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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

I very specifically didn't say that PHP couldn't be used to build real products, but that still doesn't (at least on it's own) make it good or make it the best.

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I guess the worlds most popular websites, and the vast millions of PHP programmers must all not really exist. They can't exist, and can't be making good stuff, because PHP is just doesn't work.

Here is a list of template languages people on 'real' platforms use:

Python.

Airspeed, Castalian, Chameleon, Cheetah, CubicTemp, Django template system, Elements, EmPy, Evoque, HRL Powerful macro preprocessor for HTML, Genshi, Jinja 2, Mako, moody-templates, Myghty, Qpy, PML, pyratemp, Spyce, SUIT, Tempita, Tenjin, Template Toolkit, Templite+, thrases, ClearSilver, HTMLTemplate, JonsPythonModules, meld3, PyMeld, Pyxer, pso, Sprite, teng, webstring, XSLTools, PyPa, Genshi, kajiki, htmltmpl, Kid, SimpleTAL, CherryTemplate, AsciiDoc, Markdown, PyTextile, ReStructuredText, txt2tags, PottyMouth, Creole,

Ruby.

Radius. HAML. cs/Template. ERB, eRuby, Erubis, Galena, Tenjin, Liquid Markup. Ruty, PageTemplate, Amrita, Amrita2, Kwartz, Markaby. Maline. Builder::XmlMarkup, RedCloth, BlueCloth, RSmarty, Tempura, TAL, Curtis / Punk, Erby, RBML, RTALS, Tie, RVelocity, RailTags,

Java.

FreeMarker, SiteMesh, StringTemplate, Tea, Better Templates for Everybody, jxp, LSP, JCopist, Dynamator, RTFTemplate, Velocity, JByte, Jamon, JDynamiTe, WebMacro, Viento, IKAT, Bluprints, Transformica, Hapax, MiniTemplator, Xtempore,

_Not a complete list._

PHP is a pretty good template language, with pretty amazing documentation.

To deploy, you just upload a file.

You could walk outside now, and start yelling "I NEED A PHP PROGRAMMER!" and you'd probably find someone pretty quickly.

There are millions of hosts to choose from at tiny prices, who can provide support because they know the platform.

Saying PHP is good because Facebook use it is kind of like saying phone hacking is good because it was utilised but some of the UK's most popular newspapers...

I'd be interested to know if there's any commentary from people high up in Facebook on whether they'd use PHP again if they were starting now?

No, it's nothing like that.

Look at Quora, Path, and Asana, the three most successful consumer startups started by former Facebookers.

None use PHP.

Never heard of them.

And that's relevant how?

You are deliberately trying to miss the point. But in the off chance that you don't really get it, the point is quora, asana were started by early facebook programmers, and they didn't use PHP. If they liked PHP so much, they would have used it.

I can't find a citation, but there was a thread where a fb engineer claimed fb's internal PHP wiki starts with "There are two kind of people. People who hate PHP, and people who don't use PHP."

> If they liked PHP so much, they would have used it.

Or they got tired of being bullied by people like you.

>> If they liked PHP so much, they would have used it.

> Or they got tired of being bullied by people like you.

Or they really aren't a fan of PHP?

http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choo...

What kind of an analogy is that? It is not only flawed but does not relate to your argument. I guess the point that illumen was trying to make is that PHP can be used in popular real world applications and is "proven" to scale. Just like Facebook, you can look at Wikipedia, Wordpress, Tumbler or earlier days of Youtube all of which was/is written in PHP!

Be comfortable with the language you prefer and quit whining about the rest!!!

In no way whining about PHP, I still maintain various projects which use it and for which I think it's well suited.

The analogy was only meant to demonstrate an objection to arguments along the lines of "it's used by something popular therefore it's good" or "lots of people use it therefore it's good" which seem to be common points put forward in favour of PHP.

Popularity/ use by someone popular may be an indicator of quality but it very often isn't, the analogy isn't intended to go any further than that!

There is such commentary from people who left facebook to do their own thing. They did not use PHP. http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choo...

Yeah. That's why they completety rewritten it...

I guess your point is that there are too many options. But you have artificially inflated the count as you have made this point. Most of the things you have listed are not applicable (either not used any more, or are not general and were never used to compose full HTML pages). Cut out the ones which are not actively developed and you only have a handful for each language.

Since the problem seems to be that you need someone to choose for you: use Django on Python, use Rails on Ruby, and for each one use the templating that comes with it. If you switch to another framework, use its templating language. If you are advanced enough to use a microframework then you are advanced enough to plug in Jinja2 or whatever it is you really want.

Django, Rails, and Jinja2 have excellent documentation. I can't understand why you would think that PHP's documentation is significantly better.

You get what you pay for on super-cheap hosts who are somehow incompetent to understand Python or Ruby.

And choice is not a bug.

> Cut out the ones which are not actively developed and you only have a handful for each language.

"The template language you pick has a good chance of becoming an abandoned project" hardly seems a great selling point.

You literally just repeated all of the things that I just got done addressing. You also continue to ignore that I said NOTHING about PHP not being usable for "real sites".

I also, still, don't get your point. There are other templating languages for PHP too.

Again, your deployment argument is just as silly as your availability argument. It's trivial to deploy to Azure (sites) or Heroku, or Ironio or gondor, or any Go project, or etc, etc.

>There are millions of hosts to choose from at tiny prices, who can provide support because they know the platform.

Are you even reading what I write? Please show me a real webapp with actual users hosted on el cheapo shared hosting.

> You could walk outside now, and start yelling "I NEED A PHP PROGRAMMER!" and you'd probably find someone pretty quickly.

This is something that I point out as a negative. Yes, you can get a PHP programmer just about anywhere. But being that there are so many, it's harder to find those few truly talented programmers.

My own complaint about this is that if you bring in cheap PHP programmers, you end up with cheaply-written PHP. And the result is inevitably an unmaintainable mess. If you want well-written, maintainable code, you have to be willing to hire talented and experienced programmers. And in doing so, you give up that so vaunted "advantage" of PHP's mindshare.

Moreover, it seems to me that the truly talented programmers that would produce good software have a tendency to distance themselves from PHP.

So it seems to me: Choose PHP for cheap, quick projects on a budget for which quality is irrelevant; or choose a "harder" language for solid applications that will stand the test of customer interaction.

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