Comment by aeontech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeontech | Hacker News Reader

Their setup doesn't seem extra-ordinary in any great way, and reads more like a justification against a strawman argument. The author sets up with "PHP is regarded as a clumsy and amateurish technology, best left to development newbies". I am not sure who it is that regards PHP in such a way. Sure, it's not as sexy as Clojure, Scala, Ruby or Erlang these days, but I don't think anyone needs to be convinced that PHP is a worthy technology to build a platform on - some of the biggest sites out there are running on PHP just fine.

PHP has a bit of a reputation for attracting unskilled programmers, but that's because it is so easy to get started with, which leads to a lot of newbies writing it. All that means is that you may have to filter your candidates more carefully when you hire, and nothing to do with the language itself.

In short, the post seems subjective and opinionated, without showing any concrete problems that they overcame with alternative languages or frameworks. "Codeigniter is bloated" vs "Paraglide is awesome" are both so vague as to be useless. "Ruby's syntax sucks" is even worse.

Much better to have had a list of specific things that dissuaded them from using one framework or language, and some killer features that convinced them to use the other - if all I see is a personal opinion without any reasoning behind it, I cannot make any useful decisions in my own situation.

"PHP is regarded as a clumsy and amateurish technology, best left to development newbies". I am not sure who it is that regards PHP in such a way.

No one likes it but it gets the job done in a clumsy and amateurish way. It's the BASIC of web programming. Those other so-called sexy languages have actually been designed rather than having features bolted on later, those features are designed to fit into the language from the start.

some of the biggest sites out there are running on PHP just fine.

Popularity != proof of goodness.

I think he was trying to show capability more than quality.

Popularity != proof of goodness.

I never said it was the greatest language ever. I'll take Ruby or Lisp over PHP any day. I was simply saying that the OP's post is framed as if PHP was generally considered a useless newbie language, and that using it for a startup is somehow noteworthy.

I absolutely agree, this article was a waste of time. His use of technology wasn't awe-inspiring either. He comes off as someone who is unfamiliar with PHP instead of an experienced user with a bone to pick.

I've worked in Java, PHP and Python. I personally prefer using Yii, phing along with PEAR and pecl libraries to anything else, at least with timeliness in mind.

Unlike Ruby and Python, PHP is a DSL, plain and simple. Yes, it's poorly designed. But it does what it was meant to do-- to build web apps-- quite well. It's up to the end user to write software that scales. And a lot of the scaling issues you'll see will be independent of language choice.

Also, this statement is rubbish:

"Unit Testing

While we don’t practice Test-Driven-Development, we do have unit tests in place. PHP does not provide an elegant test library, so we built our own (soon-to-be open-sourced.)"

Really? You've never heard of PHPUnit?

I think he's referring to the lack of a first-party PHP unit testing suite, but I agree with you, PHPUnit is fantastic, and I can't see a reason to write your PHP unit testing library own when PHPUnit exists

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