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Comment by cvander | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of a fresh start in the crowded market of PHP frameworks.. But also, I think that there if you're willing to do the effort to work with something new, you should also try new languages. The web is moving very fast and the nicest projects in github today aren't built in php.

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PHP might not be the language of choice if you start hacking a project for yourself. And sure, it has tons of problems and weaknesses but you can't deny one thing: you can very easily get very cheap dev-power when you use PHP.

Sure, those people would also be able to learn Python, Ruby, or whatever the flavor of the month is. But it would take you significantly longer to train them to work on your project. And they might want more money if they realize they now have a more valuable skill ;).

I believe this is why Facebook still uses PHP.

In that light: a new PHP framework that makes things even easier is a good thing.

I think the valid argument here would be that PHP is the cheapest/easiest option for most webmasters out there. When a normal person -- say an artist -- buys hosting, it isn't likely that he'll sit down and set up Python or Ruby. No, he'll upload a copy of Wordpress (on PHP) and be blogging in a couple of hours.

That said, it's NOT true that Facebook still uses PHP because they get cheap developer power. See this Quora thread: http://www.quora.com/Why-hasn-t-Facebook-migrated-away-from-...

From FB's former Director of Engineering:

The reason Facebook hasn't migrated away from PHP is because it has incumbent inertia (it's what's there) and Facebook's engineers have managed to work around many of its flaws [...]

When people recommend writing web applications in Python, they don't point to the language itself as being better for web development. They point to Django or web2py. Same for Ruby, with Rails. So it's odd that people talk about PHP itself in these same conversations. You can write web apps without a framework in PHP, but I don't think anyone building non-trivial applications is still doing that.

"Tons of problems and weaknesses" is largely untrue at this point. Many of the problems that were traditionally pointed to were corrected in 5 and 5.3. There is no interest in breaking backwards compatibility, so the built-in function parameter order inconsistencies are still valid. Most frameworks work around this issue with an OOP wrapper for array and string operations.

It is difficult to find good dev-power for PHP that's cheap. I've tried. You can find many people who have a basic level of PHP knowledge and refer to web apps as "scripts". Finding people who have an understanding of OOP and modern development techniques is much harder and more expensive.

Here's why I program web apps in PHP: it works and I know it well. If I need a library for something web related, I can assume it will be available as open-source. I don't have concerns that I can make a PHP application scale if I need to. When features don't make sense to implement in PHP, I'll snap them off and implement them in the most appropriate language in the background. Most of the heavy-lifting for web applications typically happens in the background.

I keep hearing about PHP's "function parameter order inconsistencies". Has that ever been a real problem for anyone? Guess not. Auto-completion got your back and it's debatable if these are real 'inconsistencies' anyway. The amount of really really helpful built-in PHP functions for a lot of common tasks more than makes up for this.

Definitely hear you on the lack of PHP developers with an understanding of OOP and all though. Seen it myself when my previous company tried to hire one, the 'range' of people applying is incredible.

The inconsistencies are just more mental friction. It's not a huge cost, but it's no benefit either. If you can avoid such friction, why wouldn't you?

Completely getting your point that it could be annoying for some people out there. It never bothered me though and while this is not really a strong argument, it's always one of the first things to come up when people talk about PHP's flaws.

If it really bugs you it could easily be solved with a few helper/wrapper functions.

(Besides that, regarding elegance of syntax, there's no doubt that most other languages used for web dev'ing are lightyears ahead of PHP.)

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