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Comment by treeface | Hacker News Reader

I'll even go so far as to say that coding in PHP is downright pleasant when you use a framework like CodeIgniter or Kohana.

At the same time, I have to use Joomla at work and I sometimes catch myself with a partially-tied-off noose around my neck.

It really comes down to what framework you choose.

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Any problem in computer science can be solved by adding a layer of abstraction, apart from the problem of too many layers of abstraction.

That would be solved if only we had a framework framework.

Your comment reminded me of an older comment here:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431....

That's just silly. You want a generic framework factory factory, that you can then use to create a framework framework factory. And then you can get your framework framework.

They do in Java. It's called FrameworkFramework.

Unfortunately you have to get them from a FactoryFactory.

See "panels" in drupal.

...and apart from the well-known two hard problems.

You mean cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors?

If you don't like naming variables, use Fourth. (You'll still have to name functions, though.)

Against off-by-one errors, abstain from any from of loop.

For the real hard problems, like deciding whether your program has crashed or just takes a long time, give up.

Naming things was even harder when filenames were restricted to five characters or less.

That's why they had to name it Forth.

As a Kohana user, I can corroborate the claim that Kohana-land is miles above the world of complete garbage PHP, but the community, the libraries, the robustness of the framework itself, and support from hosting providers, etc., is still far behind (say) Rails in every case.

Touching on community, that would probably be the biggest motivator for me to move towards rails in the future, well over anything the individual languages offer.

Don't discount PHP yet; the CodeIgniter community is great (http://codeigniter.com/forums/)

I use CodeIgniter, have done for about 4 years now.

I never even think about high level stuff like "what language should I code in" anymore. It doesn't matter to the end user. CodeIgniter allows me to do anything I want, elegantly and with a small footprint.

It's a means to an end and eventually like you said, you stop caring about the "means". It's the "end" that matters - i.e. how well you execute. Using RoR (for example) as opposed to PHP has zero impact on that.

Yeah, you could argue that another language might get code down quicker or more elegantly but to the same "end". (Experience largely negates the quicker bit)

You might also argue that at scale PHP may eventually come back to bite you, but your not at scale at the moment and the majority of us should be thinking about the best way for us to deliver v1, not the best way for us to deal with 1 million users.

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