
PHP needs to die. What will replace it? - muhammadatt
http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/php_needs_to_die_what_will_replace_it
======
kemayo
To replace PHP you need:

1\. To be on all shared hosting everywhere. I.e. you need to be really easy to
install, and preferably not involve long-running processes that shared hosts
might choke on.

2\. To be beginner friendly. No requirement of understanding MVC, or running
commands in a shell (hi RoR!). Pure instant gratification. Someone's first
step into using PHP is likely going to be "I want the current date in the
footer of my page", or "I want a random image on my homepage", or something
like that. Anything like that you can handle by taking your existing page and
dropping a _tiny_ snippet in where you want the change to happen.
<?=date('Y')?> is a potent thing to someone who has never programmed before.

(Note: For point 2 many of the things serious programmers hate about PHP are
actually advantages. All the functions in one big namespace? That's great! A
newbie doesn't have to try to understand `<? import datetime; print
datetime.date('Y'); ?>.)

It's easy to replace PHP for serious developers. We like advanced features,
and care about a sane default libary. We're willing to use complex tools to
get a payoff.

It's hard to replace PHP for non-programmers who just want to tweak their
static page in notepad, or install a blogging package on their cheapo shared
hosting.

To sum up: if you don't address both of these points then you haven't killed
PHP. You're competing with Python or Ruby or whatever. PHP will carry right on
ignoring you, because you're not addressing its fundamental use case.

~~~
ajross
Yeah, exactly. This headline could have been written with the same
justification in 1999. Yet PHP refuses to die. Clearly us hackers are missing
something important.

~~~
ra
Having not used php for 12 years, I recently accepted a freelance job for a
client who had been left in the lurch by his php developer who seemingly
abandoned the project because she was out of her depth.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by some of the new language
features that php has borrowed from elsewhere... eg: closures, anonymous
functions, docstrings.

IMHO php is held back primarily by messy, inconsistent documentation and
extremely ugly parts of the core library that are also riddled with
inconsistencies that should have been deprecated years ago.

Not that I would consider starting a new project in php - I just love
programming too much for that; but I believe php will evolve, benefiting from
other languages.

Really, it needs it's own "Python 3" (out with the old, smarten up the new).

~~~
Bloodwine
Major PHP versions are the evolutionary jumps for the language. They don't
tend to worry as much about backwards-compatibility when going from PHP3 to
PHP4 to PHP5. I've read that PHP6 was supposed to take it further and outright
remove a lot of deprecated and insecure aspects of the language, but I don't
know if or when PHP6 will be released.

I agree that they should take things even further and really clean up the
language before releasing the next major version. Fix the needle-haystack vs.
haystack-needle inconsistencies, function naming conventions, and so forth.

The adoption rate of a new major version on shared hosting providers is
relatively slow, so it'd be a perfect time to really shake things up and clean
it up.

~~~
eropple
I would suggest that minor PHP versions often are, too. Significant internal
changes between 5.x versions have caused some code to break (and other code to
act very differently than it was originally intended to).

------
jordanlev
One word: deployment

To me, the best thing about PHP is that it is so easy to deploy to pretty much
any shared hosting on the planet, not to mention really easy to set up on your
local machine (with WAMP/MAMP).

I love Rails, but on many occasions have built projects in PHP (using a decent
framework like Kohana) just because I was putting this on my client's shared
hosting account and didn't want to deal with having them get a new server, or
just plain setting up Rails. Yeah yeah, I know there's passenger now, etc. --
still not as stupid easy as dropping a php file into a web directory (and
assuming that Apache is set up with mod_php, or FastCGI or whatever -- which
it always is).

~~~
generalk
One of the interesting things about doing Passenger deployments for Rails is
that it's very similar to doing PHP deploys, with the added benefit of the
server not reloading any application code until you tell it to.

For example: you can update the Rails code on the server, maybe run some data
migrations or last-minute production tasks against the new codebase, and THEN
tell Passenger to reload the application code.

On an unrelated note, having the Heroku service around for low-traffic side
projects or whatever is just plain awesome.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
Lots of PHP folks call that a disadvantage... It's nice knowing I can mess
with files and after pressing F5 I'll always have the latest version. Yes, ok,
caches can get out of sync, but they're easy to clear. There are furthermore
no good PHP deployment automations, things Rails and Python have because of
the level of complexity.

