Hacker News Reader

Comment by huskyr | Hacker News Reader

> PHP is the only language that is welcome to complete novice > programmers. All other languages require a lot of setting up.

One thing that is often overlooked with PHP is the fact that the deployment process if extremely easy, even for novice programmers. Simply use FTP/SFTP/SCP/whatever to copy over your files to a server, reload your browser, done. It's completely optimised for the scenario where you simply want to create a webpage.

Compare that to something like Python, which is very 'novice-friendly' as well, but needs quite some steps before you have a working website deployed on a server.

View on HN

Really depend on your hosting provider. I use gandi, and deployment is as hard "git push gandi master && ssh login@host 'deploy default.git master'". If you administrate the box yourself, I haven't found setting up, say, Apache with Python particularly hard, assuming you have enough sysadmin knowledge in the first place.

> and deployment is as hard "git push gandi master && ssh login@host 'deploy default.git master'"

That really isn't on the same level as "ftp index.php to shared webhosting provider" for most people and that's exactly the point the parent comment is trying to make.

Well, you can do that too. However, how does "ftp index.php" work once you use dependency management?

"dependency management" doesn't really come into play with the scenario we are talking about which is:

"It's completely optimised for the scenario where you simply want to create a webpage." [for a novice programmer]

I recommend you read over the parent comment again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709025

I'll gladly grant you that point: it is easier to deploy a PHP application which solely relies on the standard library. Outside of that, PHP isn't easier than more well thought-out solutions.

And for many thats enough and is one of the major reasons PHP is popular.

You could just ftp the files directly from a particular branch, and keep the dependency management entirely off the production server.

You probably shouldn't do it that way, but that's one way it could be done.

You lost the novice at dependency management

Deploying by hand is an extremely bad habit that novice developers should be steered away from at all costs. If they can learn how to use version control, they should have no trouble at all picking up an appropriate deployment tool for their chosen language (even if that language is PHP).

>One thing that is often overlooked with PHP is the fact that the deployment process if extremely easy..

This should only matter if you are making something trivial, like making a contact form for an otherwise static site..

No this matters for even more complex things like CMS or web applications or forums.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com