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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

The core of fowler's article is, "what is the alternative to ORMs?" - and the answer is there isn't much other than rolling your own.

This is not at all analogous to PHP where there is an abundance of alternatives to it's mediocre design. PHP isn't hated because of its concept - a "web-based scripting language". It's hated because it's done very poorly. Just like a lot of bad ORMs Fowler refers to.

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Funny you should mention PHP. I suspect that a lot of the ORM hate comes from people forced to develop PHP and witnessing the epidemic of NIH syndrome among its web frameworks, every single one of which seems to come with its own half-assed ORM.

There is nothing wrong with PHP - it runs multi-billion dollar companies and it is the most ubiquitous language on the web for a reason.

Because it has near-zero barrier to entry. That doesn't speak highly of PHP as a language, just on how its deployment strategy is designed.

I don't think Facebook or Yahoo chose PHP because it was easy to write.

I think that is exactly why Mark Zuckerburg chose PHP when working on TheFaceBook back in 2003 and 2004. It was easy to write and deploy.

you are incorrect.

Yahoo's rationale for choosing PHP:

"The short development cycles needed to stay ahead of the competition demand a web-centric scripting language that is easy to maintain and update."

http://public.yahoo.com/bfrance/radwin/talks/yahoo-phpcon200...

They didn't choose Python, or Ruby, or Java, because none of those languages are as expressive or shut-up-and-get-out-of-my-way as PHP. Just because a high schooler can write PHP doesn't mean it's a toy not also meant for world class engineers.

PHP is more expressive than python, ruby, or java. I see.

It's success is largely due to it having the correct execution model. The request based execution environment makes iterative development quick and easy.

However there are plenty of bad ideas in the language itself.

there's a lot wrong with PHP, here's a good place to start: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Just because PHP doesn't 100% doom you to failure, doesn't mean there is "nothing wrong with it".

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