~~~
FooBarWidget
You claim that deployment automations for Rails and Python exist because of
the complexity? Have you ever worked with PHP apps that are larger than 1
single file and use the database? Things like Capistrano do a lot of things
that even PHP would benefit from.

Deployments are rarely atomic actions. With Capistrano, apps are stored in
versioned release directories. Apache points to a 'current' symlink which
points to the latest release directory. Upon deployment, Capistrano creates a
new app directory, runs database migrations or updates configurations or
creates asset files or whatever is necessary to upgrade the app. Only after
it's done will it update the 'current' symlink and instruct the app server to
restart.

Consider what happens if you upload your new PHP app with FTP. If someone
visits /some_page.php while you're uploading then he could access an old
version of it. Suppose some_page.php depends on common_library.php which may
have been updated to the latest version in the mean time. Then things blow up
because the new common_library.php is not compatible with the old
some_page.php. With Capistrano, the deployment is as good as atomic.

Capistrano also supports deploying to multiple servers at the same time, and
even to servers that are behind a firewall and can only be accessed through a
gateway server. It supports rolling back to a previous version. And much more.

~~~
chrismsnz
After having battled a PHP (mod_php) deployment system and having to hack the
hell out of capistrano to get a usable one... Amen to your comment.

------
phatbyte
It's 2011 and people still compare frameworks vs languages. PHP may suck, but
oh boy, the author doesn't have his facts right. No method chaining ? really ?

Rest assured that I would rather hire a good PHP developer than this guy to
code in Ruby.

~~~
pak
You're right, both things that the author claimed are lacking are in fact very
much available.

PHP >5.3 has lambdas: <http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/functions.anonymous.php>

PHP >5 can support easy method chaining if you return $this from your method.

Lambdas are not yet common, but method chaining is already easy to find in
most well-designed PHP libraries and frameworks.

------
chc
This entire essay seems to be predicated on the frankly weird assumption that
if something is part of the language, it's good, but if it's part of a
library, it's not — even if the two are indistinguishable. For example:

 _Code that writes your boilerplate for you is helpful and all, but if your
language requires a pile of boilerplate to get anything done, then something
is already wrong._

If the same functionality is implemented, the code is being generated
somewhere. Ditto with his dismissal of Ruby on Rails because Rails is not
built into Ruby like PHP's web app support is.

------
mikey_p
I won't argue that PHP is getting long in the tooth, has a somewhat unclear
future, and some of the standard lib is hella inconsistent, but these points:

 _then what PHP is lacking is lambdas and method chaining._

Does the author know anything about PHP at all? As far as I can tell method
chaining has been available as long as PHP supported OOP and Anonymous
functions have been supported for several years since PHP 5.3 was released.

This makes it really hard to take the author and the article seriously.

~~~
berntb
>>Does the author know anything about PHP at all?

The author doesn't know about any other languages either, it seems.

I stopped reading when he argued that PHP's assocative arrays was an
advantage; hashes/dictionaries are in all the scripting languages. (Afaik,
they come from AWK by the way of Perl, anyway -- they were created many years
before PHP existed.)

~~~
sciurus
When I read

>> the critical thing Perl was lacking was PHP's wonderfully flexible
"associative arrays"

I grabbed my copy of "Learning Perl" from 1997. Chapter 5's topic? Hashes.

~~~
pak
Perl hashes don't preserve order. PHP's almost always do. i.e., the order you
insert keys is the order in which you will receive them back when you iterate
over the array. It's similar to a LinkedHashMap in Java.

CS types might recoil at the mixture of behaviors that are baked into PHP's
workhorse data structure, but most of them turn out to be quite useful. (And
it makes it easier for the beginner programmer to decide what data structure
to use: you have keyed data? a list of data? a set of values? doesn't matter,
just use an array!)

