Hacker News Reader

Comment by trevelyan | Hacker News Reader

Brian, do you have any examples of companies that failed using PHP that you think would have succeeded with another interpreted language, and what problems did they run into that gave you this judgment?

Asking as I've developed in a slew of languages and never found the PHP-bashing credible. Most of the complaints seem to come from Rails people, but there are no shortage of MVC frameworks in PHP, including at least one that is a direct clone of Rails.

View on HN

I to have seen plenty of companies flail and get bogged down because of technical debt and a just get it done culture. It's really hard to begin with a "yes it's a mess, but it works" culture and transition to anything else.

Plenty of A rounds have been spent trying to make a sand castle taller.

This is not unique to php - I'm sure you can do it right - but it's more common to it.

I've seen plenty of companies fail (or at least stall) because of technical debt. PHP certainly isn't to blame for that but it doesn't exactly lead by example either.

I think it would be hard to provide such an example. Mostly because most companies that fail don't do it because of technology but rather because of the nature of their product itself, people, or money. And language plays a part in it but not a particularly noticeable one. Another reason is that failures tend to be silent and we don't pay attention to silent things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com