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I think you'll be crucified because it's a bit of a weird conclusion to draw. PHP was popular for ages, and loads of great things were built on top of it. With

I think you'll be crucified because it's a bit of a weird conclusion to draw. PHP was popular for ages, and loads of great things were built on top of it. With modern development practices and improvements in the language, it's even possible to build better tools using it. But it's not like it's easier to build excellent tools than any of the other environments available – Rails, or Django, or Play, or whatever. I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project, at the end of the day. Sure, maybe it would be a problem if it were some rarely-used, obscure system, but that hardly applies to Rails.

smacktoward 12y ago
I don't think it's particularly weird, if you phrase it slightly differently: PHP is a better choice for web software that users are expected to host themselves. Using PHP lets your users tap into the absolutely ginormous ecosystem of PHP hosting providers out there, and makes deployment dead simple ("FTP these files to that place, now you're done"). No other platform makes these steps as simple and inexpensive as PHP does. If you're writing an app that you're going to host for the users, it doesn't matter much what you write it in. If you're writing an app that users are going to host for themselves, it matters a lot.
aikah 12y ago
> I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project I think it does if you expect people to install that project.
- kentonv 12y ago
  FWIW, we're trying to fix this with https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io. Try https://demo.sandstorm.io https://demo.sandstorm.io -- apps in many different frameworks, all equally trivial to install. :) (We'll have Diaspora on there soon...)
  - woah 12y ago
    If everybody hosted their diaspora nodes with you... Would that be centralization?
    - panic 12y ago
      The idea is that you'd have a Sandstorm installation on your own server or hosting service. At that point, installing something like Diaspora would be a point-and-click endeavor.

smacktoward 12y ago

I don't think it's particularly weird, if you phrase it slightly differently: PHP is a better choice for web software that users are expected to host themselves. Using PHP lets your users tap into the absolutely ginormous ecosystem of PHP hosting providers out there, and makes deployment dead simple ("FTP these files to that place, now you're done"). No other platform makes these steps as simple and inexpensive as PHP does. If you're writing an app that you're going to host for the users, it doesn't matter much what you write it in. If you're writing an app that users are going to host for themselves, it matters a lot.

aikah 12y ago

> I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project I think it does if you expect people to install that project.

kentonv 12y ago
FWIW, we're trying to fix this with https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io. Try https://demo.sandstorm.io https://demo.sandstorm.io -- apps in many different frameworks, all equally trivial to install. :) (We'll have Diaspora on there soon...)
- woah 12y ago
  If everybody hosted their diaspora nodes with you... Would that be centralization?
  - panic 12y ago
    The idea is that you'd have a Sandstorm installation on your own server or hosting service. At that point, installing something like Diaspora would be a point-and-click endeavor.