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Comment by erangalp | Hacker News Reader

No offense to the writer, but it seems to me he doesn't really understand web development. In 99.9% of web applications, the bottleneck for scaling is the database and not the language. Web application processes are generally not CPU intensive and are short lived, something PHP handles very nicely.

On the other hand, PHP has a huge list of existing resources, libraries and excellent documentation and community.

Look over at the language used by the largest sites on the Internet, and compare the number that use PHP to the number that use Go. Not saying Go can't handle those applications, but obviously PHP was used in scale effectively on many occasions, while Go hasn't proved anything yet.

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It powers YouTube, among other things: http://code.google.com/p/vitess/

Go documentation is very good, the standard library is extensive, and it has a very active community, but it does lack certain libraries that web developers might find attractive, e.g. a comprehensive ORM.

Insinuating PHP is better because it's deployed in more places is silly.

Stop reading between the lines, I didn't say PHP was better as a language. What I was saying was that trying to convert PHP developers into Go programmers with those kind of arguments shows a basic lack of understanding of how web applications work, or what is the real strength of PHP.

Most web developers who read Hacker News don't host their stuff with a hosting provider that doesn't even provide shell. With Go you just need to be able to execute a binary.

You sounded a lot like Go hasn't proved it's viable for "web scale." It has. Is it as widely deployed? Of course not, it's new.

I'm not sure what strength of PHP you're referring to--I'm assuming the ubiquity with shared hosting providers--but it's not even that great of a language to interface with databases, which was your example before.

Not arguing for Go particularly, just arguing against PHP. Its ubiquity is basically all it has going for it, but yes, that's a big deal.

Again, you assumed wrong. Makes me wonder what your actual experience with PHP is. The strength of PHP is its focus on the web environment through features and functions that make it simpler to develop in that environment, that have be implemented in code on most other languages. In addition, the huge amount of available mature libraries for a variety of purposes and the large community that supports it, is something I really find hard to believe Go can compete with. Saving development time with mature code is much more important than learning a language that doesn't provide much tangible benefits for the web environment.

I've used PHP for 15 years. You keep making these "I-know-better-because-I-use-PHP" statements, but ironically you probably have never even touched Go. Give it a try. Don't be the guy who hates anything that's new.

("Poor library support" is a terrible argument for PHP vs. Python, Ruby, or even functional languages with respect to web development too.)

You're the one who's doing the hating my friend... you keep finding hidden messages in what I write and generally piling up on PHP without good reason. I never said anything bad about Go, or bad library support in other languages, just not agreeing with the article on comparing PHP to it where PHP is (in my humble opinion) a very strong option already.

I pile up on PHP because it's a shitty language, and basically the only argument for using it nowadays is that it's relatively ubiquitous among budget shared hosting providers. I don't think I ever tried to hide that I hate it.

Now you're twisting your own words.

> You sounded a lot like Go hasn't proved it's viable for "web scale." It has. Is it as widely deployed? Of course not, it's new.

This depends on what is your definition of "widely deployed":

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go

I meant as widely deployed as PHP. I'm not sure that that is a measure of anything at all though, except that itself. It's certainly not an indicator of any kind of code or API quality.

I think you're right about PHP for most web apps.

A type of web app for which Go shines is ones that have data already prepared when the user arrives. Database retrieval and update can be handled by processes that aren't dependent on the user. This can make the app super fast; e.g. langalot.com.

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