Happily married to PHP, should I get a divorce? | Hacker News Reader

Happily married to PHP, should I get a divorce?

6 pointsyannis7 comments

I have been doing web development work with PHP now for over 5 years and for the last year or so using CodeIgniter (moving to Kohana on the next Project). I have a good background in Computer languages and have programmed average size developments on desktops using most of them. With all the hype with functional languages and developments such as Ruby on Rails, I have been thinking to try something different. I mostly do development work for web applications (mostly my own). One Project that is on the cards now involves a lot of text-analysis. I have been thinking Django and Python for this one. However, I ran some test code for this with PHP and other than the fact that PHP looks less sexy, I can do almost everything I want with PHP.

Can anyone make any suggestions?

>Happily married to PHP, should I get a divorce?

Replace PHP with your real wife's name and the silliness of the question is apparent.

Either you are happy and shouldn't be worrying about the 1500 other development areas that exist, or you aren't really happy.

Figure that out, and you have your answer. More importantly though you should keep in mind that all of these relationships are perfectly open. There's no reason to stop learning.

'Replace PHP with your real wife's name and the silliness of the question is apparent'. You probably right. Maybe a fling on the side though, might not be such a bad idea :). Learning and exploring for me is a lifelong passion, however, I try to separate what I should use professionally with what I explore.

There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being one-dimensional in your choice of language either.

The key is to do what makes you feel happy, and not worry about what everyone else is doing, within reason.

I'm of two minds on this... I've been doing pretty much what you are doing, about since PHP came out, maybe a bit shorter, but not by much.

I have a love/hate relationship with the platform, I still get bitten every now and then by obscure language 'features' (others would call them bugs).

PHP is a bit of a dog in many ways (including said bugs), but it's a dog that I know and apart from the occasional scratch it's been pretty good to me. It kept me alive for about a decade so I really have no reason to complain.

But still, the grass on the other side of the street is looking greener and greener. Now, I never married my dog, but I'm loyal to it, I wonder though if I shouldn't get one of those other puppies, they're fresh, young and seem to have plenty of potential to grow in to big sturdy and dependable dogs as well.

Mind you, I'm not going to go into the back 50 tomorrow to shoot PHP but django or something like that is really interesting.

I empathise with the love/hate relationship w/ php. It is the most deployment friendly option out there (seriously). But as a programming language it can sometimes feel like like you are attempting to knit chainmail from steel wool; if you squint it looks sort of right, but you know it's not as sturdy as the real thing.

My general rule of thumb is that if you find yourself using more than a few classes that aren't directly producing output, you should reconsider your application and move the heavy lifting into some piece of middleware that the php talks to.

my biggest issue is the number of projects that I have that are already running PHP and the decade that I invested in to getting to know the environment. That's going to be hard to let go...

Even java starts to look pretty good compared to PHP these days and I can hardly believe that I'm writing this. Not so long ago java was spelled s-l-o-w now it's only drawback seems to be that it takes about 4 times as many lines to do the same job. But at least the end result is somewhat maintainable, which is always a difficult thing to achieve with PHP. It's possible, but it will cost you a lot of extra time.

it depends. do you want to push for new skills or are you happy doing what you're doing?

if you want to learn some new stuff and you have the time to devote to the learning process, why not? your timetables will be inflated for whatever you're working on and you'll need to commit fully. but you'll definitely learn new stuff.

if you're happy with what you're doing and are doing well and aren't really interested in learning something new, then why would you?

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