Ewww, You Use PHP?

I am not a super-dev, but I can write code in an unfamiliar language in a day or two (non-idiomatic, of course). Better people than I can do better, I am sure.

I am sure you will be able to find great engineers if you open up your playing field.

If somebody's got the attitude that 'Java sucks, I only want to code Ruby', that person's not a pro in my book.

Anecdotally, I took a job as Rails developer some years back. I had zero experience with it before starting (Having worked mainly with PHP before), but because the environments are so similar (http is the same, gnu/linux is the same, mysql is the same, architecture and oop is the same etc. etc.), I was creating value after about three weeks and I would say that I was fully up to speed after something like 3 months. Consider that it can easily take the same time to get the business, the problem domain and your new colleagues to know, I'd say that the cost for my employer was close to nothing.

Now, I'm not saying that anybody can do this - I consider myself a fairly good developer and beside PHP, I have tinkered with a broad spectrum of languages, which surely helped my transition. And the point isn't that Ruby is such an easy language that it can be learned in 3 weeks either (In fact, I think it is a rather complex language). What I take from my experience is that a good (and diverse) developer, with a motivation can jump from related technologies with relative ease.

I do agree with your sentiment that it might be easier to sell a jump from php than to, but that is a different problem. If your project is interesting in it self, I'm sure you can find good developers who don't fret too much over what particular language they write in.

I am amused by the perception that a pro software engineer is assumed to only be proficient in the programming language they used in their last job. If an engineer is applying for your job, talk to them and make sure they are a good personality fit for your team. They are probably going to take more time understanding your dev tools and procedures than boning up on PHP.

Node.js wins for deployment if you ask me. Node.js + riak handily beats the pants off of the LAMP stack. It's so easy I'll tell you how to do it right now:

    1. Install node, ./configure && make && make install
    2. Install riak, make all rel && mv rel/riak /usr/local && export PATH="/usr/local/riak/bin:$PATH"
    3. Install your app: scp -r remote:/my/app /web
    4. Install dependencies: cd /web/app && npm install
    5. Run your app: node /web/app/do/something/cool.js

(I'm being somewhat facetious and these instructions don't get you startup services and such, but I do believe that Node.js stacks are much simpler than traditional stacks and easier for devs that have to wear the sysadmin hat too)

It's just as easy to get mod_python working as it is mod_php.

Can't speak for rails, but for Django we're talking 15 lines and a pair of commands for a clean setup:

* Create a virtualenv with all your dependencies and your django application checked out (0 lines)

* Extract static files to whatever directory you're serving static files from (1 command in 1.3)

* Create your wsgi handler script (4 lines, because you have to setup the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE env)

* WSGIScriptAlias and the relevant directory allow (5 lines)

* WSGIDaemonProcess and WSGIProcessGroup configuration directives (2 lines)

done.

Let's take your VPS example. Install nginx, gunicorn, and your database of choice. Set up gunicorn to serve your app, set up nginx to serve static and proxy to your gunicorn instance. Do any app-specific setup.

That doesn't take any longer than deploying a PHP app, at least not for me.

For example, let's say you've got a string like 4|1|45|343|22. You want to return a string with the last three numbers, but seperated by a comma and a space.

In PHP:

    $arr = explode('|',$str);
    $last_three = array_slice($arr, -3);
    return implode(", ",$last_three);

    return ', '.join(str.split('|')[-3:])

    return implode(', ',array_slice(explode('|',$str),-3)); 

When I work with an unfamiliar class in Ruby, or come back to something familiar (say, Array) after a long time away, I'll often not "know" the exact method signatures for what I want, but I'll just guess something reasonable based on my knowledge of the language and idioms. And, lo and behold, most often it works!

Having to "remember" (does this method use array_?) or "translate" is a mental tax; there's cycles wasted that could keep your mind in the business logic.

  > When people want to pick nits about this or significant whitespace 
  > it makes me think that there must very little variance between 
  > the languages if THIS is the issue that deserves scrutiny.

However this "short array syntax" is representative of PHP's sluggish internal development process. [] is very nearly the de-facto solution for creating arrays, and yet the PHP core devs have, for two years, rejected[1] patches that implement it on ridiculous grounds.

[1]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/shortsyntaxforarrays

Finding the argument order for a method takes ~3-5 seconds. Its irrelevant. array() vs [] is actually a bigger deal as its indicative of php's verbose syntax. But its not a killer.

People like JS because it got the fundamentals right. The bad parts are just details. PHP is bad because it got the fundamentals wrong. But people still harp on the details.

A lot of little details make a big difference.

    foo = mydict[key] # Throws exception if key does not exist
    foo = mydict.get(key) # Returns None if key does not exist

    # PHP
    foreach ($arr as $value) {
        echo "Value: $value<br />\n";
    }
    
    # Python
    for value in arr:
        print "Value: %s<br>" % value

    # PHP
    foreach ($arr as $key => $value) {
        echo "Key: $key; Value: $value<br />\n";
    }
    
    # Python
    for key, value in arr.items():
        print "Key: %s Value: %s<br>" % (key, value)

I think this is a bad feature and causes bugs. In Python there's a fail fast feature, where it'll throw an error if you go past the end of an array. It's places like this were bugs creep in. In python, you find out that there's a problem with this array, in PHP you have to hunt around and only later look at the array X lines above where the bug manifests.

they are all hashtables so you can use them as both arrays and lists

Python dicts (i.e. hashtables) are better than PHP arrays. PHP arrays only have number or string keys, so you can't use arrays as a key in a PHP array. You can in python.

I still recommend that people new to Kohana start with 2.x because a framework is worth a lot less without quality documentation, when you have to go read the code all the time. Not that you shouldn't do that eventually, there's a lot of good code in there to learn from!

Really, Kohana needs more documentation....

I would personally pick another language if I were doing something from scratch, but the benefit is that it is a language others are already familiar with and so adding a framework like Yii isn't too hard.

(Hint: copying files to a server is not how real applications are deployed.)

Probably better than finding a good dev in other languages for web development considering all the good PHP developers are still using PHP, and all the ones that couldn't cut it went on to learn the next LotM.

Honest answer: The same chance of hitting a good dev regardless of the language.