Why Hacker News Thinks PHP Won Something
gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
The fact that this post could raise a coherent counterpoint to the issue is evidence enough of that.
I thought his criticism was valid though. (Not that he cares one bit! ;) ... Both those articles started off assuming that PHP 'won' something, and then tried to explain why by pointing out good things about PHP and its community. Neither of them started by laying down the contest rules, examining all the contenders, and picking a winner... They started with a winner and worked backwards somehow into the aether.
On the other hand, if you just realize headlines are by definition linkbait, you can make the mental substitution of the phrase "became more popular than any other toy language" for the word "won". Suddenly those articles make more sense, even if they become less controversial (or insightful) in the process.
I think what would work better is a pool of links that shows you stuff you might find interesting based on past usage (voting up/down, friending others, etc). Don't show me what's interesting to everybody who reads the site, show me what's interesting to _me_. As Giles has said in the past, I have a need for better filtering mechanisms.
If your purpose is knowledge or worldly depth/breadth, there is probably greater value in doing exactly the opposite. You know best those things which you already like.. so exposure to those ideas you don't already like would provide the greatest bang for the cognitive buck.
If anything, we need less filters. (imo)
Of the 3, HN is the only one that really welcome true contrariness SOMETIMES, but I've still been downmodded for pointing out biases and groupthink here.
And I'm not even an asshole about it.
But if he wants content personalized, Stumbleupon might be a good avenue.
I've been finding exactly the same thing, actually. Usually when I upvote it's because the discussion is interesting, rather than the article.
I don't really have a problem with that though; reddit et al can provide links in topics of immediate interest, but the community still differentiates HN IMO.
Edit: I just created http://jessealdridge.stumbleupon.com/ if anyone is interested in doing this.
I find many more interesting things by just scanning the "new" section. It would be nice if there was some way to have a front page with just the news that I like.
But a system that recommended links from past usage would be interesting (and a fun challenge to do well)
it's not contemptuous, although it may seem contemptible. I just did the math, knew the tactic would become infallible over time, and used it when signs indicated it would succeed.
of course this implicitly challenges your statement that the site's the same as it ever was. I actually don't have any proof to back that up. I think it would actually be reallllllllllllllllly hard to quantify. I could say there's a frog in boiling water effect there, but then there's the possibility that HN aka News.YC simply had a bad day yesterday, and if I had chosen another day for my random return, I could have come away with the impression it was improving.
Ah, the classic claim that there was never any doubt of success. Always works best after the fact.
HN is very predictable, in some ways. It's not predictable with 100% accuracy like digg or reddit.
But, still, HN people have a group identity to a large degree. And if you attack that group identity, the group is interested in the attack and they are ready to circle the wagons.
Both interest and wagon-circling in this context mean upvoting so other people see it.
Hasn't just about everything Giles' written about HN come up on the front page?
How great the just perceptible change can be made to become by making the rate of change extremely slow is a matter that still remains for investigation. It is worthy of note that it has been found possible in 5.25 hours to crush a frog's foot, without a sign that the pressure was felt, by screwing down a button at the rate of 0.03 mm per minute. A similar experiment showed that a live frog can actually be boiled without a movement if the water is heated slowly enough; in one experiment the temperature was raised at the rate of 0.002 Celsius per second, and the frog was found dead at the end of 2.5 hours without having moved.(1) If a frog can be crushed or boiled without any evidence that he has noticed it, it is at least an interesting question of what can be accomplished in this direction with human beings.
(1) The literature on these experiments with frogs includes Heinzmann, Euber die Wirkung sehr allmaliger Aenderungen thermischer Reize auf die Empfindungsnerven, "Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol." (Pfluger), 1872, vi. 222. Fratscher, Euber continuirliche und langsame Nervenreizung, "Jenaische Zeitschrift," 1875, N. F. ii. 130. Sedgwick, On the Variation of Reflex Excitability in the Frog induced by changes of Temperature, "Stud. Biol. Lab., Johns Hopkins Univ.," 1882, 385.
That Garfield submission on the front page, OTOH...
regarding the whole discussion vs. linkroll thing, I have to say the quality of the discussion is one place where Hacker News still really shines. I have no theory to explain that atm.
pg would prefer that not to be the case, and actually frequently edits headlines to "blunt" them.
