7 ms·

How PHP became such a huge success - Talk with Rasmus Lerdorf

41 points by edw519 17y ago

TweedHeads 17y ago
PHP is the BASIC of web development, nothing to configure, no main routines, just type and run. echo "Hello world"; and from there all the functions you may need to do whatever you want. Beautiful? hell no. Simple? enough to have millions of wannabe coders doing wonders on the web with just a $5 hammer and a box of nails.
mdasen 17y ago
PHP became such a huge success for a few reasons. It's easy to deploy. You just have .php files that execute code in <? ?> tags. It has a bunch of framework-type things built in such as all the database connector functions, session handling, and it returns HTTP responses easily. What really bothers me about this article is that the author goes after Rails without knowing anything. He says that Rails is slow. That simply isn't true when compared to PHP frameworks. Rails is many times faster than CakePHP. And Rails has a ton more features. It's all well and good to just spout off that Rails is slow, but actual investigation proves that in the real world it isn't true. See: http://video.merbcamp.com/public/katz3.mp4 http://video.merbcamp.com/public/katz3.mp4 http://avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks http://avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks Lerdorf doesn't even seem to know that scaffolding really isn't Rails. He just comes off as someone who doesn't actually know or get the technological landscape.
- cesare 17y ago
  I don't think that Lerdorf (btw, not Lerforf) doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just saying that frameworks like Rails are inherently slower, and all the magic (like scaffolding etc.) isn't really worth it. He also says: > Ruby as a language is great, I think it's a really clean and nice language. There just aren't that many people who know it well.
  - benatkin 17y ago
    Here's what he said: "But there are performance issues with the scaffolding and stuff, and they recognise that, which is why the new build will be better." Any rails dev could tell you that scaffolding is irrelevant to the performance of a typical rails app. Yet he mentions "scaffolding and stuff". Also, DHH has said numerous times that scaffolding is mostly just a development tool. I think people who still trot it out as one of the problems with Rails are deliberately ignoring what he said.
    - jonknee 17y ago
      I think it's a fair knock because it is so prevalent in the screencast (which he mentioned). If it's in the sales pitch, it's fair to knock.
      - davidw 17y ago
        It's a bit like saying Ford cars are crap because they don't fly well. It's knocking the wrong thing.
        jonknee 17y ago
        I don't follow... Ford doesn't sell their cars by showing how easy it is to make them fly.
        davidw 17y ago
        Scaffolding does not make Rails fast or slow. It's code generation that happens prior to run time.
      - jamesbritt 17y ago
        "The" screencast? Maybe in 2004 there was The One Rails Screencast, but their numbers are now legion. Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax. Seems pretty clear Mr. Lerdorf has very little knowledge of Rails, and likely very little interest in changing that. "But when they needed to do something real, they thought, 'Oh crap, I don't know Ruby very well!'" Pretty sure that's true for people who hear good things about any [Perl|PHP|Python] framework and decide to pick it up. Usually people then just learn the language. PHP might have a brighter future if its BDFL wasn't so myopic about other languages.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- qeorge 17y ago
  I think you've missed his point a bit. He doesn't like code generation in general, which would mean he wouldn't like CakePHP's scaffolding either. If you read other interviews with him I think you'll find he's surprisingly modest about the whole thing. I've never heard him hold PHP up as particularly better than any other language, and he's the first to admit that it can be messy. FWIW, I'm a huge fan of CakePHP and I use it daily (although I don't have much use for scaffolding). Its plenty fast if used correctly, which is a common feature of any good framework.
- idlewords 17y ago
  The link you yourself cite shows a fourfold speed advantage for procedural PHP over ROR. Not mentioned is the large memory footprint of a Rails process compared to a procedural PHP page. It's the usual phenomenon of trading off development time and complexity for performance. I'm sure if you wrote a web app in C, it would run even faster. Rasmus's point in the article is that as soon as you move away from simple apps under light load into real applications, it is no longer enough just to rely on Rails magic. You find yourself needing to understand the innards of what is a very complex environment, and dealing with an idiosyncratic development community that considers monkey-patching a neat programming techinique, and likes to publish its documentation in video format. He doesn't seem to me to be saying 'don't use Rails'. He's just pointing out you should be fully aware of what you're getting into. Caveat scriptor.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    Rasmus's point in the article is that as soon as you move away from simple apps under light load into real applications, it is no longer enough just to rely on Rails magic. This seems backwards to me. I consider PHP to be ideal for simple apps. Rails comes with a certain amount of overhead (memory being the most important as far as cost is concerned), therefore I think it's only really useful for applications of a certain complexity. What makes Rails useful are some basic architectural assumptions (MVC + a bunch of low level assumptions / web helpers) that are surprisingly applicable to a large chunk of web apps. The magic is just some Ruby tricks to streamline things, but you don't "rely on it". Where Rails tends to fall down are limitations of the Ruby runtimes, or applications where the web front-end is not a significant enough part of the problem to warrant the Rails approach. PHP is similar in some ways--it includes many web-based assmptions, but it doesn't make any architectural assumptions, which means there is no way to benefit from common conventions (eg. knowing where to look for a certain file or class definition, what a variable or database table should be named, where is the default place to put certain types of logic, etc). As such, PHP is better than any other raw language for web work, but it doesn't really allow you to easily utilize best practices that we've collectively learned over the last 15 years of web development. That's not to say Rails is just plain better... to the contrary, I think PHP is a better templating language. The difference is that with PHP you are better off moving to a real language for your back-end on any moderately complex application fairly quickly. Rails, on the other hand, will let a significant portion of web apps (if not a majority) go quite far without any separate back-end.
