Comment by andrewdalpino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewdalpino | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is a good convo to have

Two things you mentioned that are incorrect though

The first is the presumption that you need a GPU to do machine learning - the reality is that the average business doesn't need nor has the data to benefit from such large models

The second is that PHP is slow - but when you do comparisons with Python, PHP is actually faster

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

The reason why Python, for example, is faster in some machine learning applications is because it's probably getting help from a library such as numPY or Tensorflow

Although these tools are missing currently in the PHP ecosystem, I'm confident that we'll have them eventually

For example, here is an attempt to bring numPY-like functionality as a PHP extension

https://github.com/phpsci/phpsci-ext/tree/1.0-dev

We've also had some progress being made accessing Tensorflow from PHP using an FFI (foreign function interface)

https://github.com/dstogov/php-tensorflow

So this is where the convo should begin in my opinion

If you're going to do it at all, I agree, integration with GPU enabled libraries is a must. Even so, I could use DLLImport in VBA, and get access to Tensorflow from an Excel macro. I would say the same thing: you can get a dog to walk on two legs, but that's not what it was meant to do. 'Can' and 'should' are world's apart.

What languages do you program in?

I've used PHP for a while now. PHP is a language that favors practicality. It's a language that is depended on throughout the world and doesn't (purposely) change as fast to accommodate new trends

Having that said

- The value of machine learning has become very clear over the past decade or so

- 80% of websites on the web are powered by PHP

https://haydenjames.io/80-percent-web-powered-by-php/

I undoubtedly anticipate a steady rise in effort from the PHP community directed at practical applications of ML - Rubix ML being one of the first libraries to make these tools accessible to the PHP engineer

I write in all kinds of languages.

Just because Wordpress generates it, doesn't make it a best practice. Do you think Wordpress websites are the best? It's definitely not the most popular language:

https://github.com/emmanuel-keller/github-language-statistic...

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/20/language-rankings-1-1...

PHP is falling because it has major issues. It has poor idioms and is slow. It is trending down, not up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com