Lisphp: A Lisp Dialect Written in PHP
github.com
github.com
The only people I know that care for PHP enough to be into this kind of thing are people who have never written anything but PHP, and that's a small number of people...and the number of those competent enough to write a LISP in PHP is precisely nil. Only my experiences, sure, but I'm sure I'm not that off the mark.
There are many people competent enough to write a lisp in PHP, but most are working for companies that still work with PHP (of which there are many, including some pretty high-profile companies)
I can imagine many handy reasons to have a lisp interpreter in PHP.
Also, for your information, I've written code in many languages. I've written thousands of lines in lisp. Typically, if I'm aggravated at a project, it's because of the project itself, and not the language. It's odd to me when people find the language to be so significant for a language that is fairly mature.
Edit: I totally lied, there was an occasion where I had that thought. A friend of a friend wanted the year in her otherwise static site's copyright notice to auto-update. So I emailed her a snippet to paste and told her to change the file extension.
Here are some books that will introduce you to Laravel (http://laravel.com/), it's nothing like the PHP of <2010. https://leanpub.com/codebright https://leanpub.com/laravel https://leanpub.com/implementinglaravel https://leanpub.com/laravel-testing-decoded
But you speak of competing and avoiding pain - my point is why not just use something that was decent from the get-go? I still don't get it.
Ruby/Clojure/Python/Javascript/Scala guys will wax lyrical about why they're awesome - ever seen Rich Hickey talk? That man has an ideology and a fiery passion for it. I never see anything remotely like this come out of the PHP world, just vague pseudo-defensive statements.
Why wouldn't people use it, and create new things in it?
Sorry you had horrible experiences with it, but seriously, get off your high horse.
I'm not on a high horse, I just don't get it! Fine, sometimes we have to work with things we don't like. I get that - am I going to do anything beyond what's necessary and start writing libraries for it? Not on your nelly...
I can't be that wrong because for all PHP's ubiquity, it still doesn't have a ubiquitous package manager (that works) for sharing these creations.
That's what you don't seem to be getting... people work with it, even people who work with other languages, and find that it happens to fit into a particular niche for them. They write libraries for it and expand it because they find the language useful and expect it to continue to be useful for the forseeable future. And it doesn't suck as badly as it used to.
"still doesn't have a ubiquitous package manager"? http://getcomposer.org
What else have I failed to realise? I'm entirely willing to believe that I'm wrong, I have a vested interest in learning, not being right - I almost want to be proven that I'm wrong about PHP.
I don't know how much exposure has to count for "experience" since i'm still a student but i've written code in perl, python, c++, java and php and so far I find things to like and things I can't stand about each of them.
So far I've got necessity, and maybe that's the whole story, maybe not.
I'd really like somebody to say "because I like to" - that's the conversation I really want to have. I would love to know why someone would say that, and not because I'm a troll, but because I do not like PHP at all and I have genuinely have no way of answering that question on my own.
I saw some really bad PHP written by other people. But that shows how easy it is to write. Even people who are terrible at programming can figure it out, sort of.
You have to remember that no other language has really been able to beat PHP in terms of ease of use and setup. Every shared host in the world has PHP installed. There's no server to start, no scripts to run, you just upload your files to the server and they work. Django/Rails and all of those other languages don't just run on most shared hosts. PHP is easy and that's part of its appeal and the reason why it won't be dying any time soon.
Every language has quirks, not just PHP. If you want to talk languages that were too, once horrible and in some ways still are, look no further than Javascript. That didn't stop it becoming the most widely used scripting language on the web.
Until such time the Rails/DJango/Flask/Sinatra/Node/etc folks come up with a compelling shared hosting story for the likes of 1&1, Fasthosts, GoDaddy etc then PHP will continue to be hugely popular. Like it or not PHP has virtually no friction, technically or cost-wise, when building and deploying your first apps. Add to that we now have some nice dev tools such as PHP Storm and VS.PHP which grease the wheels of PHP somewhat more.
Yes I know there's the Herokus of the world out there, but your average mort agency developer has never heard of these things, or possibly may not have the skills.
Trust me, I work for a webhoster, and despite asking myself the same questions, I do understand firsthand why PHP is hugely popular, despite my own misgivings about the language.
Should I feel good or bad?
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