- garnet7 17y ago
  > It's easy to deploy. Yup. This is the reason PHP is trouncing Python. Python should be where PHP is, right? But it isn't. If you ask the Python folks for easy deployment, they'll go into a lecture about how it's ugly, or a hack, or not general enough. And then they'll start telling you about how you should be using WSGI. You: "I like vanilla." Python: "What? Vanilla? There are better flavors than that. C'mon. Let's get you some nice strawberry." You: "But I don't like strawberry. Python: "Well, you should! It's a great flavor! How many scoops would you like?" You: "[Sigh]. 2. Sugar cone, please." Python: "Here you go!" You: "Hey, this is a wafer cone. And it's only one scoop. And it's sherbet!" Also, learning to make a scripting language spit out some html is easy. Learning how to get various apache modules built, configured, and installed -- or convincing an inexpensive ISP to do so -- is a whole nother ball of wax. AFAICT, PHP did deployment right, and is still making "better" languages look like they can't get their act together. I should be able to drop a .py file into my docroot and a persistent apache-managed python should execute it (when it's requested) and spit the results back to my browser. It's astonishing that we don't have that. You: "I like vanilla." PHP: "Here you go. Vanilla. Also take these napkins -- it's a little drippy."
  - dasil003 17y ago
    Passionate software developers need to accept the fact that web programming has hit the mainstream. There are tons of amateurs doing it, and the number is growing explosively thanks to platforms like Facebook. It's pretty much a given that these type of people coming in with a passion for the end result are going to be different from the geeks for past generations who were just as obsessed with the process of programming. PHP is ideal for seeing a quick result. HTML + PHP is the most rewarding platform ever invented in that regard. Naturally, many of these individuals will evolve and outgrow PHP, but it's also powerful enough to keep a lot of talent around just due to inertia. Ease of deployment is just one piece of this perfect storm.
  - gaius 17y ago
    Websites are a small corner of the Python world, but all of the PHP world.
    - 17y ago
rarrrrrr 17y ago
We previously had a poll here of which languages have the best "innards" or something like that. I wonder what a similar poll on languages with the best "outards" would be (i.e. documentation, learning curve, simplicity of initial setup, time from total n00b to achieving your first actual goal, friendliness of the community, etc.) While I don't enjoy PHP as a language, it clearly excels at all of the above. I'm not surprised that it has a large user base.
- pbiggar 17y ago
  Friendliness of the community? I've not seen it. I've found the internals group to be particularly unfriendly, though perhaps that's not the one you meant.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    I imagine they would be quite defensive based on the amount of hate they must receive.
davidw 17y ago
Cool. I don't care much for PHP, but I worked with Rasmus briefly at Linuxcare, and he is a cool guy. And, when it comes down to it, PHP has made it possible for more people to do more things with the web than before it came into existence, so you do have to give it some credit. With the caveat that it's easier to write those kinds of nice things when I'm not currently being forced to deal with any PHP:-)
korch 17y ago
I detest PHP, and have been lucky enough to mostly avoid working with it. But I'm currently leading the development to convert an 80k line PHP app to Rails, and I'm absolutely shocked at how fundamentally flawed PHP code is from the perspective of general best practices in software and web development and also computer science. PHP code is so bad that it deserves it's own section on dailywtf.com. I think PHP has been successful because it's the Visual Basic of the web. Just like in the 90's with the programmer "holy war" between Visual Basic "developers" versus everyone else(C++ mostly). At that time the number of "pseudo-developers" dwarfed the number of "real" developers, and so Visual Basic ended up being used for all kinds of stuff, in companies all over the land, and for all kinds of software for which it was totally inappropriate. It was termed "Virus Building" for good reason, and not just because M$ software was so exploitable. With Microsoft dominating the desktop, they were able to embed Visual Basic everywhere. It's the oldest trick in the book: if you can be the distribution platform, your default tool set will end up being the most used simply because people are too incapable and lazy to tweak and customize software themselves. To paraphrase Steve Jobs' remark about people reading: "people don't tweak anymore". There's been a similar demographic split on the web for the past decade. The number of web developers who know nothing about software engineering in general dwarfs those who know best practices, computer science and stuff like that. Add in the sweet spot of the entire hosting industry defaulting to Apache and the LAMP stack, PHP got to be the default tool, like Visual Basic on Windows desktops. It's totally impossible to "win" against these kinds of numbers--we can only wait for the platform to change, then PHP will be dead, just like how Visual Basic is now "dead". Perhaps the whole "cloud computing" hoopla and mass move to VPS will pull the rug out from under PHP in the next 2 years.
- eru 17y ago
  > It's totally impossible to "win" against these kinds of numbers Just redefine "win": Not using the same stupid stuff as everyone else can be a competitive advantage.
- NathanKP 17y ago
  "I'm absolutely shocked at how fundamentally flawed PHP code is from the perspective of general best practices in software and web development and also computer science. PHP code is so bad that it deserves it's own section on dailywtf.com." I assume that your 80k line app must have been written very poorly. Like any other good language PHP can be misused to create horrifying spaghetti code. That doesn't mean the language is no good.
snewe 17y ago
Perhaps this explains the hate for PHP by "real" developers: "It tends to be that code wins. If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how braindead it is; if we should have the feature, but we can't agree on the implementation, we'll go with whoever builds it."
billpg 17y ago
Because cheap webhosts support it. I would never have bothered learning PHP were it not for them.
xtho 17y ago
> If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how braindead it is I'm the least bit surprised.
pyman 17y ago
Python is great for small apps or server scripts. For building large-scale enterprise apps, it's a NO-NO. The code can become unmaintainable. I can't say the same for Java, Ruby and PHP apps though.

