6 ms·

Is php ever used?

by nickthemagicman 12y ago

Is php ever used?

Artemis2 12y ago
Probably only with things such as Laravel, but I guess it's frowned upon.
- logicuce 12y ago
  One's proficiency in a language is more important than using a newly learnt shiny thing out there. Given the people who get in the YC batches are deemed to be smarter of us, I would not expect them to be judgmental about these things.
e1g 12y ago
As an anecdote - in my circles I observe that PHP is very popular among people who started working in web ~2000, while ruby is popular among those who started in ~2007. Nothing to do with seniority etc, I think it's simply the default choice of whatever was in vogue at the time when the person started hacking, and by now many PHP guys skew older and are out of the startup game (i.e. working in established companies on established products). As another example, I'm still astonishingly productive with PHP for backend APIs and rapid development projects. The symfony/Doctrine community has done a phenomenal job at bringing world-class tools to the language.
- swartkrans 12y ago
  I started out with PHP in ~2000 as that's what people used, but then migrated over to Python around 2007 and web.py. Now I've experimented with node and Go, Java and Scala, but I prefer Python and Django. There's so much that Django gives you, it feels stupid not to use it. I haven't tried Ruby or Rails, I just don't feel like I need to. It doesn't really matter what you use if it gets the job done.
- legohead 12y ago
  As a young person, when I was examining possible choices for development, I chose what was fast and stable. At the time that was C & PHP, and maybe even perl. I don't see how the young people of today decide to go with Ruby, with it's terrible performance, and especially last year with it's slew of vulnerabilities. If you like the beauty of Ruby, use it on your own stuff or for learning. But using it with intention for a production environment? I just don't get it...
  - johan_larson 12y ago
    It's not Ruby. It's Rails. Ruby on its own is just a slightly more flexible Python. Rails was embraced because it provided a clear way to write DB-driven web apps with minimal configuration, following a strict pattern. And a lot of people sort of like strict.
franciscop 12y ago
Laravel is indeed the thing I am learning next from PHP, and I love the Startup ecosystem (and working in one), so I guess I'm not the only one. Also, take into account different countries; I'm from Spain and the Rails ecosystem is really weak here.
- johan_larson 12y ago
  "Use what you know" and "use what the people around you know" are at least pretty good answers to the question of what platform to use. Joel Spolsky had some interesting things to say here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html
jacquesm 12y ago
Pure conjecture, use salt liberally: PHP was 'in vogue' in 1998 to the mid 00's, after that a ton of other (and better) options appeared (I say that as a 'PHP guy'). So if you look at younger people you're likely not going to find a very large number of programmers there that will have PHP as their first language of choice. The older ones though might find that their experience with that particular platform will give them an edge over first learning a new stack. So to complete the guess I think if you focus on the teams with older technical founders you might find some PHP but in the teams with younger technical founders I doubt that that would have a high incidence.
sauere 12y ago
Mailchimp is 100% PHP.
bkanber 12y ago
Yes. We use PHP and we love it! It has its, er, quirks from time to time, but allll that negative stuff that you're always reading about PHP doesn't really affect the bottom line: PHP is great at building websites and scalable web apps, warts and all. (Edit: a few others in this thread are observing that most PHP-ers got their start in the early 2000's. To add another datapoint, that's true in my case as well. Active since 1998, I started with perl, got familiar with PHP, moved on to MS tech for a few years, then became a RoR dev in ~2005-07. Eventually I got frustrated with Rails' performance, decided to refactor an app in PHP and was blown away by the two-orders-of-magnitude performance difference at the time. I've stuck with PHP since then, though I still play with Node and Python. All great tools. I hate the language wars, use whatever works for you.)

Is php ever used?

Artemis2 12y ago

Probably only with things such as Laravel, but I guess it's frowned upon.

logicuce 12y ago
One's proficiency in a language is more important than using a newly learnt shiny thing out there. Given the people who get in the YC batches are deemed to be smarter of us, I would not expect them to be judgmental about these things.

e1g 12y ago

As an anecdote - in my circles I observe that PHP is very popular among people who started working in web ~2000, while ruby is popular among those who started in ~2007. Nothing to do with seniority etc, I think it's simply the default choice of whatever was in vogue at the time when the person started hacking, and by now many PHP guys skew older and are out of the startup game (i.e. working in established companies on established products). As another example, I'm still astonishingly productive with PHP for backend APIs and rapid development projects. The symfony/Doctrine community has done a phenomenal job at bringing world-class tools to the language.

swartkrans 12y ago
I started out with PHP in ~2000 as that's what people used, but then migrated over to Python around 2007 and web.py. Now I've experimented with node and Go, Java and Scala, but I prefer Python and Django. There's so much that Django gives you, it feels stupid not to use it. I haven't tried Ruby or Rails, I just don't feel like I need to. It doesn't really matter what you use if it gets the job done.
legohead 12y ago
As a young person, when I was examining possible choices for development, I chose what was fast and stable. At the time that was C & PHP, and maybe even perl. I don't see how the young people of today decide to go with Ruby, with it's terrible performance, and especially last year with it's slew of vulnerabilities. If you like the beauty of Ruby, use it on your own stuff or for learning. But using it with intention for a production environment? I just don't get it...
- johan_larson 12y ago
  It's not Ruby. It's Rails. Ruby on its own is just a slightly more flexible Python. Rails was embraced because it provided a clear way to write DB-driven web apps with minimal configuration, following a strict pattern. And a lot of people sort of like strict.

franciscop 12y ago

Laravel is indeed the thing I am learning next from PHP, and I love the Startup ecosystem (and working in one), so I guess I'm not the only one. Also, take into account different countries; I'm from Spain and the Rails ecosystem is really weak here.

johan_larson 12y ago
"Use what you know" and "use what the people around you know" are at least pretty good answers to the question of what platform to use. Joel Spolsky had some interesting things to say here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html

jacquesm 12y ago

Pure conjecture, use salt liberally: PHP was 'in vogue' in 1998 to the mid 00's, after that a ton of other (and better) options appeared (I say that as a 'PHP guy'). So if you look at younger people you're likely not going to find a very large number of programmers there that will have PHP as their first language of choice. The older ones though might find that their experience with that particular platform will give them an edge over first learning a new stack. So to complete the guess I think if you focus on the teams with older technical founders you might find some PHP but in the teams with younger technical founders I doubt that that would have a high incidence.

sauere 12y ago

Mailchimp is 100% PHP.

bkanber 12y ago

Yes. We use PHP and we love it! It has its, er, quirks from time to time, but allll that negative stuff that you're always reading about PHP doesn't really affect the bottom line: PHP is great at building websites and scalable web apps, warts and all. (Edit: a few others in this thread are observing that most PHP-ers got their start in the early 2000's. To add another datapoint, that's true in my case as well. Active since 1998, I started with perl, got familiar with PHP, moved on to MS tech for a few years, then became a RoR dev in ~2005-07. Eventually I got frustrated with Rails' performance, decided to refactor an app in PHP and was blown away by the two-orders-of-magnitude performance difference at the time. I've stuck with PHP since then, though I still play with Node and Python. All great tools. I hate the language wars, use whatever works for you.)