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Comment by netmute | Hacker News Reader

Simply not true.

Have you ever tried to install and setup PHP on a fresh server? It's almost as painful as writing code in PHP.

The article is talking about managed hosting, were that might still be true (Admins are incredibly conservative and stubborn individuals).

But for everything else? PHP doesn't work 'out of the box'. It's due to the work of a poor admin somewhere that you can just upload your crap and it runs.

In contrast, I can install and setup a complete Ruby server in about 15 minutes.

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apt-get install apache apt-get install mod-php5 apt-get install php5-pdo-mysql

whatever the packages are - there's about 4-5 core packages (yum/apt/whatever) or other packages like xampp that set up a default environment in about 5 minutes on most modern systems.

There's certainly a lot of configuration that can be done, but getting a LAMP system set up to allow PHP/MySQL to work is trivial these days compared to 2000.

Cue the puppet and chef supporters who would suggest scripted recipes for everything anyway. :)

Really?

apt-get install nginx php5 php5-fpm php-pear php5-common php5-mcrypt php5-cli php5-gd

Takes about 2 minutes.

If you want to pretend that is all that is involved, then your argument suggests web development with haskell is just as easy to setup as with PHP:

    $ pkg_add snap

Well, that was easy.

It could not be any easier to get a LAMP stack up and running on a fresh server.

$ apt-get install lamp-server

I think you may need the caret at the end if you are using apt-get rather than tasksel directly:

$ apt-get install lamp-server^

And since most people in this world use managed hosting for their website projects thats the right thing to compare with.

Also you have MAMP which is as easy as it comes for setting up a PHP/mysql environment on your computer.

But the strength of PHP goes far beyond this simple point.

For developers it's very very simple to get started. The difference between writing a hello world app and a crm app isn't that big. Weaving HTML and PHP together with JavaScript, CSS, JS easy to learn with PHP.

I wouldn't even know where to start in Ruby or Python. Just too many dependencies before you can even get started.

So yes it's by any metrics it matter true.

Take it from someone who had to teach himself how to do it and have tried to get started with several languages.

Is it really that difficult? The last time I had to install LAMP stack was on Ubuntu and it was something like:

$ sudo tasksel install lamp-server

He could be implying shared hosting is the most common method of hosting. In these cases, they all tend to come pre-configured with a LAMP environment. No setup necessary for CLI scripts.

From scratch, everything is easy to install. I wouldn't say Ruby is any easier to install and setup than PHP. You're talking about installing something like Phusion Passenger on top of Apache. A LAMP stack takes as long as it takes to run `apt-get` or `yum install`. By no means is it 15 minutes; I'd say 5 to 10 with minor Apache configuration and a VirtualHost entry.

>He could be implying shared hosting is the most common method of hosting.

He's not only implying it, he states it explicitly. No need to guess, the article is there.

>Simply not true. Have you ever tried to install and setup PHP on a fresh server? It's almost as painful as writing code in PHP.

Which is so totally beside the point he makes, that I'm pretty sure you didn't RTFA.

The "market" he describes is NOT installing PHP from fresh on servers.

PHP "out of the box" is very easy, sudo apt-get install php5 mysql-server apache2.

apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5, edit create/edit your vhost file, upload PHP files to wherever you pointed the vhost file, reload apache?

But that work is reused.

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