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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

No they aren't easier to understand, not by a long shot.

Imagine you're some mom who's made a static website for some group you're a member of. You made 20-30 static pages with Frontpage or something like it.

It's a much MUCH smaller step to rename a file .php and add

    <?date('Y-m-d')?>

Than it is to wrap your head around what that node JS or python is doing.

It's exactly that integration that makes PHP win. If someone would make a similar integration for a better language (and made it fit the other niches that PHP fits that nothing else does) they'd stand a great chance of changing the world.

The problem is, no one gets it. Just like you you're fundamentally missing what people like about PHP. It's not the language that they like. It's that it's HTML+server scripting. No setup needed, no external files needed, no libraries to learn, no security issues at least at the start. It just works, in small increments above the level of static HTML.

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So you walk into a culinary studio and they're having this intense class on how to properly prepare escargot.

And you stare at them ... and tell them they should just make a peanut-butter sandwich. They stare at you blankly. Then they tell you to go #$%$#^ yourself.

Is the peanut-butter sandwich easier to make? Yes. Does it taste better? Yes. Can you use it to feed the masses? Yes.

But sir, you forget. It isn't gourmet!

Great analogy. I never got the arguments telling you it's so simple to change little things. When is this ever useful except for when you just get started? It only takes a couple of hours until you leave the zone where small modifications are handy and you need to structure your code, mostly using some MV*-approach.

Adding: <?date('Y-m-d')?>

Would whiff...

Either short tags would be disabled and cause an error. Or nothing would happen.

<?php echo date('Y-m-d')?> -- Would be most preferable.

<?=date('Y-m-d')?> -- Won't work on half of webservers.

PHP is simple but most PHP servers are terrible. Part of my job is to ensure the smooth installation of proprietary software on around 1000 servers a year. This is the painful part of PHP development. If the client is paying less than $5/mo for hosting then I often run into problems with misconfigured servers, common features being disabled.. hell.. shit not working! Why isn't it working? I don't know. There are no errors. There is nothing logged... yet for some reason the session only lasts 7 seconds before disappearing.. yay!

I love PHP because it is simple and just works... I really dislike 80% of shared hosting providers who cause all sorts of problems with what should be a simple cross platform application.

Yeah, OK, I'll bite...

"<?=date('Y-m-d')?> -- Won't work on half of webservers."

You're referring to shorttags, and how evil they are. Firstly, PHP 5.4 enshrines this echo shortcut usage, and they'll always be on from now on. <?=$something;?> will always work from 5.4 on.

Secondly, "half"? Where the hell are these mythical 50% of web servers that actively disable short tags? I've been working with PHP since 1996, have worked on hundreds of projects on dozens of hosts - shared and dedicated - over those years, and have come across this once, on a server managed by someone who compiled everything by hand (not just PHP, but everything) and felt turning short tags off was "optimal" because he'd read it somewhere. He wasn't a PHP dev, just had read 'short tags are bad'.

I don't doubt that some admins and hosts do turn off short tags. It is no where close to 50% of servers out in the wild though. 5% perhaps? Even that, in my view, would be a huge stretch.

Surely you realize that PHP is alone in having vast swaths of its common functionalitity disabled by hosts because of massive security problems arising in actual use?

This means PHP being crippled on many servers is PHP’s own fault.

Not necessarily. Popularity makes something more likely to be exploited. Compare PCs to Macs re: viruses. Also, many security issues were due to conventions in early versions of the language, e.g. register globals.

This is the main strength, and also one of the most obvious flaws, of PHP. What makes it incredibly easy to get started (if you start from static HTML) also makes it easy to trip yourself up later on.

Mixing logic and your text/data will work well for inserting a simple date, but when you start adding more complicated logic it is easy to create a mess which is difficult to read and modify even for you a few months later. That's the reason other frameworks/languages try to give you a more structured (and complex) starting point.

By "win", of course, you mean develop a giant ecosystem of abysmal code that decent developers flee from at any given opportunity, right?

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