Vote for my new version control suggestion :-)
hahaha. dude even after I clicked that I had no idea what you were talking about. however, I had to turn off a Greasemonkey script to even find the comments here. I have it set up to automatically block me from seeing whether my posts are on HN or not. if I see them, I read the comments, and get pissed off. so not I'm not still angry but yeah I did get quite mad at the time, whatever it was about.
What GM script are you using?
The thing thats most wrong with this article is the author understands exactly what the other authors meant. I don't think they were attaching any more meaning to word 'won' than having the most users. Something this author doesn't dispute. Communication was successful, if you need to add extra information about why you think PHP sucks then go ahead. It's not in conflict with those other articles.
I doubt anyone's idea of won is: earns contract programmers more money. Even here though the author contradicts himself in two ways: he says that PHP was more popular because you didn't need headers, and that this meant the "difference between driving a Honda and piloting a yacht". Then he claims that PHP had no language advantages and earns you less money.
There is a lesson in there for language designers - keep making those simple but common tasks easier, every little bit can make huge difference if its multiplied by an economic shift.
Take the case of the small startup without an inspired coder CTO which didn't have time to wait for ruby or python programmers who went shopping for contractors. PHP can get you far and fast (and often badly).
I was interviewed to lead technology in a place like this and they knew I'd try to make them start over and abandon PHP (purist, longview). PHP had provided them capability and in their mind clearly "won" (developers existed and made themselves clearly visible on the market). They wouldn't have been in business at that point if they had held out for something better.
Unless you're on Reddit and the post is titled "Vote up if you think PHP won!!!"
trying to extract lessons from the design of PHP is like trying to win the lottery by wearing a trucker hat because you saw some dude in a trucker hat win the lottery. there's nothing there! you might as well be reading tea leaves. which is what I said in the rant, but you didn't get the point. you might as well be posting a picture of some tea leaves and then having a discussion about that.
yes a good enough conversationalist can extract something meaningful from anything, and that's the real challenge I was after when I wrote the rant, but if your goal is to write something interesting about what you saw on Hacker News, let me tell you, Hacker News does not make it easy for you by talking about PHP.
Obviously people in this community feel that there is something interesting there worth discussing. If you disagree, perhaps that implies that this community isn't a good fit for you.
There are lots of people that disagree in 'challenging ways', but if everyone here saw everything the same way, there would be no discussion at all.
Despite being a technically uninteresting language, it still became incredibly popular. Why?
That's why it's on Hacker News.
I don't know why the author thinks PHP coding is somehow different from every other kind of programming, and that there aren't huge differences between programmers (we're talking orders of magnitude) as far as speed of output and code quality go.
Meanwhile, that army of "commodity" programmers will be out there, energetically growing the market for your services by bringing lots and lots of new PHP-powered sites online. Every blogger who installs Wordpress, and every school and church and magazine and music label that goes online with a basic Drupal site, is a potential future customer.
Of course, just because PHP work pays decently and is easy to find doesn't mean you'll enjoy it. There's a lot of pain involved in working with PHP, particularly other people's PHP. (I ameliorate the pain somewhat by sticking strictly to Drupal, which has higher coding standards and a better defined, more modular structure than the average PHP newbie's code.) But the work is certainly out there.
It's easy to see that an interference from the attribute of one good to the attribute of another is usually not sound. For example, just because bricks are commodities doesn not mean everybody is able to build proper houses.
Also, if we follow his assumptions and logic, any language that would have won the popularity contest, would have been a "looser" by his definition. For nearly everybody would code in the most popular language, therefore reducing prices for programming jobs in that language.
But, of course, this logic is also flawed. For it assumes that supply of programmers increases while demand remains more or less constant, which consequently leads to decreasing prices for programming jobs. However, the popularity of a language may also increase demand for programming jobs. Depending on the relative effects, (average) prices may decrease or increase.
I used to think this until I started freelancing, but it's much easier to get quality jobs if you can meet with the client face-to-face at the start of the gig.
If you program only in the most popular programming language, you have made yourself a commodity.
The author seems to think that one PHP programmer is just as good as the next, but there's a whole litany of skills beyond just writing code in whatever language that make someone desirable to a client or employer, from communication to product design. Programmers are not cogs in a machine that you can replace easily as long as you find one that speaks the right language.
Of course if this Giles character knew anything about economics he would also know that complementary products have complementary demand curves. So, the more PHP applications out there means there's more demand for PHP programmers.
