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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

PHP is like living in a big city. There are all sorts of things wrong with it, like homelessness, noise pollution, traffic, bad neighborhoods, corrupt politicians, perennially-under-funded public transit; the list goes on.

And yet there's nowhere like it. You could move to some ideal community somewhere, and maybe you visit there now and then because it doesn't have all those other problems, but all the arts and culture, all your favorite restaurants and bars, all the meetups and hangouts and friends and co-workers make your city worth the downsides.

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Continuing your analogy, you see it as an interesting, rich big city, I see it as a shite big city, devoid of interesting culture, lots of poorly run bars and shops, everyone is miserable, it takes ages to get anywhere and it's always raining. Anyone with skill and the ability has abandoned it or is trying to. Python or Ruby however are cooler, slightly smaller cities which have a decent community feel, a good art scene, and are thankfully free of people who live in the big city but are too ignorant or lazy to venture out and get there.

PHP has no fucking culture, the vast majority of 3rd party libraries and classes and snippets are garbage, the vast majority of tutorials are garbage. There are some gleaming institutions like Symfony, and some little places that are trying really hard to make it a better place, but other than that it's a wasteland.

Let's not romanticise dog shit. Yes, the original guy's post was unnecessarily harsh to the development community and people who work hard to make their life in said city, but this city is a clusterfuck in comparison to pretty much anywhere else. It's one redeeming feature being that it's easy to get to and everyone's heard of it.

Yeah, or I can live in some other big city that doesn't have all the shitty parts (or at least less of them). Plus it has all the good stuff. Please stop with this insane dichotomy that I have to choose between the stuff I like and living somewhere without crap. Damnit I want it all, and I'm getting it.

I like your city analogy. I won't stoop to comparing programming languages to actual American cities, but I would counter that "PHP is like living in [a particular] big city."

Here's where I disagree: it's not enough to say "hold your nose around these parts, but it's OK because those few blocks on Main St. are worth it."

There will be flaws in any city, and sometimes due to mismanagement, the flaws will be neglected until blight sets in. Here's where the citizens of the city need to step up: they either flee the city and it continues to decay, or they acknowledge the flaws and address them. Don't just accept the downsides! Fix things. Make improvements. The city only thrives on the investments of its citizens.

I've always said somebody should fork php and polish it, getting rid of all the backward compatibility issues and leaving intact the ease of use and deployment. It is unbelievable to me how nobody sees the huge potential it has in books, blogs, docs, frameworks, etc. Like giving php a second chance, this time done right.

Rasmus himself should give it a try as a side project with a different name. I would follow him from day one.

PHP has a lot of bad parts and, like javascript, is asking for its cup of coffee. The time is ripe.

what holds you back?

Right now I am learning about compilers because if nobody does it, I will.

There are three opportunities right now in front of our eyes we are all missing: a simpler-than-node JS on the server implementation, a rectified php, and a simpler functional language for web development. Bonus point: a universal templating system, like jinja, for all programming languages.

As soon as I finish the course about compilers I'll jump head first to try to solve them all.

In the meantime, if you (or anybody) can point me to modern compiler techniques I'd appreciate it a lot. Been devouring all I can find online but nothing satisfies me.

What have you been reading that hasn't satisfied you? What are you looking for? The basics of parsing haven't changed much. . I'm still learning, too, so I don't know how much I can help.

As I've stated elsewhere on the thread, I prefer the idea of giving another language the ease of use of PHP. It is likely to be less work, especially in the case of Lua (super easy to embed in C). And the compiler is already built for you. :)

I've been reading mostly about lexers and parsers (antlr, yacc, bison, etc) that produce C code and would like to try different approaches like SML but haven't found any literature. Read also about LLVM but C++ is not my type. Haskell and GHC are cool but again C shows its ugly head.

So, I'd like to know if C is the only way or if there are new papers that I don't know of for implementing modern compilers before committing to C. I am just starting so there is a lot to read about different contexts and ideas.

(PS: Java is not an option)

Personally, I've been using Python for prototyping. It has lots of lexing libraries, and from there I just do recursive descent. I figure I'll switch to C for a "real" implementation, partly because what I'm going for in my current project is as much database as programming language.

I don't think you have to use C++ to target LLVM. I think you can output LLVM IR from anything and then just call LLVM from the shell to get an executable.

Are you looking for an alternative to emitting C or to using C as the implementation language of the compiler? I'm not totally sure what you're after, and I'm a compiler noob, but I've been enjoying Appel's Modern Compiler Implementation in ML, which uses SML as the implementation language and emits RISC machine code or assembly (I think, I haven't actually gotten that far). I don't know how suitable it would be as a stepping stone to forking PHP, but it's something.

'Modern Compiler Implementation in ML' any online resource you can share?

It's a book: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ml/

Is mustache.github.com not good enough as a universal templating language?

I don't agree with ever design decision made for the syntax, and I've not used jinja, but it has the universal part handled quite well.

The idea of a roasted PHP is interesting. It's not a no brainer in the way CoffeeScript is though. There's no real choice of language in the client-side, but there is on the server side.

Server side devs can just learn ruby/python/.NET/Scala. Client side devs are probs best switching to JavaScript or something very similar.

Mustache is good enough and seeing it ported to so many languages is cool. But I don't like it, I'll explain why:

I rather see a 'for' statement than imply that an object is 'loopable', or an 'if' instead of guessing if the var is boolean.

I rather see a differentiation between statements and variables like {% statement %} {{ var }} like in jinja.

I don't support the idea of logic-less templates. Everything in the right measure. Not a full-fledged language inside the template but basic loops and conditions I think are ok.

I am always complaining about syntax but I believe if it is too noisy or it makes me think about its meaning, it's too complex and should be simplified.

Maybe Facebook will one day as their upcoming Hiphop VM evolves. Until then, there are better options.

Then again look at what happened with Perl 5 / Perl 6 transition or specifically with the one that didn't happen.

Rasmus himself hates programming and he will put up with PHP in its current form as long as he gets his job done.

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