~~~
berntb
There is CPAN for that. (iirc, this is solved with a module in the Perl
Cookbook. I don't have that book where I am writing this.)

Edit: For a beginner that wants a Visual Basic for web, sure. By now I have
different needs, to enjoy using my tools. (And for the record, if I need to
keep order of a hash/dict/etc in some language, I generally use a
"traditional" array in addition. That is probably too complex for a beginner?
:-) )

Edit 2: I'm not dumping on PHP, it is a useful tool for many people. I just
wish the development of the language had been handled a bit more carefully.

~~~
pak
Exactly, it's not a native part of the language, which reinforces my point
that the beginner doesn't need to think as much about data structures with
PHP. The built-in array() usually can handle the task well enough. They never
are left muttering "this would be perfect for a linked hashmap but where is my
drat PHP cookbook?"

------
wccrawford
"Needs to die" needs to die.

Let's replace it with "Here's how we can improve."

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Yes.

------
michaelchisari
The article states that php doesn't have lambdas and method chaining, although
it does. They aren't well done, as per usual, but it definitely has them.

Honestly, we may be best off doing a CoffeeScript style pre-processor for PHP.
Because PHP isn't going anywhere, no mattter how much we may prefer other
languages, PHP's popularity is one of pure pragmatism, something the language
purists don't seem to understand.

Get me from 0 to "Hello, World" as fast as you can. That's how you build the
next PHP.

~~~
jmathai
>> Get me from 0 to "Hello, World" as fast as you can. That's how you build
the next PHP.

Well put.

~~~
thrashr888
I can't think of any other languages that let you do `echo 'Hello World' >
/Library/WebServer/Documents/index.php` and you already see that in the
browser because it comes with your OS. It's hard to beat that for normal folks
just starting out making web pages.

~~~
corin_
ASP?

------
sophacles
I really really think this is asking the wrong question. Sure PHP beat perl at
its own game, and really was the master of the CGI style web. But the thing
is, that really isn't where the world is anymore. Sure, there is a place for
building pages from templates, particularly in piecing together custom splash
pages and whatnot, or xml feeds, but honestly, the CGI style web is just going
away.

Look at what everyone is doing right now: make an app in javascript+html5+css,
serve those static files, and feed the app with json. Save bandwidth, scale
easier, and just have better control of the display by manipulating the
display directly.

tl;dr - Nothing will replace PHP, because no one is making tools for that case
(file-oriented-web) anymore.

~~~
pcole
My thoughts exactly as I was reading the post :-)

------
encoderer
I've come to expect hackery from this guys blog.

The truth is that for professional, skilled developers, mastering their Nth
language is an increasingly smaller investment compared to their first.

But for people north of HTML coders and south of professionals, they have a
lot invested in the scripting skills they've developed and nobody is
interested in seeing the value of their investment diminish for a reason like
this.

People here always tout PHP's installed-base as a big "plus" for the language.
But I think more than that is the mindshare.

~~~
dasil003
Yeah, the first post I read was the ORM one, which I thought was such an
egregious piece of misinformation that I debunked it ad nauseam
(<http://darwinweb.net/articles/in-defense-of-orms>).

