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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

> I promise you the Facebook PHP engineers who worked on HHVM and Hack know best practices and PHP really well.

I said "the average person working on PHP applications", that clearly does not fit the description of HHVM engineers at Facebook, people that certainly know what they're doing.

If PHP users are so great, let's take a quick look at what kind of discussions are they having in 2020:

"Why you should use asynchronous PHP", posted on February 2020: https://www.zend.com/blog/why-you-should-use-asynchronous-ph...

Seriously? Communities for other languages already moved past this debate long ago. I do not have time to debate stubborn people trapped in 2004.

> PHP is a language. One that is as performant as it's peers, has a large presence on the internet, and is battle-tested.

PHP is not as performant as Java, C#, Go, Rust and many others. And it's battle tested in battles not worth having.

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You're speaking past me.

Again, you listed a ton of compiled languages compared to an interpreted language. Want to throw X86 Assembler in there too? Should we write all software in Intel syntax x86 Assembler? It's faster than Rust - just manage the registers yourself!

Fact is, interpreted languages have THEIR advantages in lots of areas.

Nice random zend link. I literally took 100ms and found questions on Stack Overflow about writing async PHP code from 2013.

Python LITERALLY just added the async/await keywords and co-routines in 3.5 in 2015 (AFTER PHP did). I can also link to "Why you should use Async in Python articles" from 2020 and 2019. Hell, google that phrase and see what comes up. Look at the talk tracks at PyCon last year.

I can also link to an article on how to do asynchronous programming in C# on MICROSOFT.COM from May 20, 2020 (you know, a pretty authoritative community place for .net) But it's a stupid point. There are tutorials to learn how to do things in every language written every day.

I get it, you're a language snob. This conversation feels like "Man, fuck people who speak German. They don't know how to build cars the way people who speak Japanese do."

Languages are languages. You can write shitty things in any language and good things in any language.

The facts are, nearly all of the big sites on the Internet have PHP somewhere, some PHP is bad and some is good, and there is a wide variance of skill level among PHP developers.

Replace that previous paragraph with any language and the answer is the same.

ReactPHP and similar solutions have existed for a while, but after many years of existence, how many people are using it? Not many.

Was async I/O promoted to a core language feature? It hasn't. You can do it, but you have to install a 3rd party dependency, and you will have to still interoperate with code that does not use async I/O. Contrast that to the reality in other languages.

Then, the rest of your arguments are not new, and are the usual last-resort losing arguments:

- "write everything in assembler if you care about performance": zero/low cost abstraction are different than no abstractions at all. Different in terms of productivity, maintainability, portability, etc. And you know this, I wonder why you mention it.

- "everything is relative and the choice of language doesn't really matter because they're all the same": they are not the same and the choice does matter. Languages are the product of different design and implementation processes, as well as different levels of investment, and results can differ a lot.

- Ad-hominem: I don't care. To me, your ad-hominem is the same as admitting your argument is inferior.

Anyways, PHP jumped the shark long ago and today it's just another legacy code language.

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