatest pioneers". Just succesful pioneers. There were far more evolved and elegant languages at the time C was created (and during the time it took for C to rise, even more were made). LISP for one, but also languages with the same performance characteristics and systems programming capabilities as C. C definitely wasn't seen as a "great language design" -- just a very useful and pragmatic one (e.g see also the classic "Worse is better" essay).

by dscrd 13y ago

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...

yawboakye 13y ago
What you just said is plain stupid. So our language designers can be critical of other languages? Bullshit! Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?) we should give reasons why we use C and not PHP. If they were equally crappy what would have been the cause of choice of one over the other? I can call PHP the worse language ever, and I don't need to have created a language already.
- tesseractive 13y ago
  Given the widespread use of PHP for web programming, it seems obvious that in the domain of web programming, developers have voted with their feet for PHP.
  - yawboakye 13y ago
    Energetic amateurs. They've not reached maturity so that their votes should be counted.
    - tesseractive 13y ago
      Given that these supposed "energetic amateurs" have created an enormous percentage of the code that web applications across the internet run on, their votes automatically count. If PHP developers had never produced anything of value, that would be a different discussion.
- coldtea 13y ago

coldtea 13y ago

C was not build by the "greatest pioneers". Just succesful pioneers. There were far more evolved and elegant languages at the time C was created (and during the time it took for C to rise, even more were made). LISP for one, but also languages with the same performance characteristics and systems programming capabilities as C. C definitely wasn't seen as a "great language design" -- just a very useful and pragmatic one (e.g see also the classic "Worse is better" essay).