Now in this article there's a telling clue to why he thinks writing SQL by
hand is better than using any ORM:

> _I can knock out a good website in an hour in PHP, and an excellent one in a
> day or two._

This suggests that he's working primarily on tiny projects. Of course if you
are working on tiny projects than an ORM doesn't buy you much. Also, there is
perhaps no language suited better to tiny web projects than PHP and I don't
see that changing. If you want to make something measurably better than PHP
for general purpose web programming you start having to make decisions that
developers don't want taken away from them. Rails does what it does by being
opinionated, but it works because if the opinions are ill-suited to your
project you can still use Sinatra or whatever. If you move too high up the
abstraction layer while trying to still serve a wide audience you end up with
the kind of morass that is Drupal, where the system can do almost anything
adequately, but it doesn't do a great job of anything because of the creaking
weight of the infrastructure that attempts to be everything to everyone.

------
Sodaware
I get that PHP is not the most elegant language in the World (see kemayo's
comment about strpos and in_array for just one example), but I don't
understand why people get so worked up over the fact that people use it.

It seems like you can't mention PHP without people inferring that you're a
lesser programmer or that you clearly don't know what you're doing.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
The funny thing is that the second most visited and profitable website in the
world (Facebook) is written in PHP... not bad for a "beginners language" i
think.

------
dmk23
OMG, Julius Caesar had to die too!

There is no need for any language or framework to "die".

If you do not like PHP (or Perl or Python or COBOL or Ruby or Java) just do
not use it. There are plenty of alternatives.

If you and your team can be productive with any of these languages, go for it.
PHP with modern OO-frameworks, like Yii, can support rapid development of
complex web apps just fine. Facebook runs just fine on PHP even without any
3rd party frameworks. The proof is in the development and deployment. The only
way you can "kill" a language with so much support is to offer something 10x
better or create some exclusive tie-in. Where is that magic offering?

Vote with your feet and dollars and just take it easy. There is no need to
fight the imagined oppression.

------
racoder
He lost me at "The most obvious potential successor to PHP is Ruby on Rails".
why compare RoR framework written in ruby vs PHP programming language... go
for Ror VS cakephp, RoR vs codeigniter, RoR vs symfony etc

~~~
Legion
For better or worse, the Ruby web community is so centered around one specific
framework that people tend to just say Rails instead of Ruby.

The post isn't comparing PHP with no frameworks versus Rails. Indeed, the
author's conclusion is that Rails doesn't sufficiently separate itself from
PHP with an MVC framework (and he listed a few).

------
russell
COBOL is still alive after more than 50 years. PHP will still be being used in
2050 for government web sites. It wont be getting any respect. but the
octogenarians who can still program in it will still be making some pretty
change.

------
ryanto
How do the articles from this site always make it onto the HN front page?
They're full of misleading information, are only written for the link/flame
bait, and don't provide any good actionable advice.

I know news is slow these days, but this kind of posting needs to stop.

------
FuzzyDunlop
PHP is a nightmare, but only once you learn enough about programming or
development to understand what you should _really_ be doing, and only once
you've seen how other languages do it.

After that comes PHP's special flavour of OOP. I'd prefer to call it 'Do
Whatever The Fuck You Like Orientated Programming' given the abundance of
'magic methods' and other functions that try really hard to make sure you've
got a cheeky workaround for something you can't be bothered doing properly
(creating countless security issues in the process). And that's before you
start using classes as pseudo-namespaces for collections of static functions.

The disappointing side is that someone who learns PHP before anything else
will have a heart attack when they realise that very little of what they know
applies the same to another language.

It's so loose and care-free that it doesn't care what you do or how you do it.
(Not helped by the mountains of useless tutorials and documentation that teach
awfully bad practices.)

So I guess the thing I dislike about PHP is that I learnt to use it but it
didn't give me good programming skills.

~~~
maratd
> It's so loose and care-free that it doesn't care what you do or how you do
> it.

This is precisely why I fell in love with PHP. My first was BASIC, my second
was C, my third was Java, but my fourth ... oh god ... like that slutty girl
who will let you do absolutely anything. How can you not fall in love with
that?

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
All I can really say is that I'm getting fed up of it. In keeping with your
analogy, I'd certainly prefer one that gave me the odd slap and told me to get
my shit together if I tried pushing my luck.

