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Comment by rick888 | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I like PHP is that it still lets you get to a lower level of coding. Many of the newer languages and frameworks that have become popular in the past couple of years abstract things such as database connectivity away (Django is a good example of this) and it makes it difficult to optimize queries effectively without hacking onto the framework.

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Rails has two ways to do this. You can do any select query returning active record objects with

    Model.find_by_sql("raw select query")

And any query with a driver dependent result using

    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("raw sql")

You can shorten the second one to simply "execute" by creating a method to wrap the functionality.

Don't confuse abstraction and formalization with convention with restricting low-level access. Most ORM frameworks allow you to drop down to direct SQL if you need to.

Most ORMs (including Django) let you easily drop-down into writing your own custom SQL queries when the need arises.

I've used Django and many others and while you can do this, you end up with code that isn't very clean.

Depends on your definition of 'clean'. I think Django found a very solid way to handle raw SQL statements[0].

[0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/

Wow, It's pretty apparent that there are a lot of young programmers here on HN. I was just stating my opinion and I got downvoted because I talked bad about your precious frameworks.

The comparison between PHP and frameworks isn't valid. Writing PHP on a framework probably abstracts away SQL too, just like writing CGI in Python gives you lower-level control.

When frameworks are the popular alternative to PHP (RoR,Django,etc), it is valid.

Are we also not allowed to talk about RoR when it comes to a discussion about PHP alternatives?

That is like saying Cocoa is a popular alternative to C++, but you prefer C++ because it allows you to write your own UI event loop.

I guess it is true if you really stretch your imagination, but does it mean anything?

Yes, when I write a web app, I don't want to be stuck with extra code that abstracts away the database into a less-efficient object/class and forces me to break the convention of the framework to write the code that I need.

I suppose it's fine when many of then newer programmers don't even know or understand what's going on underneath anyway...

It's a bit comparing apples to oranges. If you were comparing say Cake or Zend to RoR and Django then it would be a reasonable comparison.

It's not really apples and oranges - writing a website in raw Ruby is not a very feasible or popular option, whereas writing a website in raw PHP is. It is valid to compare writing a site in PHP and writing a website in Rails. It is also valid to compare writing one in Cake vs. RoR, as well as Cake vs. raw PHP (or a custom PHP framework, which is what raw PHP inevitably becomes in a sufficiently large project).

It doesn't stop the hordes of programmers on HN talking about Ror and Django and Cherry pi as an alternative to PHP.

Comments, Item 8: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

guess what? You aren't going to stop me from my opinion, sorry. You sure as hell aren't stopping the mass amounts of people from down voting my above comments for merely stating my opinion on frameworks.

oh and btw, my point has pretty much been proven.

Feel as righteous as you want, but bitching that you got downvoted and nobody explained and then accusing random downvotes of being young amateurs is indeed boring fucking reading.

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