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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

PHP

For all the hate PHP gets, a massive positive of it is entire classes of development friction that just doesn’t exist for it.

COMPILE: Slow compile times, nope - it’s interrupted & you can run the code instantly.

DEVELOPMENT: Confusing and complex development tooling or middleware, nope - just SFTP a single file to your webroot.

So the language / environment you pick to develop in can has massive impact on productivity.

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100% THIS! There is a reason so many products and platforms - like WordPress, which powers so many blogs on the internet - were built leveraging PHP: productivity/getting stuff done! I would add that i'm not only implying that conventional developers gain productivity...but that also that PHP empowered - yes empowered - folks who may not be "real" developers, and gave them a tool/platform to participate on the production (not only consumer) side of the greater web.

There’s also a reason a ton of those applications built on php are terrible to use and get crushed under their own weight.

I do not disagree. In fact, going outside the context of tech, sometimes democratizing inventions for the lay people is great in one area, and terrible in other perspectives. One example could be the invention of the automobile which - at least in the U.S. - empowered so many people (and commerce), but it also enabled folks to do very foolish things...to the detriment of so many, many auto-related deaths every year. So, back to technology...yes, i like me some PHP, but it is not lost on me that in the hands of the less qualified (or maybe folks who know, but simply do not care), there could be significant (and widespread) downsides. ;-)

I always thought the reason was that nearly every webhosting offers it, even though it has serious warts.

Oh yeah, i agree that making PHP or other platforms more widely available helps them get more adopted. But i would have to guess that web hosting providers either were responding to customers requests to run PHP (because said customers felt they could do more), or these providers believed that php was good enough to offer to their customers because it empowered their customers but was not too much of headache to support. I say "not too much" because as noted, php has its warts. But even still if i put my business hat on, i would guess that a business would not purposefully make a platform available that is so bad which would create more work - hence tech support - that it would lessen or do away with any profit margin. In other words, if php were really that bad, web host companies - especially the low cost ones - would definitely not provide such a service because the constant tech support work would kill their profit margins...Full disclosure: i have never been a web host provider company (other than, small amounts of work in setting up web environments for my consulting clients)...so only someone in that industry could confirm/deny my theory.

As a former small-time webhoster, I ran PHP because it was the easiest to run, but that doesn't mean it was the best app platform or the easiest to develop with. Making Ruby or Python or Java hosting was out of reach back then (without Docker and other niceties of today).

I still cant get over its syntax.

Otherwise I agree with all your point. It basically kept things simple while every other web development language increase their complexity by 10 to 100x.

Do you dislike C syntax?

Because PHP is basically C with dollar sign $variables.

>Do you dislike C syntax?

Kinds of, yes. And the dollar sign is especially programatic for me as I read lots of financial reports and statements. Part of the reason I dont like Perl as well.

Isn't it the same for Python?

In the sense that subsequent requests will see the changed code, yes (unless byte code cache is involved).

OP is likely referring to the mod_php convention of directly executing PHP scripts by filename/URL while Python/WSGI needs a single entry point. Your directory structure becomes your routing logic.

I use Python, but miss being able to just a .php file in a dir and have it work.

Now to make some small site, I instead end up setting up some WSGI server and doing nginx config to get it visible, upstart config to make it start at boot, and then invariably forget how it’s set up after a few months pass.

Deploying changes to a server with python tends to be more involved than just plonking a file via ftp. Even best-case, you usually have to restart a process or something (gunicorn).

nope

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