(programming languages and sado-masochistic tendencies would be an interesting
avenue to explore...)

~~~
damncabbage
Perhaps a little appropriate:
<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage>

------
there
why does one language have to die for another to become more popular?

if you don't like php, don't use it.

------
jamesmoss
Why is the article comparing PHP (a language) to RoR (a framework). There's
plenty of good PHP frameworks which have emerged over the past few years that
take care of the boilerplate code needed for a web app. Symfony 2.0 was a
released a few months ago; Fabien Potencier's hard work brings a lot of great
patterns and conventions from Java to PHP users.

------
ashrust
I understand why rails continues its ascent but the LAMP framework is still
very popular - you can get to hello world on your home computer or free
hosting account extremely quickly, that's pretty powerful when your're
starting out. Services like codecademy may change that but we're a ways off
imo.

------
aristus
I'm surprised that you didn't mention HipHop, especially if performance is
your biggest gripe. It really is the bee's knees and will only get better.

I spent a good chunk of my day looking at PHP code and profiling data. Assocs
are terrible for performance but it's not a fatal flaw IMO. What people really
want are separate "vector", "dict" and "set" types. It also needs a decent
standard library to replace dyslexic crap like explode(). And don't get me
started on the string libraries and the abuse of preg_* functions.

Lastly, comparing plain PHP to Ruby+Rails isn't fair. I prefer Python myself
but even then I need something like webpy or Google's appengine library to
make reasonable app.

~~~
nolok
Show me a website where php is the source of the performance problems and I
will show you a website php allowed to reach success/a large audience.

Frankly, unless you are very large scale php is never your bottlenecks, I/O
is. And if php become your bottlenecks, you have already won.

(of course you could find exemples of math-heavy calculating sites where this
isn't true, but that just means you don't know how to pick the right tool for
the job)

~~~
aristus
You are right that I/O is usually the first bottleneck. I assure you that
being CPU bound is no picnic, not least because most optimization knowledge
and experience out there relates to I/O. :)

Even if you are not CPU bound, HipHop is steadily adding grown-up features to
the language that make it quite nice to use, functions like
mysql_connect_with_db() which save a database round-trip, and extensions like
xhprof which will tell you what is actually slow.

------
fleitz
Honestly, why does 2 to 4 times slower mean anything? Why can't you cache? or
write that really performance intensive part of the app in something else?

There aren't any numbers to back the idea that 2 to 4X performance means
something. It's pretty easy to spend $5-10K per month on a single dev, thats a
fair bit of hosting.

If the concern is speed of page rendering go with .NET, the JVM, or C++ it's
much faster than rails or PHP will ever be. The trick is to use RAD/MVP to get
you to that twitter like world of hurt. Then you rewrite in a faster language
once you know what your product is like.

~~~
jordanlev
This brings up something I feel gets missed in a lot of language/platform
discussions: a vast majority of sites on the internet are informational sites
for people/companies and plenty of those are created by designers (non-
programmers).

When you say it's easy to spend $5-10k per month, you're obviously thinking of
a company whose business is the software, but this does not apply to most
websites in the world.

------
nir
Technologies might "need to die" on blogs, but in the real world they get
replaced with better alternatives - once these emerge. Want to replace PHP
with your favorite solution X? Write a better Wordpress, Drupal, vBulletin or
even PhpMySQL alternative in X.

It's incredible to me how the fantastically talented X rockstar ninjas can't
produce a better replacement for, say, Wordpress given how much technology and
our general understanding of building web apps have improved since 2003. Less
blogging, more coding.

------
lupatus
This past weekend, for the fun of it, I setup MongoDB and Node.js on Windows.
After ~3 hours of downloading, reading MongoDB and Node.js example docs, and
looking up some config issues on StackOverflow, I had written a small TODO
list app. Last night, in about 45 minutes, I setup CoffeeScript and translated
my node.js webserver into CoffeeScript, resulting in about 25% fewer lines of
code.