41 points by edw519 17y ago

PHP is the BASIC of web development, nothing to configure, no main routines, just type and run. echo "Hello world"; and from there all the functions you may need to do whatever you want. Beautiful? hell no. Simple? enough to have millions of wannabe coders doing wonders on the web with just a $5 hammer and a box of nails.

mdasen 17y ago

PHP became such a huge success for a few reasons. It's easy to deploy. You just have .php files that execute code in <? ?> tags. It has a bunch of framework-type things built in such as all the database connector functions, session handling, and it returns HTTP responses easily. What really bothers me about this article is that the author goes after Rails without knowing anything. He says that Rails is slow. That simply isn't true when compared to PHP frameworks. Rails is many times faster than CakePHP. And Rails has a ton more features. It's all well and good to just spout off that Rails is slow, but actual investigation proves that in the real world it isn't true. See: http://video.merbcamp.com/public/katz3.mp4 http://video.merbcamp.com/public/katz3.mp4 http://avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks http://avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks Lerdorf doesn't even seem to know that scaffolding really isn't Rails. He just comes off as someone who doesn't actually know or get the technological landscape.

cesare 17y ago
I don't think that Lerdorf (btw, not Lerforf) doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just saying that frameworks like Rails are inherently slower, and all the magic (like scaffolding etc.) isn't really worth it. He also says: > Ruby as a language is great, I think it's a really clean and nice language. There just aren't that many people who know it well.
- benatkin 17y ago
  Here's what he said: "But there are performance issues with the scaffolding and stuff, and they recognise that, which is why the new build will be better." Any rails dev could tell you that scaffolding is irrelevant to the performance of a typical rails app. Yet he mentions "scaffolding and stuff". Also, DHH has said numerous times that scaffolding is mostly just a development tool. I think people who still trot it out as one of the problems with Rails are deliberately ignoring what he said.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    I think it's a fair knock because it is so prevalent in the screencast (which he mentioned). If it's in the sales pitch, it's fair to knock.
    - davidw 17y ago
      It's a bit like saying Ford cars are crap because they don't fly well. It's knocking the wrong thing.
      - jonknee 17y ago
        I don't follow... Ford doesn't sell their cars by showing how easy it is to make them fly.
        davidw 17y ago
        Scaffolding does not make Rails fast or slow. It's code generation that happens prior to run time.
    - jamesbritt 17y ago
      "The" screencast? Maybe in 2004 there was The One Rails Screencast, but their numbers are now legion. Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax. Seems pretty clear Mr. Lerdorf has very little knowledge of Rails, and likely very little interest in changing that. "But when they needed to do something real, they thought, 'Oh crap, I don't know Ruby very well!'" Pretty sure that's true for people who hear good things about any [Perl|PHP|Python] framework and decide to pick it up. Usually people then just learn the language. PHP might have a brighter future if its BDFL wasn't so myopic about other languages.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
qeorge 17y ago
I think you've missed his point a bit. He doesn't like code generation in general, which would mean he wouldn't like CakePHP's scaffolding either. If you read other interviews with him I think you'll find he's surprisingly modest about the whole thing. I've never heard him hold PHP up as particularly better than any other language, and he's the first to admit that it can be messy. FWIW, I'm a huge fan of CakePHP and I use it daily (although I don't have much use for scaffolding). Its plenty fast if used correctly, which is a common feature of any good framework.
idlewords 17y ago
