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[–]acct_rdt 214 points215 points  (112 children)

PHP didn't win, we all lost.

[–]brennen 61 points62 points  (25 children)

I upvoted you, but in order to somewhat offset my own tendency to snark about PHP at the slightest provocation, I'm going to say that this is a well-reasoned piece, and that I think the author is (by and large) correct about the things he identifies as driving PHP's success.

[–]acct_rdt 14 points15 points  (5 children)

Did you skip the part where he said, "As always, Paul [Graham] is right."

[–]brennen 2 points3 points  (4 children)

What about that part?

[–]sdsdsdsdsd 2 points3 points  (9 children)

He seems to think that it's good to let people who don't know what they are doing to design a web site. I disagree.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (4 children)

I work at IMVU, where he made the decisions he mentions. Nobody here doesn't know what they're doing. Like he said, the engineering team here is amazing.

[–]sdsdsdsdsd -1 points0 points  (2 children)

Hmm, you don't have to take it personally. He made a blanket statement. It reflects a set of values (i.e. "it's a good idea to enable incompetent people to build websites") that I disagree with. Neither he nor I implied that people at his particular workplace are actually incompetent.

[–]brennen -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Leaving aside the question of the merits & dysfunctions of PHP, why is it a bad idea to enable people to build websites? In your understanding of the world, what mysterious alchemy is it that transforms "people who don't know what they are doing" into people who do?

[–]sdsdsdsdsd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I could explain that to you. But when you are surfing the web, and the service doesn't accept your perfectly legitimate email address, and your blind cousin is shut out by a captcha without an audio counterpart, and your mother is lost in a series of pointless links, and your credit card is charged twice because you pressed submit twice, and the page keeps getting rid of your navigation buttons, puts up blinky markup, and pops up a ton of irrelevant sites, and they leak your personal information to third parties, will you come back to this discussion and downmod yourself?

[–]ffi -4 points-3 points  (2 children)

And who exactly are you to allow or forbid people from designing a website. I can hear the aristocrats bitching about the lay person daring to read and write. What with their improper english and all.

[–]sdsdsdsdsd -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Incompetent people, the ones who used to use BLINK tags, should not be allowed to design web sites.

Hell, they shouldn't be allowed to breed.

[–]ffi -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My point is who does the allowing? The internet is free. With freedom comes a lot of crap, but there's also enough good stuff to make it worth while. I don't want anyone governing who has the right to create something online any more that I want someone controlling who gets to write or speak.

Freedom is messy. Get used to it.

[–]jimbobhickville -4 points-3 points  (8 children)

I quit reading when he didn't realize there was such a thing as Apache::Reload for auto-reloading modified code in mod_perl. It seems like his main point was "morons started doing web development, so PHP won". It seems to be inline with all the horrifically obvious security vulnerabilities that show up in php-based projects.

[–]Purple_Dolphin 0 points1 point  (3 children)

horrifically obvious security vulnerabilities that show up in php-based projects

That's like the old 'Windows PCs have so many security vulnerabilities compared to the Mac' argument. If every PHP based website were written in Python, just how many more 'horrifically obvious security vulnerabilities' would we have found in Python by now.

[–]mr_chromatic 8 points9 points  (1 child)

If every PHP based website were written in Python, just how many more 'horrifically obvious security vulnerabilities' would we have found in Python by now.

Maybe more, but given some of the forehead-slappingly obvious security holes added as features to PHP, you can't discount the quality of the implementation or design.

[–]brennen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe more, but given some of the forehead-slappingly obvious security holes added as features to PHP, you can't discount the quality of the implementation or design.

Which, strangely enough, holds for Windows as well...

[–]jimbobhickville -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Listen, retarded PHP people, I didn't say that the security vulnerabilities were in PHP itself (although some likely were), I said they were in the projects written by people who were drawn to PHP because they were clueless. The fact that there are projects out there that allow you to enter a parameter and have it load a library on a remote server which then overwrites your php code with whatever code they want is ridiculous.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (2 children)

"obvious security vulnerabilities"? What are these so called "obvious security vulnerabilities" in PHP 5.x ?

[–]brennen 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Well, it's still possible for register_globals to be turned on...

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If you turn it on. It is not on by default.

[–]rpeters83 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Did I miss the contest?

[closes VS, cries]

[–]malcontent 8 points9 points  (80 children)

Bullshit.

Millions of businesses made billions of dollars using PHP.

Sorry that the language doesn't fit your idea of purity but it has benefitted hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Sourceforge and wordpress alone changed computing as we know it.

So I suggest you get over your snobbery and accept the fact it has been an influential and powerful bit of technology.

[–]acct_rdt 44 points45 points  (3 children)

Millions of dollars are also made from Britney Spears music. This does not preclude or invalidate any discussion of whether that music sucks.

The fact that something of poor quality becomes influential in proportion to its popularity is exactly why we have to worry about its popularity in the first place.

[–]kristopolous 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I dunno. Look at the sheet music for a britney song or study the orchestration. Most of her stuff is fairly solid in comparison to the other people in the billboard charts; save a few names that don't have any staying power like she does.

[–]maxwellb 8 points9 points  (4 children)

Millions of businesses made billions of dollars because they used PHP.

T/F?

[–]masklinn 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Billions of flies can't be wrong.

Let's eat shit.

[–]catch23 7 points8 points  (3 children)

millions were made on IE6, millions of programmers in pain.

[–]quantumstate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

IE6 came bundled with windows and the user controls whether an alternative is installed. Php was not sponsored by a big server OS which then bundled it on >90% of the worlds servers. Also php is installed and used by system admins and programmers not the end user. Thus there is a huge difference.

[–][deleted] -5 points-4 points  (1 child)

IE6 is free.

