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PHP is not obsolete. Quite the opposite. HHVM by Facebook has made PHP a bit cooler. An argument from a PHP developer (i'm not one, personally dislike it) cou

by kayman 11y ago

PHP is not obsolete. Quite the opposite. HHVM by Facebook has made PHP a bit cooler. An argument from a PHP developer (i'm not one, personally dislike it) could be: "its good enough for facebook"

Demiurge 11y ago
PHP will never be obsolete in the sense of, Wordpress and Facebook will never be obsolete. It's good enough for Facebook to not start from scratch. But it's probably obsolete in terms of starting a new website. I started web dev in PHP but switched to Django as first choice many years ago. Isomorphic React now feels like a one step backwards, two steps forward. P.S. These are illuminating :) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf
- gexla 11y ago
  Meanwhile, there are hundreds (thousands?) of new Wordpress installs going up every day. People building their businesses and making money without much thought as to which tooling is behind their administrative control panels other than the name, Wordpress. You did say, "website." Perhaps you didn't mean to use such a general term. A green field web application may not choose a stack which includes PHP.
  - Demiurge 11y ago
    Yeah, I meant 'original web app'. Funny, my company also uses Wordpress because thats what the design studio supplied, and we keep it on a completely isolated server for security reasons.
memracom 11y ago
HHVM is one of the things that is making PHP obsolete. You simply cannot run a top-level Internet business on PHP anymore. It does not work!! PERIOD! Facebook realized this and solved the problem by building a proper platform to run a subset of PHP which allowed them an easy migration to the new platform. Massive companies can afford to do this, but the rest of use need to choose safer tools with a long future ahead of them.
- giaour 11y ago
  You're confusing the Hack language (the "subset" of PHP Facebook uses -- actually a superset, as all PHP is valid Hack) with HHVM, which is a PHP runtime engine. Wikipedia recently transitioned their PHP website from running on the Zend engine to running on HHVM. It's still regular PHP code, though.
- ChrisCinelli 11y ago
  "You simply cannot run a top-level Internet business on PHP anymore" - I guess you mean ONLY on PHP. Maybe Facebook is not using just PHP... Twitter and Slideshare demonstrated that you cannot run their businesses exclusively with Ruby on Rail. Pinterest and Quora have done the same with Python. At a certain scale, it is more economical and efficient to optimize part of your architecture with services written in other languages. This has always be true. People has massively relay on caches that are usually written C/C++ Ex: memcache is a very tiny piece of C has been used with PHP, Python, Ruby forever. However you would be surprised to know how many million dollar businesses are running almost exclusively on PHP. I am not saying that is the best choice, but it is the reality.

by kayman 11y ago

PHP is not obsolete. Quite the opposite. HHVM by Facebook has made PHP a bit cooler. An argument from a PHP developer (i'm not one, personally dislike it) could be: "its good enough for facebook"

Demiurge 11y ago

PHP will never be obsolete in the sense of, Wordpress and Facebook will never be obsolete. It's good enough for Facebook to not start from scratch. But it's probably obsolete in terms of starting a new website. I started web dev in PHP but switched to Django as first choice many years ago. Isomorphic React now feels like a one step backwards, two steps forward. P.S. These are illuminating :) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf

gexla 11y ago
Meanwhile, there are hundreds (thousands?) of new Wordpress installs going up every day. People building their businesses and making money without much thought as to which tooling is behind their administrative control panels other than the name, Wordpress. You did say, "website." Perhaps you didn't mean to use such a general term. A green field web application may not choose a stack which includes PHP.
- Demiurge 11y ago
  Yeah, I meant 'original web app'. Funny, my company also uses Wordpress because thats what the design studio supplied, and we keep it on a completely isolated server for security reasons.

memracom 11y ago

HHVM is one of the things that is making PHP obsolete. You simply cannot run a top-level Internet business on PHP anymore. It does not work!! PERIOD! Facebook realized this and solved the problem by building a proper platform to run a subset of PHP which allowed them an easy migration to the new platform. Massive companies can afford to do this, but the rest of use need to choose safer tools with a long future ahead of them.

giaour 11y ago
You're confusing the Hack language (the "subset" of PHP Facebook uses -- actually a superset, as all PHP is valid Hack) with HHVM, which is a PHP runtime engine. Wikipedia recently transitioned their PHP website from running on the Zend engine to running on HHVM. It's still regular PHP code, though.
ChrisCinelli 11y ago
"You simply cannot run a top-level Internet business on PHP anymore" - I guess you mean ONLY on PHP. Maybe Facebook is not using just PHP... Twitter and Slideshare demonstrated that you cannot run their businesses exclusively with Ruby on Rail. Pinterest and Quora have done the same with Python. At a certain scale, it is more economical and efficient to optimize part of your architecture with services written in other languages. This has always be true. People has massively relay on caches that are usually written C/C++ Ex: memcache is a very tiny piece of C has been used with PHP, Python, Ruby forever. However you would be surprised to know how many million dollar businesses are running almost exclusively on PHP. I am not saying that is the best choice, but it is the reality.