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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see a reference to Ghost I think of the interview with the founder where he lamented the choice of NodeJS, insisting that if he had opted for a modern PHP framework (Laravel was named) they would be 1.5 years further down the feature roadmap.

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/07/26/ghost-open-s...

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I've built RemoteHub in PHP on Laravel. There's also some jQuery written (you can call me oldschool) – I should maybe switch my JS framework. But I'm used to jQuery, hah. And what's wrong with jQuery?

I mean, yes I've played around with Node etc, but somehow I've sticked with PHP. Maybe because it was the first language (computer language) I learned.

And I really like Laravel. It's actually so cool that you can use frameworks like Laravel for free although a lot of people have contributed a massive amount of their time into these open source projects. And then you come and just built your project on top of it!

We use PHP for our backend stuff. We've been using our own custom framework for years, but are in the process of migrating to Laravel now (something we really should have done much earlier).

I can understand the hate for PHP. As it is easy to pick up and because it doesn't enforce good coding practices, PHP has become a magnet for poorly capable programmers. In fact, one of our great challenges is that the majority of candidates who apply for PHP Software Engineer (SE) positions are barely capable of programming in the first place.

At the end of the day, what matters is the skill of the tech team. A team of SEs with strong coding skills and well thought out engineering/architectural practices can create systems that are well-built, scalable and maintainable, regardless of language. Conversely, no programming language or framework can compensate for a lack of skill or poor knowledge of good engineering practices.

Seems a big reason for that was the lack of maturity in the node module ecosystem 6-7 years ago.

From the interview:

"How do we gone down a PHP root? I think from a product point of view, we'd probably be a lot further along than we are now, because in the PHP ecosystem much like in the Ruby ecosystem, or even the Python ecosystem to some extent, this tooling is well understood. It has evolved over a long amount of time. You have your defaults that just work. You have your libraries, which have been time-tested, proven they're great.

Whereas in end of 2012, beginning of 2013 starting out into the node.js ecosystem, pretty Wild West. There's not a lot of stuff going on. There was barely a usable authentication library that we could start working with. Even to this day, it's not – there's a lot of things where if you were working in Ruby or PHP you’d go, “Yeah. Obviously, I'll just grab this library that everyone uses.” Whereas in node you go, “I can't believe that doesn't exist.”

I think when we wrote the first version of Ghost that wasn't a usable RSS library for parsing XML and delivering RSS feeds in node, and that was just mind boggling. Then that has repeated enough times to where it really slowed us down."

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