This is by far one of the easiest stack deployments I've ever done. I'm even
thinking about writing a push-button windows installer to do all the
installation and configuration stuff for me in the future. If there is any
interest, I'll share it.

And heck, couple those technologies with jQuery, and I imagine that you could
use CoffeeScript to develop for both the server and client side of a web app.

Easy and way cool.

~~~
davemcd
I'd like to see a windows installer with node.js, coffeescript, mondodb and a
couple apps with some collected docs behind a web server for example. that
approach bootstrapped a lot of Rails coders.

a demo video also helps create a lot of interest.

------
fletcher
It is so nice to be addicted to the coolest abstractions of programming
languages, considering PHP undeniable lack of elegance and orthogonality just
a mess, but I think when there is to get shit done this is not the only
quality a programming language should have. PHP has other qualities: trivial
to deploy, a set of libraries built-in, dispatch/execution fast enough. So I
would love to see PHP improved as a language as replacing it is not so easy at
this point. Instead fixing the language should not be so hard, assuming a
competent core team.

------
bryanh
PHP is not the devil. It has some funky design decisions, but oh well. Mixing
HTML, SQL and logic is the devil. The problem is that PHP makes it too easy to
do (some would say it encourages it).

~~~
tjogin
PHP is not that bad? What other popular language is worse?

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
Lua and JS both come to mind. Neither of them are worse than PHP, but they're
right around that same level of (un)usability and number of pitfalls.

~~~
mtogo
Lua, really? Could you provide some examples?

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
No basic string manipulation, only RE-based stuff.

One-based indices instead of zero-based.

~~~
compay
> No basic string manipulation, only RE-based stuff

It's trivial to write, there are lots of libraries that do this. I've worked
on a _lot_ of string processing code in Lua. It's not as easy as Perl or Ruby
but it's not by any means hard.

> One-based indices instead of zero-based.

Other than violating the expectations of people used to other C-like
languages, this is not in any way even remotely a problem. I don't know
anybody who's spent any significant time with Lua who regards this as more
than a minor detail.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
These are pitfalls and usability concerns. Languages that make you actively
work against the nature of the language are not good; programming languages
should be making this stuff easy.

One-based indices stop being a "minor detail" as soon as you realize that out-
of-bounds indexing doesn't fail, but returns nil. Time to re-examine all of
your code. Combine this with the natural mathematical awkwardness of one-based
indices and it can get really frustrating, really fast.

I had to do Lua for some game design stuff a few years ago, and these were the
two things which stuck out at me almost immediately and bothered me during the
entire ordeal. Maybe I've been spoiled by Python, Perl, Java, C++, C, and
other languages, but it's deeply frustrating how wrong Lua is about this.

~~~
compay
Lua is not perfect. But saying you shouldn't use it because of 1-based indexes
is an overreaction.

> Maybe I've been spoiled by Python, Perl, Java, C++, C, and other languages

Probably. :)

One of Lua's main goals is to provide a language easy for beginners to use for
small tasks. This affects its design in some other rather annoying ways (like
for example, variables being global by default rather than local) but they
were pretty carefully made decisions.

The context of this thread is, "what could be a good replacement for PHP?" I
think because Lua aims to be easy for inexperienced programmers, it's a rather
good choice, even if some of its characteristics can be surprising or annoying
to established developers experienced with other languages.

------
toblender
Killing PHP is like trying to kill English. Too many people know it and use it
day to day for it to go away. It will just carry on with all its
inconsistencies and weirdness.

------
petervandijck
PHP is totally fine, for startups and for web projects.

Examples aplenty.

------
jemeshsu
I can confirm that I will die first before PHP.

------
bundy
I'm mainly a Python programmer now but used to use PHP fairly extensively. I
defended PHP for its ubiquity and how easy it is to get started using it until
I saw what was going on with the development of PHP6. That's pretty much when
I decided that, personally, it's no longer a language worth investing in.

------
ch0wn
_Django is capable but not really what developers expect from MVC, and other
MVC frameworks for Python have much less traction._

Wow, that's a pretty strong statement. I would like to see some sources for it
or at least further explanations.

------
zzzeek
the leap from ORM->code generation->magical thinking!! -> IS BAD , just
hysterics. A clear example of the slippery slope logical fallacy. Good ORMs
are a huge productivity boost and entirely worth it. Those particular PHP
coders who barely know programming (keep in mind, this is just a subset of PHP
programmers I'm referring to) should not use relational databases at all, they
should stick to simple key/value stores - they don't need joins, they don't
need subqueries, they've no concept of transactional isolation, foreign what ?
Just use a K/V.

------
alexwolfe
Ha, don't use it. You must have some other hidden problems if you hate PHP so
much, that's my take away.

Get a hobby, you won't hate PHP so much ;)

------
cafard
Ada. After all, it replaced COBOL, Fortran, various ALGOLs, and C, right?

------
snorkel
I only ask for a language that is readable so that code can be readily
understood among a team developers, and PHP is universally understood. It may
not be cool, but less time is wasted obsessing over being more clever.

------
kayoone
why does he compare PHP to rails ? the latter is a framework, not a language.
PHP has excellent frameworks as well, Symfony 2.0 for example is awesome.

------
mcs
Node.JS will replace it. Not a fanatic Node user either.

