Comment by kator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kator | Hacker News Reader

I've been coding for nearly 30 years and have seen this rant for every major language I've coded in. The reality is there is no perfect tool even in construction as Jeff tries to draw parallels to you will find that many different tools are required for many different situations. Often a hammer can be used to make a hole in a wall and other times you use a saw to cut a nail head off and just pound it into the wall because your hammer has a broken claw!

Tools evolve over time and saying screw drivers are useless and everyone should use a battery powered screw driver doesn't change the fact that a screw driver drives screws.

If you don't like the tool move on to other tools or make your own and get people to adopt them. Don't bash the brilliant people who worked hard to make the tool in the first place.

My father is 71 years old and codes in PHP! He was never going to learn python, ruby or anything else but PHP was approachable for him. Provide a language with that low barrier to entry and let's talk. Meanwhile I love my dad but we won't be writing the next google and that's ok by him and I both. If he wants that he'll ask me to write it in COBOL! :-)

Why is python or ruby too hard for your dad to learn? If anything I would think something like ruby would be even easier than php since things are a bit more consistent.

I just don't see how PHP is more approachable, especially compared to the supposed ease of ruby on rails.

Err, I love Rails and all, but don't confuse ease of use with ease of learning. The thing about putting convention over configuration is that you have to learn a lot of conventions.

Interestingly, this is the problem with non-alphabetic natural languages, too.

Try getting Django to run on various hosting sites. Dreamhost - been with them for ten years, gave up trying to get Django to work after a month of poring thru the docs, trying to get tab A into slot 3x. Mind you, I really like Python, but it's not worth the effort for a couple more years.

PHP is the A-10 of languages. It's a slow, ugly and easy target. It works pretty much everywhere.

For pretty much every language these days, there is a hosted service that will handle deployment for you, and you can just push code to them and they'll take care of the rest. Better yet, they're perfect for beginners, who usually don't know much about database tuning, firewalls, etc.

Which kind of leaves me not understanding how it's deployed, etc., which I kind of feel like I need to know.

There isn't any one perfect solution, just workable ones.

Yeah, but the average person doesn't really understand how their PHP is set up either. It was done for them, or they copy and pasted some instructions.

Perhaps it's best if you either completely take deployment into your own hands, or you let someone else do it for you. Given all that, rolling your own could still be made simpler.

Django + dreamhost sucks, I concur.

Try these guys (they also do rails and other stuff as well): webfaction.com

Stop comparing PHP to Rails.

Compare Ruby to PHP and something like Symfony to Rails.

Learning Ruby: approachable. Learning PHP: approachable. Learning Rails/Symfony: run for the hills (for newbie programmers).

Languages !- Frameworks (at least for the purposes of this comparison)

He's been an HTML coder for about 10 years doing sites with front page and other html authoring tools.

Him figuring out <? print date('Y'); ?> is fairly easy when he already understands html.

That makes sense then. There is more of a shift in thinking going from html to python vs php.

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