I am also not convinced that PHP just got lucky with the timing and that therefore there are no language design lessons to be learned. Perhaps if you get a noob into programming, they would still have an easier time with PHP than with more modern MVC based frameworks, because it is more straightforward. You still just write SQL directly in the code - it is messy, but easier to grasp than having to work through all sorts of layers of abstraction.
Maybe there IS a language lesson there - although I sure hope PHP is not the final answer...
PHP allows a strong separation between system administrator (who is running Apache) and the "application developers" who are people using FTP to upload their script files to a shared host. The simplicity of the system makes it easy for anyone to get started, hence the popularity.
There is also the bit about taking an existing UI (written in HTML) and being able to insert programming hooks into it at will. The "minimal change" is very small, the biggest step is changing the file extension from html to php.
There are various levels of skill within any programming language. It may take someone with no programming experience a day to write a small database app in PHP. It doesn't mean that I'd be willing to hire that person to code something worthwhile for my company.
You can't simply real world situations into easily digested bites and act like you are saying something profound. In reality, you're just omitting the layers that make the real world situations complicated.
Obviously C# beats the pants of both of these hippy languages so the argument is moot anyway.
Next time, be less of a generalizing dick.
First, admitting that you didn't read the article in a comment on that article is showing your hand before the call and you know for a fact it's a losing hand. In the future, just fold and keep your chips.
Second, it's important to retain your clout in a community like this and actually reading the site regularly is key. If you had been reading this week you would have seen the 2 posts riding the top two related to PHP "winning". In both cases you would have gotten grumpy and written precisely this comment on those articles. If you had, you might have actually had a lot of upvotes. This articles is a response to those posts saying something resembling your point with some meditation on the topic.
Third, and this is the key point, try harder before commenting to ascertain whether or not you agree with the article before admitting to having not read it and then personally attacking someone you don't know. If you absolutely have to attack someone, it is universally bad form to attack someone whom you agree with.
Read ... http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...
and specifically ...
"... When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site. Votes appear to be free, like contribution is with Wikipedia, but in reality you have to register to vote, and you have to be there frequently for your votes to make much difference. So the votes aren't really free - they cost time. If you do the math, it's actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be. ..."
I don't care about algorithms, binary trees or what fuck. I can code a web page in a day and that pays the bills.
It could have been an echo, a print or a put, but it had to be simple for us, not scary as system.console.writeln()
Most of you will never understand, you all come from a C or Lisp background and can make a computer cry for sure. We don't care, we just want to spit HTML in shiny ways and 'echo' is all we need.
Anyone can write but not everyone can (or rightly wants to) Write.
This is nothing new. Pulp outsells literature and I'm sure people cry rivers over it. Does that mean pulp "wins"? By one measure, obviously. But they still won't teach it in school and noone will remember it when it's gone.
Indeed, imagine a world in which English classes started with bawdy, violence filled plays written to entertain a mostly drunken and illiterate rabble. Then for the second unit, you could maybe read a serializations designed to sell magazines, whose author was paid by the word. Perhaps by the end of the year, you'd be ready for pop-lit writers who had to retcon their stories due to marketing considerations.
Ugh, what a pitiful and impoverished English curriculum it would be if transient crowd-pleasing drek like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Doyle were studied as literature.
Shakespeare's understanding (and manipulation) of the human condition is self-aware, with a wink and a nod.
Pulp, on the other hand, is typified by "Pregnant by the Millionaire." (A real book.) The author may have a certain level of self-loathing (doubt it), but these books are straight for all it's worth.
'Pulp' refers to popularity, not literary merit.
Let me find another example which can't be confused with Shakespeare. The Beatles wrote music to be enjoyed by the masses, popular music if you will in much the same way Vanilla Ice did. I do assign one more value over the other simply for longevity of the it's presence in and impact on western culture. I will let you guess which one. There's a good reason I can assume which you will guess.
I hardly fault pulp (I tried) for aiming at culture. I am simply rating its aim and potency. What is PHP influencing? How are PHP developers going to advance programming? In 50 years will we be using it? Will there be 30 newer programming langauages that picked up the choice bits from PHP?
It probably doesn't matter and definitely not for programmers today but in conversations evaluating the success or failure of languages these topics will be prime.
Also, this website needs more lifestyle, social and political topics.
Vote this up if you want to rename it Designer News.