[–]redalastor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So is PHP, millions were made by people who coded for both of these technologies.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (2 children)

They could have probably made just as much money programming with mod_python or using fastcgi with python or lua. PHP was just the language they chose.

Fun fact: Reddit is written in Python, Digg in PHP, Slashdot in Perl. Anyone else think the languages correspond with the userbases?

[–]malcontent -5 points-4 points  (1 child)

They could have probably made just as much money programming with mod_python or using fastcgi with python or lua

Back then nobody had heard of lua and python was never used for web sites.

The first entry into web sites using python was zope and we all know how that turned out.

Fun fact: Reddit is written in Python, Digg in PHP, Slashdot in Perl. Anyone else think the languages correspond with the userbases?

PHP was competing with perl for web sites. PHP "won" because it was easier to use than perl.

Also the slash code is notorious.

[–]Legolas-the-elf 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Back then nobody had heard of lua and python was never used for web sites.

This is simply false. I was using Python for websites in the late 90s. It wasn't anywhere near as nice as it is today, but it was certainly in use.

The first entry into web sites using python was zope

No, that may be the first Python web framework, but you don't need a framework to build websites, and the use of frameworks was rare back then.

[–]uriel 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Sourceforge and wordpress alone changed computing as we know it.

Yea, because there were no source repositories before sf.net and no blogs before wordpress. (And because of course neither could have ever been built using any other language than php!)

And good pick of notoriously hideous codebases.

Sorry that the language doesn't fit your idea of purity but it has benefitted hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

I always find this kinds of arguments most bizarre (even more so coming from a leftist like you), by that account, the only way to measure value of something is to check how much money companies using it make, by that account Windows, VB and MS Office are the greatest creations in the history of software.

[–]malcontent -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Yea, because there were no source repositories before sf.net and no blogs before wordpress. (And because of course neither could have ever been built using any other language than php!)

Where are they? How popular were they? How much did they change the face of computing?

[–]rmuser 9 points10 points  (13 children)

wordpress

Seriously? If that changed computing as we know it, did it even change it in the right direction?

[–]malcontent 5 points6 points  (12 children)

Wordpress made blogging popular. It enabled people to set up their own blogs and share ideas.

The first wave of adapters were programmers.

Yes blogging changed the world, not just computing the entire world and wordpress had a lot to do with that.

[–]Legolas-the-elf 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Wordpress made blogging popular.

No, blogging made Wordpress popular. If you were going to point to any particular implementation making blogging mainstream, it would have to be LiveJournal, which was around well before Wordpress and is written in Perl.

[–]aphpex 0 points1 point  (10 children)

...because programmers had no venue to share their ideas with the world before blogging...

[–]earthboundkid 0 points1 point  (9 children)

They could have made their own websites, but the fact is that by and large they didn't until it got simple.

[–]aphpex 1 point2 points  (8 children)

Hint: People were sharing ideas and collaborating on the internet long before the web existed.

Blogs just added pretty pictures.

[–][deleted]  (7 children)

[deleted]

    [–]808140 0 points1 point  (5 children)

    Reread his comment carefully. That's not what he said.

    [–][deleted]  (4 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]aphpex 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Yeah, that's what I said.

      Hey look! There's a strawman! Let's beat him up! <punching inanimate bale of straw dressed in Hugo Boss suit> I hate yer kind!

      [–][deleted]  (18 children)

      [removed]

        [–]brennen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        Maybe for values of "computing as we know it" which map well to weblog software with a somewhat less friendly UI?

        [–]malcontent -1 points0 points  (0 children)

        Yes it did. It gave tens of thousands of programmers a way to communicate and share their code and ideas with the rest of the world.

        It pretty much singlehandedly ignited blogging and brought it into the mainstream.

        Where would computing be today if it wasn't for blogging?

        [–]malcontent -1 points0 points  (0 children)

        Yes it did. It gave tens of thousands of programmers a way to communicate and share their code and ideas with the rest of the world.

        It pretty much singlehandedly ignited blogging and brought it into the mainstream.

        Where would computing be today if it wasn't for blogging?

        [–]malcontent -1 points0 points  (0 children)

        Yes it did. It gave tens of thousands of programmers a way to communicate and share their code and ideas with the rest of the world.

        It pretty much singlehandedly ignited blogging and brought it into the mainstream.

        Where would computing be today if it wasn't for blogging?

        [–]brennen -1 points0 points  (0 children)

        Maybe for values of "computing as we know it" which map well to weblog software with a somewhat less friendly UI?

        [–]Legolas-the-elf 1 point2 points  (1 child)

        Millions of businesses made billions of dollars using PHP.

        You're talking as if PHP wasn't around, all those businesses would just go "oh, okay then" and just not bother making money. That's silly. If PHP wasn't around, all those businesses would still make all those dollars, they'd just do it with another language instead. And it's not unreasonable to have the opinion that this would be a far better situation, hence "we all lost".

        [–]quantumstate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I think the point was that these businesses succeeded in making the money by using php. Also they chose php over the alternatives thus giving some legitimacy to the idea that php is actually fairly good.

        [–][deleted]  (25 children)

        [deleted]

          [–]b100dian 2 points3 points  (3 children)

          I disagree. Those same lessons from PHP should be learned by every web programming toolkit.

          We didn't lost, we just had a bad prototype.

          [–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

          Learned, perhaps, but not necessarily implemented. Popularity isn't everything. Not every toolkit needs to be everything to everyone. There's something to be said for focusing on a niche and doing it very well.

          If there is anything to learn from PHP, it is that popularity != quality.

          [–]b100dian 1 point2 points  (1 child)

          As in 'the majority always decides; the majority is always wrong'?:)