

Here’s to the PHP Misfits - melvinmt
http://melvinmt.com/80/heres-to-the-php-misfits

======
debacle
Disclaimer: I am a PHP programmer. I write PHP every day.

With that said, oh god _please_ shut up already! This dick-waving is getting
out of control. It has gotten to the point that people are writing these
articles just because they know they will get hits.

PHP is a good tool. It's not the best tool, but it's good enough. Over time it
will get better. It is what it is.

~~~
leftnode
Thank you for saying this. I also do a ton of PHP development and it's so
fucking tiring. Just stop with the posts already and get some shit done.

------
astrodust
When you have more pride in your _tools_ than in your _craft_ , you're not
doing it right.

Anyone who's been using PHP long enough to be proficient in it should move to
a more robust toolset simply to get more done. To sneer on Python and Ruby as
being elitist is just the sort of thing a self-proclaimed "PHP programmer"
would do.

You shouldn't aspire to be an "X programmer", but a programmer period. Learn
more tools, more techniques, even those outside your immediate comfort zone,
and you will be able to improve in ways that being locked into a single way of
thinking will never offer.

~~~
melvinmt
Here's the thing: I'm not interested in being a 'programmer', I just want to
build out my product ideas. And right now I do it with the language I know
best: PHP.

~~~
zenogais
Then why even bother listening to what people who do want to be programmers
write about your tools?

~~~
twism
This is what I don't understand about "PHP" programmers.

Programmers, you are not in a position to defend a language if said language
is all you know.

------
bithive123
If you take this story, remove anything specific to PHP and then copy paste it
a few times replacing PHP successively with Perl, Ruby, Python, and JavaScript
then you have my trajectory as a coder.

Similarly, I wasn't interested in the computer science part at first either,
but boy has the importance of the "managing complexity" part made itself
obvious over the years.

Why is it that the people who take the time to blog defensively about PHP are
typically monoglot coders? After my third or fourth language helped me
understand what programming was at its core, I stopped using just one and
ended up writing...a lot less code for any particular task.

~~~
melvinmt
Obviously the complexity of my projects have also been increased since I
started out 10 years ago. But thanks to frameworks like Kohana I've been able
to manage it pretty well.

I'm not saying that I will never use another language (obj-c has caught my
interest) but I will never use another language for the sake of using it -
especially not when I can do more or less the same thing as with PHP.

------
YmMot
Saying that PHP has value because it lets beginners get up and running quickly
is like suggesting we outfit babies with jetpacks so they can get about
quicker without all that crawling nonsense.

I'm being over dramatic of course, but I find it interesting that in a lot of
these posts the author doesn't seem to consider if it's really a feature that
you can just hack away and not have to think or work to much to get something
running.

Hanging out on help forums and irc I see a lot of requests for help in dealing
with the fallout from poorly coded PHP applications; whether it's been hacked,
they need to update it but the design is poorly thought out, etc etc.

I think in reality like most things, it's shades of grey. It is nice that
people can use it to just get up and running quickly but that also lands us
tons of poorly coded, brittle, and insecure websites. This of course isn't a
problem unique to PHP, but I think because it's considered a "good language
for beginners" and the barrier is a little lower, more beginners or "Just hack
and slash until I have something that works" types end up using it and the
effect is more pronounced.

~~~
shaunxcode
I think it's more like arguing that one can safely drive on the freeway with a
tricycle, after all it has wheels and it moves quickly if you pedal fast and
hard enough.

------
stevencorona
What I don't get about these "I get shit done with PHP so booya" posts is that
people get shit done with better designed languages too. So where's the
advantage?

IMO, PHP is only "magically productive" when you're starting out and banging
out scripts over FTP on Shared Hosting with Apache/mod_php. Once you start
running a "real app", with servers/deployment/nginx/php-fpm/frameworks, it
requires the same amount of setup complexity as Rails/Django/etc.

Disclaimer: I write PHP for a living. Not a hater.

~~~
mildweed
The advantage is that this guy, who otherwise wouldn't have been able to
accomplish his goals, did. He did because PHP was accessible. And till other
languages are as dead-simple to accomplish small-to-medium tasks, PHP will
continue to have fans such as the OP.

~~~
RageKit
imho ruby is simpler than php.

~~~
bennylope
Easier on eyes, more powerful? Surely. But can you just drop .erb files into a
directory and turn on mod_ruby? That's the allure of PHP for so many.

