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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

This seems like madness to me. It's "PHP", so it inherits everything that's bad about that language. But it's also incompatible with PHP, so you don't even get the power of being able to reuse the world's existing PHP code and expertise.

    * PH7 is case-sensitive unlike the standard PHP engine
    * Unlike the zend engine which passes arrays by copy, PH7 pass arrays by reference exactly like PHP5 does with objects (class instances).

I'm not saying the extensions and changes they've made aren't for the better, but they mean this language is effectively not PHP. And, if you're going to use a language that's not PHP, why not use one that's significantly cleaner and simpler?

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It's still great for embedded devices when your main language is PHP.

> when your main language is PHP.

There is your problem.If you cant learn anything else pretty sure you havent the skills to program any "embedded device".

I'd normally agree, but "embedded device" in this situation means "network router" (which are reasonably powerful computers in their own rights), and the application is not mission critical with hard deadlines and strict memory requirements, but just a web interface that is rarely active and can take as long as it wants running in the background. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to set aside some portion of memory for the web interface, give the PH7 process low priority, and hire some PHP web devs that actually know what they're doing to make the interface for them. More sense than letting the firmware developers hack something together in C anyway.

I'd say the better way would be to develop the entire GUI with static HTML + JS files talking to the embedded device through a REST-ish interface.

That way you can get a clean separation of the front and back ends, and the web developers get to work with exactly the tech they are used to.

I'm not a web developer, but that sounds pretty sane to me. However, the important part of their decision, I'm guessing, was not so much the PHP part, but the "get people who actually know about the web to do this for us." Someone has to build the site either way, and I'm guessing the embedded engineers they had working on it didn't really know how to go about that.

EDIT: Another possibility is that they already had PHP devs working on their corporate site or whatever, and they wanted to use them instead of hiring another team.

I am a web developer and the static HTML + JS with a RESTful API sounds excellent.

This is exactly what LuCI does on OpenWRT, except they use Lua, which is a sane language designed for embedded environments.

> If you cant learn anything else pretty sure you havent the skills to program any "embedded device".

How did you arrive at this conclusion?

it's obvious isn't it? it's like "if you can't learn calculous I'm pretty sure you haven't the skills to do rocket propulsion calculations"

Someone with only one language or a "main language" is someone who just simply has a lower level of skill than is needed for embedded programming- which requires lots of different skills and languages. Being able to learn more than one thing is a prerequisite.

So if you work at company with a PHP stack (meaning your main language will obviously be PHP) you can't learn anything else?

if your natural response to something like embedded php is "Oh how convenient, I can use my main language!" then that would imply the answer is "yes", since, if you do know other languages your natural impulse would be to use pretty much any other language if you have a choice.

Well, these arguments of yours aren't the most ridiculous I've ever heard... I'll give you that much.

So having PHP as your main language means you can't learn anything else?

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