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Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

> "PHP's main advantage is ..."

I wrote out a list of PHP's main advantages a while ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347956), but I don't think there's just one.

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Those are what its advantages were. Now its main advantages seem to be: (1) Omnipresence and (2) Easy to migrate from a static site (I missed that one in my prior comment, and it's an important one - thanks!). All the others are relative to the environment of its birth, rather than today's environment.

Today we have choices other than Perl, C, and PHP - and many of those choices are free and Free and have great docs and large healthy communities and have languages and libraries with a better design. When people get good enough at programming to understand why global variables are bad, they should generally not be choosing PHP for new projects unless they need one of the above two features.

Indeed, fair point. But I think PHP's omnipresence is no longer the great advantage it once was. Its so easy to learn Ruby and deploy to heroku.

One hosting site that's backed by another hosting company that has a history of huge, extended outages does not make ruby or rails "omnipresent"

I seriously question anyone who uses heroku for production anything.

Right, but you're not using shared hosting for production either.

Plenty of php based web sites (not web apps, sites) use shared hosting

I have sites hosting on shared hosting providers that have better uptime then Heroku.

They aren't big sites. Hell, they are little sites, with barely a trickle of traffic. But that traffic results in real, paying customers.

I don't know where this idea of heroku having poor uptime is from. Heroku has excellent uptime - even during the ec2 outage most sites had very little actual downtime.

> I don't know where this idea of heroku having poor uptime is from.

Heroku's uptime.

Looks pretty good from here: https://status.heroku.com/past

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