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Comment by j_col | Hacker News Reader

> I use it for some piddly shit because that's what it's good for

So do Facebook.

And his point still stands. :) Could not resist.

I know you're joking, but his point is very badly made. Anything that can support ~1 billion users is not piddly. Facebook are doing amazing work with PHP, as are many others at a very large scale.

Why the unpaid work of Rasmus and many, many other open source contributors like him, who's hard work facilitated the growth of massive web sites like Facebook, is constantly being ridiculed on threads like this is sickening.

I agree. I was commenting on Facebook "the social network" and not Facebook the "technology".. :) Anything that can be made to support such large transactions (be it with duct tape and glue) has to have a core capability to support such usage.

It is important to keep in mind that Facebook isn't just a single PHP code base, and thus one can't really make many assumptions about how well PHP is suited to solving certain problems because one doesn't necessarily know about which bits are implemented in PHP, or whether PHP is just a templating/rendering stage over work done elsewhere.

Some other languages might allow you to do certain operations in the front-end more easily, but the way to approach it when using PHP might be to delegate that to a back-end service in another language. Similarly, some languages might allow you to write both most front-end and most back-end software in the same language, where PHP might be wholly unsuitable or makes certain things harder to achieve than it is worth using it for (maybe strict memory usage control, maybe where you're looking for CPU cache wins).

"Facebook uses it, it can't be all bad!" is a stupid argument. Because the rest of us have to deal with PHP's not-Facebooks, whose flaws are made more frustrating because of shit tooling and the systematic encouragement of shit practices in the writing of code.

In all fairness with enough hardware you could serve ~1 billion users using virtually any language which supports development of web applications. Just because you can develop a hugely successful system using a language doesn't prove (or disprove) that said language is necessarily the best tool for the job. It just happens to be what FB picked.

Right, you could use BASIC or any Turing-complete language.

Actually, BASIC has been written so many times that you would probably get a pretty sane and systematic experience out of a web BASIC. Relatively speaking.

It is too bad if people complaining about PHP makes someone feel bad.

What's really important here is that people need to be aware when they are adopting a tool which brings this much technical liability.

People should not be unknowingly exposed to this relentless stream of years-old, fatal bugs. Life is too short and it's even more unfair to newbies to make them deal with nutty, random issues like 'can't use a Turkish locale'. This isn't just picking on PHP. These bugs are epic and breathtaking and impose an exceptionally high amount of effort to work around.

It is clear by now that (A) these are not just a few isolated bugs but a big pile (B) most of this pile is old and already known for years (C) the PHP team is not fixing the pile despite lots of time (D) it would be such an epic amount of work to fix that you could never reasonably expect others to do it, especially if they have no reason to be invested in PHP (how is that reasonable?) (E) you could never get the fixes and cleanups published because of all the existing code which would be broken, unless PHP adopted a risky, even more labor-intensive backward-incompatible renovation project (F) there are already multiple well developed alternatives which do not have these problems, so why would I wait for PHP to get its house in order?

I'm not saying that PHP sucks and could never be fixed.

I'm saying that PHP doesn't have enough positives to justify the huge time and effort to fix it... or to suffer through using it for years. There is no third choice.

Why on Earth would I bust my butt trying to fix this pile of bugs when I can just use anything else?

Just because I feel sentimental about the name 'PHP'?

This is a slowly sinking ship, it is not responsible to tell newbies to get on it.

Didn't facebook largely reimplement php, though?

The question is whether someone is saying that you can't use the PHP language/architecture to create a large and large-scale application like the Facebook front-end, or whether they mean the PHP runtime is unable to perform effectively at scale.

The Facebook front-end code is largely just the PHP language (modulo things like XHP) and follows the shared-nothing, request-based architecture that people who program in PHP expect. With the right abstractions and code organisation, it is fairly clean and understandable even at the relatively large size (even if I'm not generally a fan of the language and would almost certainly not make the decision to use it today).

It is somewhat less interesting whether the PHP runtime is as efficient as it can be. Partly because one can use an alternative runtime like HipHop for PHP if you want to. And partly because very few people have to worry quite as much about performance/efficiency that comes with a large capital/operational cost where you have hundreds of servers.

So while "But Facebook uses PHP so it must be good" is not the best argument, neither is fighting it with "But Facebook reimplemented it!".

It would be better to say Facebook begrudgingly uses PHP due to not wanting to do a major rewrite.

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