The link you yourself cite shows a fourfold speed advantage for procedural PHP over ROR. Not mentioned is the large memory footprint of a Rails process compared to a procedural PHP page. It's the usual phenomenon of trading off development time and complexity for performance. I'm sure if you wrote a web app in C, it would run even faster. Rasmus's point in the article is that as soon as you move away from simple apps under light load into real applications, it is no longer enough just to rely on Rails magic. You find yourself needing to understand the innards of what is a very complex environment, and dealing with an idiosyncratic development community that considers monkey-patching a neat programming techinique, and likes to publish its documentation in video format. He doesn't seem to me to be saying 'don't use Rails'. He's just pointing out you should be fully aware of what you're getting into. Caveat scriptor.
- dasil003 17y ago
  Rasmus's point in the article is that as soon as you move away from simple apps under light load into real applications, it is no longer enough just to rely on Rails magic. This seems backwards to me. I consider PHP to be ideal for simple apps. Rails comes with a certain amount of overhead (memory being the most important as far as cost is concerned), therefore I think it's only really useful for applications of a certain complexity. What makes Rails useful are some basic architectural assumptions (MVC + a bunch of low level assumptions / web helpers) that are surprisingly applicable to a large chunk of web apps. The magic is just some Ruby tricks to streamline things, but you don't "rely on it". Where Rails tends to fall down are limitations of the Ruby runtimes, or applications where the web front-end is not a significant enough part of the problem to warrant the Rails approach. PHP is similar in some ways--it includes many web-based assmptions, but it doesn't make any architectural assumptions, which means there is no way to benefit from common conventions (eg. knowing where to look for a certain file or class definition, what a variable or database table should be named, where is the default place to put certain types of logic, etc). As such, PHP is better than any other raw language for web work, but it doesn't really allow you to easily utilize best practices that we've collectively learned over the last 15 years of web development. That's not to say Rails is just plain better... to the contrary, I think PHP is a better templating language. The difference is that with PHP you are better off moving to a real language for your back-end on any moderately complex application fairly quickly. Rails, on the other hand, will let a significant portion of web apps (if not a majority) go quite far without any separate back-end.
garnet7 17y ago
> It's easy to deploy. Yup. This is the reason PHP is trouncing Python. Python should be where PHP is, right? But it isn't. If you ask the Python folks for easy deployment, they'll go into a lecture about how it's ugly, or a hack, or not general enough. And then they'll start telling you about how you should be using WSGI. You: "I like vanilla." Python: "What? Vanilla? There are better flavors than that. C'mon. Let's get you some nice strawberry." You: "But I don't like strawberry. Python: "Well, you should! It's a great flavor! How many scoops would you like?" You: "[Sigh]. 2. Sugar cone, please." Python: "Here you go!" You: "Hey, this is a wafer cone. And it's only one scoop. And it's sherbet!" Also, learning to make a scripting language spit out some html is easy. Learning how to get various apache modules built, configured, and installed -- or convincing an inexpensive ISP to do so -- is a whole nother ball of wax. AFAICT, PHP did deployment right, and is still making "better" languages look like they can't get their act together. I should be able to drop a .py file into my docroot and a persistent apache-managed python should execute it (when it's requested) and spit the results back to my browser. It's astonishing that we don't have that. You: "I like vanilla." PHP: "Here you go. Vanilla. Also take these napkins -- it's a little drippy."
- dasil003 17y ago
  Passionate software developers need to accept the fact that web programming has hit the mainstream. There are tons of amateurs doing it, and the number is growing explosively thanks to platforms like Facebook. It's pretty much a given that these type of people coming in with a passion for the end result are going to be different from the geeks for past generations who were just as obsessed with the process of programming. PHP is ideal for seeing a quick result. HTML + PHP is the most rewarding platform ever invented in that regard. Naturally, many of these individuals will evolve and outgrow PHP, but it's also powerful enough to keep a lot of talent around just due to inertia. Ease of deployment is just one piece of this perfect storm.
- gaius 17y ago
  Websites are a small corner of the Python world, but all of the PHP world.
  - 17y ago

