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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Laravel has been around since 2011. PHP 7 is slow and continues to perform badly in all reasonably done comparisons:

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

But even if both of your points were true, the point is to look at what is happening in other languages and frameworks. Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places. Ask yourself, honestly, how many interesting new ideas will you learn from studying PHP, versus the more versatile (as in more platforms, and also the frontend) languages such as Javascript/Node, or the more innovative such as Go or Rust or Clojure or R or Julia? And I'm not even mentioning the more experimental languages, such as Shen or Lux.

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Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places.

I continue to be baffled by this sort of "novelty-chasing" --- do I really care about "interesting new places" or "interesting new ideas"? No; and in fact I'd rather not, because it takes time and energy away from actually solving useful practical problems, besides the ones you create yourself in chasing after the latest cruft.

PHP is slow on an absolute scale, but chances are that a minimal, straightforward application written with it can perform better than something with a bloated framework on top in a different language. That takes true skill and experience, not something you can get if you're continuously jumping around trying to chase the fashion trends.

As someone who has witnessed several major trends in programming come and fall, the amount of churn (and encouragement thereof) in the web community is astoundingly unsettling.

"It's not about the tool, it's how you use it."

Maybe you don't realize this because you haven't studied them, but "bloated framework" is unknown in Go or Clojure or Rust. Each of these languages tends towards minimal frameworks. Clojure, in particular, is known for its composeable libraries which make frameworks a bit of a sideshow for that community. Go is known for having enough in its standard library that some aspects of frameworks are not needed.

About this:

"because it takes time and energy away from actually solving useful practical problems,"

You can not know that without first studying other languages. You might find that you are 10x more productive in Rust. You can only find out by studying Rust.

But you bound the conversation in ways that I didn't when you write:

"in the web community"

I feel that developers can learn a great deal if they study projects that don't necessarily have anything to do with Web programming. Nothing in the article or on this page necessarily restricts us to only considering Web programming.

"It's not about the tool, it's how you use it."

I wouldn't use a hammer to go fishing. Nor would I use a saw to turn a screw. Nor would I use a frying pan to tune a piano. It helps to learn about a lot of different kinds of tools, because over the course of your career, you might be confronted with diverse tasks.

Why was this downvoted? What in this comment is untrue?

Try writing a web app in Luminus (Clojure) or Phoenix (Elixir). I guarantee you will be enlightened. The danger, however, is that you may lose your tolerance for OOP languages thereafter.

Elixir/Phoenix is great and promising but you don't get everything you have in Symfony out of the box. For example the EEx template system is behind Twig (I especially miss inheritance) and Auth/Autorization is kind of a mess.

The ecosystem is also smaller and deployment in Elixir is still a work in progress (mismatch between Mix and Erlang releases).

Yeah because inheritance was always such a great idea :D

Well as Jinga2 and Twig showed, it is for templates ;) Compared to traditional nested includes.

> I continue to be baffled by this sort of "novelty-chasing" --- do I really care about "interesting new places" or "interesting new ideas"?

Is this a troll? No you don't need to care. Feel free to go live off roots and tubers in the forest. Or write some COBOL. Anything is justified if you're putting "interesting new ideas" in quotes.

I worked with PHP full-time for several years and energetically rationalized away the time I invested into building that expertise. I liked it, I was getting things done, it would help me get jobs in the future. Utter nonsense. What a waste of my life.

Eventually I snapped out of it. Turns out you can just move to places Silicon Valley, there are jobs at awesome companies working with the cool modern technologies. You don't need anybody's permission, just do it. Want to write Haskell/Go/Rust/Elixir/Clojure every day? Want to work with ML or robots or big data or whatever floats your boat? Just go do it. You don't need to sit there writing PHP as the world passes you by.

PHP is a backwater. People live there and tell themselves that it's fine, good as any place really, can't imagine anything better, probably wouldn't like it anyway. Or they just stop thinking about it.

Some people could care less about SV. Or maybe they want to ship products their clients can handle after launch. Whether you like it or not PHP has created more value than any of those languages you mentioned. It's like you're saying it's better to be a Ferrari mechanic than a Toyota mechanic. The user does not care. So ship stuff that matters in whatever tool of choice.

Then however we're on a platform made by Paul Graham which stated that lisp delivers more value than any other language.

DHH says the same thing about rails/ruby.

Taylor Otwell says the same thing about laravel/php.

Mark Zuckerberg says the same thing about React / HHVM / Hack (PHP variant).

I'm sure Steve Jobs said the same thing about Objective C or Swift.

It's called an opinion, just because one person who spends more time investing in VCs, and just because we're debating an issue on a site, doesn't mean we have to take the creator of the site's past essays as the absolute truth...

Go, php, ruby, python, lisp variants ALL are the best script if A. it's the only one you know and you just want to launch something or B. You've done your due dilligence to figure out what you need, is it just a crud app? PHP is fine, is it a chat app? Well you might need erlang or elixir on the backend, or something with concurrency.

If you're spending 100+ hours debating on platform instead of building shit, then that's time you can't get back and that's wasted opportunity acquiring customers to a platform you could've had built last week -- if you weren't stuck in...confusion about what framework to build in, or spending all your time in tutorials because you picked the shiniest framework or language that is above your pay-grade so you have to learn everything.

Exactly. Anyone who puts “interesting ideas” in quotes is literally a blub programmer, as Paul Graham described:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

PHP was never in fashion. In the beginning it wasn't as powerful as Perl. Then it was looked upon as not serious compared to java or hobbist by the business asp crowd. At one point because of a facebook movie it was in fashion for a year but that created a I hate php backlash. Php has changed so much I'm seeing people rediscover it.

Remember java was cool or mongodb or node or ruby on rails. It feels like go is becoming less cool. I wonder what next year will bring? Perhaps php will be rediscovered when SV changes once again.

> how many interesting new ideas will you learn from studying PHP, versus [...] languages such as Javascript/Node

This is on point! Programming PHP is not about diving deep into interesting language constructs or creating beautifully structured software - PHP is about getting things done, about starting hurdle-free and progressing rapidly. It goes against some "good development practices" but it works, see for example the single-file website remoteok.io from Pieter Levels: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/938707166508154880

Love it. Back to the roots - one file, load it up in the editor, if one needs to debug something, just search for it. Yep. This is how it should be: easy to debug.

Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places.

That's "chasing shiny". Shiny is the cancer destroying the computer industry from the inside.

Any day not learning how to do web application development in LISP is a day wasted. The old tech is still cutting edge, way ahead of any new shiny garbage, because that garbage is decidedly not moving the industry forward, just introducing one more variation of making a computer do something. And that's extremely bad.

> But even if both of your points were true, the point is to look at what is happening in other languages and frameworks. Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places.

Which of those languages give you NaCl out of the box?

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