PHP Woes | Hacker News Reader

PHP Woes

uokeke.com

2 pointsucheokeke9 comments

News flash: A programming language requires knowledge of it's standard library of functions, and can be used in less than clean/optimal ways.

PHP is where it is because it's easy to install, works fairly well, has a huge/comprehensive built in library, and is usable by many types of people. It also has solid documentation on it's website.

If you're really worried about this, use a framework, or templating engine. Smarty is a relatively lightweight solution for splitting logic from presentation, and also handles caching for you.

Thanks, I'll consider using Smarty. How about running background processes? What's the accepted way to implement them?

I don't think you can. PHP doesn't really run in a server like Java and .NET do. Zend does have a Server product (http://www.zend.com/en/products/server), I never tried it but it might offer background processes. I normally just use cron to trigger a url.

Or you can use cron to run a script written in PHP.

Dear Lord. This article shows so much ignorance about programming in general. If I was hiring, I wouldn't touch you with a ten foot pole...

Please clarify on what aspects of the article you deemed ignorant?

Like thinking Intelissense is a language feature for instance, or trying to shoehorn an inherently web language into general purpose and complaining (it's doable, everybody does it but you have to accept it was not meant to).

Sorry if it came off that way, I'll reword that part of the article as it seems to be misinterpreted. I understand that intellisense is a feature of an IDE, and not the language. I use netbeans with PHP, and it does have auto-complete. What I meant was that the code format used in C# was easier to use(maybe I am just used to it) than PHP's style.

I initially wrote the app in C#ASP.NET(2.0) but had trouble getting it to work well on the server with mono(problems with GDI), so I switched to PHP and used it as a learning experience. Perhaps I should have used a more general purpose language, but at the time I was unaware of the limitations of PHP.

PHP: by amateurs, for amateurs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com