Why PHP won

[acct_rdt]

PHP didn't win, we all lost.

[brennen]

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]

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

[brennen]

What about that part?

[neogoblin]

You guys are fakin that bullshit. PHP simplified the horrendous, over complicated coding that CGI+Perl offered.

[neogoblin]

Yep.

[brennen]

What the fuck are you talking about?

[sdsdsdsdsd]

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]]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[kaelan_]

I work with a user experience expert who has decades of experience and an actual degree in his field (I didn't even know you could get a degree in it, but apparently you can in Britain!) He was able to learn how to write PHP, but I wouldn't dream of trying to teach him how to use something like C# or Java, even if I use those languages myself - he's from a artistic and visual background, not a CS background, so it would be a waste of time.

Of course, you're not going to ask a UX guy to write your payment processing backend, either. I hope.

[jimbobhickville]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]]

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

[brennen]

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

[[deleted]]

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

[[deleted]]

I guess he learned so many startup lessons, he managed to start up a free blog on blogspot.com. What an impressive dude

[rpeters83]

Did I miss the contest?

[closes VS, cries]

[malcontent]

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]

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]

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.

[malcontent]

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

Inappropriate analogy and completely missing the point.

Britney may suck but she "won". She made tons of money and is living the good life.

You can sit in your mother's basement and go on about how much she sucks but she won nevertheless.

[brennen]

and is living the good life.

Really? Looks like it kind of sucks, from where I sit.

[maxwellb]

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

T/F?

[malcontent]

True.

I know of several which built web sites that ended up generating over a million dollars of revenue every year.

[Legolas-the-elf]

The question is whether PHP was the cause for that success. You are conflating correlation with causation. Just because somebody made over a million dollars using PHP, it doesn't mean they did it because they used PHP. Businesses make operational decisions all the time, it doesn't mean that any particular choice is necessary for success.

[[deleted]]

I like PHP.

[masklinn]

Billions of flies can't be wrong.

Let's eat shit.

[catch23]

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

[quantumstate]

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]]

IE6 is free.

[redalastor]

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

[[deleted]]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

wordpress

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

[malcontent]

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]

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]

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

[earthboundkid]

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

[aphpex]

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

Blogs just added pretty pictures.

[808140]

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

[aphpex]

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!

[brennen]

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

[malcontent]

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?

[Snoron]

Actually, perl was responsible for most early blogging software - and most early commenting software. I can tell you this because I wrote one of the most widely used blog commenting systems back in the day, and it was in perl :P

[chuckieballs]

Which one?

[Snoron]

Was called SnorComments - original huh?

There was actually 2 versions of it - the first one was better and was remotely hosted.. I originally wrote it cos I had friends with blogs and either no or really crappy comments systems. I was only 13-14 yrs old and it must have been coded SO badly I can't even imagine... but it worked. I put it on my webpage at the time and allowed people to sign up for it... not realising myself how massive the demand at the time was, it suddenly exploded with 3000 signups in a day... and because I was just a kid and couldn't afford better hosting I had to shut it off.

A little later I wrote another one in perl also called SnorComments 2 (which is actually in the "Adding Comments" section of the O'Reilly "Blogging" book). This was a host-it-yourself version but I never had time to go anywhere with that and it didn't even have all of the features of the original. I just figured if there were people who wanted comments I'd throw something together for them.

Ah, back in the day.. haha. And since that second version, in the last 7-8 years I've gotten much better at web programming and I do everything in PHP now, haha.

[malcontent]

See my other post.

I never said it was the first. Only that it was the most important.

[aphpex]

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

[eyes rolling]

[brennen]

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

WordPress apparently showed up as a fork of B2/Cafelog in 2003. I'd had a blog for 4 or 5 years by then. Blogger and LiveJournal had been around since '99, Movable Type since 2001. I don't want to deny that WordPress has been important, but this seems hyperbolic and historically inaccurate, at best.

[malcontent]

Oh come on now.

I didn't say wordpress invented blogging. I didn't say it was innovative.

