Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

I'm just leaving my current role, a fast growing start up with a completely custom framework. Currently at half a million active accounts but there's really no bottleneck with the PHP. Can easily keep throwing more boxes and hardware at it and I feel pretty comfy that it will be fine at 20 million active accounts. Also background jobs processing which is sort of async cause it lives on top of SQS and fires a sub process for every new message.

My iteration cycle is very fast. No need to sit there and wait for compiles. PHP is C-like and written in C so the hate is funny to me. Our code is unit tested, documented, and extremely well organized. I even connect to our database on my dev box through an SSH tunnel managed by a tool I made for us in.... PHP which uses AWS IAM to authorize a private key for 60 seconds and then auto connect. That's how I connect to our EC2 instances too.

I'm now jumping to another successful start up with a small team running Laravel. Again super organized and well documented.

I congratulate you on your successful projects but I don't understand what you mean by "PHP is C-like and written in C so the hate is funny to me". The language of the runtime is not particularly relevant unless you want to write custom extensions (which I remember being an absolutely atrocious experience back when I had to do in in ~2007, hopefully it improved since then) and the language itself is only very superficially C-like.

In fact the most C-like thing I remember about it is that many standard library functions where extremely thin wrappers around the libc, so thin in fact that you could get a segfault if you weren't careful.

Was implying it's efficient and fast. It's extremely unlikely you will ever need to write an extension.

> PHP is C-like and written in C so the hate is funny to me.

You didn't realize how many people hate C? (Like any other popular language, yes)

I've being used PHP since it was Personal Home Page (3.x or something). The reason I moved away from it, is it is language make up. Some point around 4 it try to become Java OO style (ok ES6 is trying to do that too). The main reason moving away from it is because would like to have language that has function as a first class citizen, and JS seems to fit the bill. Once I found the joy of developing with proper closure and using function as a first class citizen PHP just doesn't appeal to me. The best things about PHP is it's templating system. And with EJS or similar there is really no reason to use PHP anymore.

PHP supports first class functions though?

You right they are supporting it since 8.1.0.

While PHP is adding a First class callable syntax in 8.1, first-class-functions have been available in PHP since 5.3.0 (Released Jun 2009) going by the Wikipedia definition:

> This means the language supports passing functions as arguments to other functions, returning them as the values from other functions, and assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures.

Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/59293198/368328, https://3v4l.org/rQGk2

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