rarrrrrr 17y ago

We previously had a poll here of which languages have the best "innards" or something like that. I wonder what a similar poll on languages with the best "outards" would be (i.e. documentation, learning curve, simplicity of initial setup, time from total n00b to achieving your first actual goal, friendliness of the community, etc.) While I don't enjoy PHP as a language, it clearly excels at all of the above. I'm not surprised that it has a large user base.

pbiggar 17y ago
Friendliness of the community? I've not seen it. I've found the internals group to be particularly unfriendly, though perhaps that's not the one you meant.
- dasil003 17y ago
  I imagine they would be quite defensive based on the amount of hate they must receive.

davidw 17y ago

Cool. I don't care much for PHP, but I worked with Rasmus briefly at Linuxcare, and he is a cool guy. And, when it comes down to it, PHP has made it possible for more people to do more things with the web than before it came into existence, so you do have to give it some credit. With the caveat that it's easier to write those kinds of nice things when I'm not currently being forced to deal with any PHP:-)

korch 17y ago

I detest PHP, and have been lucky enough to mostly avoid working with it. But I'm currently leading the development to convert an 80k line PHP app to Rails, and I'm absolutely shocked at how fundamentally flawed PHP code is from the perspective of general best practices in software and web development and also computer science. PHP code is so bad that it deserves it's own section on dailywtf.com. I think PHP has been successful because it's the Visual Basic of the web. Just like in the 90's with the programmer "holy war" between Visual Basic "developers" versus everyone else(C++ mostly). At that time the number of "pseudo-developers" dwarfed the number of "real" developers, and so Visual Basic ended up being used for all kinds of stuff, in companies all over the land, and for all kinds of software for which it was totally inappropriate. It was termed "Virus Building" for good reason, and not just because M$ software was so exploitable. With Microsoft dominating the desktop, they were able to embed Visual Basic everywhere. It's the oldest trick in the book: if you can be the distribution platform, your default tool set will end up being the most used simply because people are too incapable and lazy to tweak and customize software themselves. To paraphrase Steve Jobs' remark about people reading: "people don't tweak anymore". There's been a similar demographic split on the web for the past decade. The number of web developers who know nothing about software engineering in general dwarfs those who know best practices, computer science and stuff like that. Add in the sweet spot of the entire hosting industry defaulting to Apache and the LAMP stack, PHP got to be the default tool, like Visual Basic on Windows desktops. It's totally impossible to "win" against these kinds of numbers--we can only wait for the platform to change, then PHP will be dead, just like how Visual Basic is now "dead". Perhaps the whole "cloud computing" hoopla and mass move to VPS will pull the rug out from under PHP in the next 2 years.

eru 17y ago
> It's totally impossible to "win" against these kinds of numbers Just redefine "win": Not using the same stupid stuff as everyone else can be a competitive advantage.
NathanKP 17y ago
"I'm absolutely shocked at how fundamentally flawed PHP code is from the perspective of general best practices in software and web development and also computer science. PHP code is so bad that it deserves it's own section on dailywtf.com." I assume that your 80k line app must have been written very poorly. Like any other good language PHP can be misused to create horrifying spaghetti code. That doesn't mean the language is no good.

snewe 17y ago

Perhaps this explains the hate for PHP by "real" developers: "It tends to be that code wins. If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how braindead it is; if we should have the feature, but we can't agree on the implementation, we'll go with whoever builds it."

billpg 17y ago

Because cheap webhosts support it. I would never have bothered learning PHP were it not for them.

xtho 17y ago

> If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how braindead it is I'm the least bit surprised.

pyman 17y ago

Python is great for small apps or server scripts. For building large-scale enterprise apps, it's a NO-NO. The code can become unmaintainable. I can't say the same for Java, Ruby and PHP apps though.