Hacker News Reader

Comment by unexaminedlife | Hacker News Reader

I've done plenty of PHP programming (including modern) in the past. I'm excited about recent developments.

Not sure about the productivity claim. I once wrote from scratch (frameworks excluded) backend and frontend (version 1) of a multi-tenant, cloud-based video-sharing platform with PHP as the backend (aws cloud) in a matter of weeks.

I once wrote, from scratch (frameworks excluded), an entire backend (and front-end) of version 1 of a hybrid mobile app (backend in PHP) for a medium-size logistics company in a matter of less than 2 months.

I have other examples, but life is too short trying to convince "haters" that they might not be 100% correct.

I was the only developer on both of those projects. Your mileage may vary :)

View on HN

Can you attribute that specifically to PHP making that possible? Why couldn't an equivalently capable peer use Python to do the same?

So the claim was that PHP "gotchas" are a drain on productivity. I'm not trying to compare with other languages, but I think my anecdata shows that, at least in my case, when you understand the tools PHP can be a very productive one.

Certainly gotchas are a drain on productivity. But I don't think this applies more to PHP than any other language I've used. The fact is, if you are less familiar with the language then you won't be as productive.

I personally spend a lot of time hopping among technologies and I always lean heavily on documentation. PHP has pretty good documentation, and this helps a lot in my opinion. I would guess that a lot of developers don't read the docs and just assume that something in a less-familiar language will work exactly like they expect it to, and then call this a "gotcha" when it doesn't.

Why is php development quicker?

Because of spaces vs tabs additional overhead. Packages vs built-in libruaries. RAD frameworks like laravel vs Django.

PHP has excellent development experience. After updating your code, you can just reload the page. That's it. It's seamless. This is something that I sorely miss now that I'm a .NET developer.

Also, the PHP ecosystem is friendly to beginners. Compare these authentication docs for a PHP project vs a .NET project:

Laravel (PHP): https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/authentication ASP.NET Core (.NET): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authen...

> After updating your code, you can just reload the page. That's it. It's seamless.

This is available with many other languages as well, i.e. https://github.com/cosmtrek/air

It may require an external tool, but the deployment experience is a lot simpler for Go than PHP.

I think in all the critical pain points all relatively popular languages used for web development have a well thought out story. I think there's nothing about the "pipeline" that's a huge bottleneck for a well-seasoned developer anymore. At least there shouldn't be. It's more about (a) getting things spec'd out well, and (b) execution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com