~~~
pbiggar
No, but you can just run `rails new` and `git push heroku`, which is about as
easy as using shared hosting.

~~~
joesb
Shared hosting is all over the world, most of them provide PHP+20GB for 1/10
the cost of heroku+5MB.

~~~
pbiggar
Sure, but we aren't comparising pricing - we're looking at how easy it is to
get started. You can go pretty far with Heroku free plans.

------
k3n
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247245>

Oh, and:

> I said: “give me 3 days” and I learned everything I needed to know about OOP
> that weekend and showed off a OO-based numbers game on Monday.

Perhaps he learned all that he "needed" to know for that job, but I kind of
doubt that he 'learned everything he needed to know about OOP'.

I get so tired of people tooting their own horns, but I guess I should get
used to it in this new era of what I like to call conference-coders.

------
drobati
Who gives points to an article like this. It's just a opinion, with nothing
informative in it? On that note, does HN have an extension like the Reddit
Enhancement Suite, to maybe setup or hide posts I'm not interested in?

------
webjunkie
"Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to
make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a
whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you
“well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and
they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where
every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the
front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking
their door. "

~~~
Killswitch
Stop blaming the tools for the stupidity and unoriginality of the carpenter.
The tools don't make the house stable, look good, or even become something
people want. How the carpenter uses those tools and puts his own vision into
it does.

The same hammer, nails, screwdriver, whatever is used to build mansions...
It's also the same tools used to build shitty houses that fall apart... Your
point means exactly what the original author meant. Don't worry about the
tools used to build your product, just build the damn thing.

~~~
zenogais
Tools have a lot to do with setting the range of possible creations you can
make. If I have better tools I can build much larger buildings than you on
similar timescales. It's the difference between using wood and all the
standard tools to build a skyscraper and using forklifts, cranes, and welded
beams. No amount of skill is going to turn your toolbox into a forklift.
Similar sorts of increases are possible with other programming languages and
better toolsets, unfortunately you usually have to use them to see these
things. You'll probably ask why everyone isn't using these tools if they're so
good. The answer is for the same reason people write articles like this. New
stuff is scary and weird and the old stuff works well enough, right?

~~~
Killswitch
Wrong. Just because you can build faster with a supposedly "better" tool,
doesn't mean everyone else can. I know Python, I know Node.js, I know a bunch
of other languages, but I don't know them better than PHP, and to be honest,
my job doesn't pay me to learn a new language at the same scale as I know my
current language, all because a group of people THINK that my language is
crap, when in reality, to the end user, my language looks no different than
theirs.

My mentality is to use whatever tool you feel comfortable with, and don't let
someone else tell you to use something different because THEY can build
faster.

Sure a nail gun is faster than a hammer, but if I have problems with an nail
gun and can bang in nails faster with a hammer than a nail gun. I'm gonna use
the hammer.

------
jiggy2011
Another "Look I can build websites with PHP!" post.

The biggest draw of PHP seems to be that there is a large quantity of (often
bad) copy paste-able code out there on the internet.

~~~
stevencorona
Agree. PHP is the only language where one looks for "snippets" instead of
libraries. It's gross.

~~~
jiggy2011
It wouldn't be so bad if standard practise was to put them in a separate
files/folders with the original authors header left on with a link back to
where it was downloaded.

Instead I tend to find the same POS code repeated 20 times in the codebase.

------
derpmeister
Seems like the article vanished:

    
    
      This is the standard TransIP page for reserved domain names. No website
      has been published for this domain. Are you still seeing this after
      publishing your website? Please make sure you upload your website to
      the /www directory and clear your browser cache before reloading
      this page.

~~~
melvinmt
No it's still up, guess Cloudflare decided to stop serving pages at one point
:/.

~~~
derpmeister
You should consider switching to a better host. There is no excuse for this:

wget -4 output: <http://scrp.at/bAD>

wget -6 output: <http://scrp.at/bAE>

As an IPv6 advocate on the side, I'm disappointed by this.

~~~
melvinmt
Ah thanks for letting me know, fixed it in the settings, let me know if it
works now.

~~~
derpmeister
How long should it take?

------
crazydoggers
It's the same type of irresponsible behavior in any industry before it's
regulated. If you can get away with building crap for cheap, why not.

Here's my longer response:
[http://tumblr.crazydogsoftware.com/post/27412353720/when-
the...](http://tumblr.crazydogsoftware.com/post/27412353720/when-the-house-
falls-down)