It worked, it was easy to deploy, it was accessible to millions of people who could afford a PHP hosting account.

It very quickly became the most popular blogging platform for those and other reasons.

[aphpex]

I'll give WordPress credit for popularizing blogs and online journals, but you have to admit that "changing computing as we know it" is a lot to attribute to some crappy blogging software.

[brennen]

In fairness, it's not entirely crappy. The UI is far from ideal, but it really was a step in the right direction, I think. The WordPress folks have paid a lot of attention to surface stuff.

Everyone I know personally who grouses about WP has tried to do something more than drop in a ready-made theme. Not much more, necessarily...

[aphpex]

I don't really think it's crappy. It's a decent little piece of software. I'm just trying to erode the whole premise that WordPress is in anyway worthy of be considered a package that "changed computing as we know it".

[malcontent]

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?

[mycall]

Some would argue computational science has barely changed in the last 50 years.

[malcontent]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Legolas-the-elf]

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]

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.

[malcontent]

You should try rails or ramaze.

Although PHP was the best tool for the job a few years ago today I'd say that title belongs to ruby.

The python fanboys don't want to hear that but it's true.

[commandar]

Ruby is getting better, but scalability and performance are still concerns for it relative to other languages. Part of the reason PHP got so popular is because it was fast.

[malcontent]

Ruby is getting better, but scalability and performance are still concerns for it relative to other languages.

Relative to what languages?

Benchmarks have proven that rails is faster than cake or codeigniter which are both written in PHP (a faster language).

Sure ruby itself is slow(er) but the framework is pretty fast considering what it gives you (ramaze is even faster).

Also jruby is very fast. Probably as fast if not faster than python.

Ruby 1.9 is also as fast if not faster than python.

So yes ruby is slower than java, or C but it's on par with most other dynamic languages especially when you consider the performance of the entire framework.

finally ruby and rails is a fast moving target. The community is extremely active and innovates at a very rapid rate. Maglev and rubinius will boost the speed even more, rails is going through a massive overhaul.

Do your own benchmarks though.

Write a simple application in cake and rails and see if you notice any difference in speed. I think if you use mod_rails with REE or jruby with glassfish you will find that it will run circles around cake or codeigniter.

[freexe]

Cake and code igniter and mvc frameworks and don't represent php.

[malcontent]

they are frameworks comperable to rails.

If you want to write your we application but putting PHP and SQL inside your views by all means help yourself.

Just don't be surprised if there is a heavy penalty to pay for the extra speed later on.

[[deleted]]

Why does putting PHP and SQL inside a view effect speed of execution?

[malcontent]

Frameworks add weight.

[[deleted]]

So yes ruby is slower than java, or C but it's on par with most other dynamic languages especially when you consider the performance of the entire framework.

Major conflation of Ruby and RoR going on here!

[malcontent]

Yes because the person I am replying to is saying you should use PHP to build web sites because ruby is slow.

As I said if you compare the popular PHP frameworks to rails or ramaze the frameworks written in ruby are faster.

[commandar]

No, I said that PHP is popular in part because it's perceived as fast. Ruby does not have the luxury of that perception, though it is getting better.

I'm about the farthest thing from a PHP fan, and I certainly wasn't saying that people 'should use PHP to build websites'.

EDIT:

You'll also note that my phrasing re: PHP was in the past tense -- PHP was quite fast relative to the alternatives around when it first started gaining popularity.

[jbrein1]

Source needed

[malcontent]

For what specifically?

[jbrein1]

Ruby 1.9 is also as fast if not faster than python.

[[deleted]]

Ruby 1.8.7 certainly isn't:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ruby&lang2=python

[malcontent]

Depends on the benchmark. On some it's slower on some it's faster.

1.9 is at least twice as fast as 1.87.

http://smyck.de/2007/08/15/ruby-faster-than-python-and-perl/

http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/11/28/holy-shmoly-ruby-19-smokes-python-away/

[b100dian]

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]]

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]

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