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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Wow. That's bit harsh. I'll try and stay civil.

"The community is pretty much dead." - not from where I'm standing. I live in a tech-savvy town and there seems to be more Django devs here than Rails devs. Of course - it's not a popularity contest otherwise PHP would be the best web framework ;-)

"All my Django projects ended up being a big mess" - that used to be the case with my own code but by reading other people's code (and the Django source) I've improved hugely. Should you be blaming your tools?

"And the community in general seems to agree" - the Django community agrees that Django sucks? Or did you mean the web dev community in general? If so - can you back that up with anything more substantial?

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PHP would be the best web framework

PHP is not a web framework like Django, it's a language like Python.There are however, many good Django like PHP frameworks.

Just wanted to clarify.

Partly a slip of the keyboard. But PHP is language + web-oriented 'libraries' (actually built-ins) so the it's a blurry distinction.

In the context discussed in this thread, "framework" means code that includes MVC, URL routing, and often an ORM. PHP in itself doesn't offer that; you need a framework such as CodeIgniter or Zend Framework on top. So no, PHP isn't a "framework" in itself (at least not in the way that Django is).

Having been writing web interactivity since before PHP, I'd disagree with you that PHP "is a language like Python".

Look at how it started, as personal home page template processing scripts in Perl, and you'll see it started with much more in common with a templating tool or web framework than with a formal language.

"PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. He named this set of scripts 'Personal Home Page Tools'. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications..."

"PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation of form variables and HTML embedded syntax."

http://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php

First of all, how it started isn't as important as where it is now. And what we have now is a full-fledged programming language. Secondly, if you can build large-scale maintainable websites with PHP, who cares how the language got started originally. It's all about what you can do with the language - and in that regard PHP is a great tool (although certainly not the only tool available).

"I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way." -- Rasmussen Lerdorf, inventor of PHP

But to your point, he also said: "I've never thought of PHP as more than a simple tool to solve problems."

http://twitter.com/#!/rasmus/status/1938080214814720

Sorry to say my friend, but the Ruby and Rails community out teaches the competition. Hands down! It's that simple. But, more importantly the founder of Rails has deliciously swirly hair. Can Django top deliciously swirly hair? I didn't think so: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509808

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