~~~
jcampbell1
I have used node and like it, but there is no way it will replace PHP. It is
just too easy to drown in callback soup with node.

------
georgieporgie
_Roughly a decade ago, PHP killed Perl. Not completely, of course; it still
clings on in some environments, it has a sizable legion of die-hard fans, and
legacy apps will need to be maintained in it for decades to come. But as a
language for newcomers, and especially for web developers, it was already
dying in 1999 and was mostly dead by sometime around 2005._

Uh. <http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+php%2C+ruby>

I think newbies just found easier languages to work with than Perl for _web
dev_ , which says nothing about the use or demand for Perl in industry.

~~~
chromatic
_I think newbies just found easier languages to work with..._

Change that infinitive to "to deploy", and you're spot on.

------
hackermom
I'm convinced that PHP is just too big, too popular, and, as the author
realizes and points out, too fast and utility-wise too well-equipped to die at
this point in time. Whatever may be able to kill it off surely won't be Ruby,
Perl nor Python.

~~~
davidu
Perl used to be "too big, too popular" and writing Perl apps that plugged into
mod_perl was what every company was trying to hire for.

PHP will likely be replaced, but not for a long time and it will take time.
And there are still a lot of perl hackers out there too, none suffering (aside
from having to use perl).

------
inopinatus
php lowered the bar to web programming to below "moron" level.

so you will need something equally instant-gratificational.

only without the horrible warts

rails was too clever. stupid people are afraid of clever.

I don't see anything to hand.

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lparry
PHP is great! It's like flypaper, attracting and trapping mediocre devs,
keeping them from writing their terrible code in nicer languages

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escoz
Don't want to be inflamatory, but:

PHP has already been replaced by Ruby/Rails as the good thing that should be
used for new projects. Only PHP developers don't see that.

You lost me when you tried to argue that ORMs are not useful. Its easy to see
why PHP developers think that, though.

~~~
michaelchisari
You're being inflammatory. Rails has nowhere near the install base that PHP
has, and furthermore, it's a framework, not a language, so the comparison is
unequal. Further, setting up and installing Rails is nowhere near as
frictionless as installing, for instance, CodeIgniter. Until that can be said,
Rails is not a viable alternative.

I'm all for a PHP alternative. I use it because it's ubiquitous, but I have no
love for the syntax or the internals. But the only way you can compete with it
is to have the same kind of momentum _mixed with_ the kind of frictionless use
that comes standard.

~~~
pjscott
If installing Rails (or Flask, or whatever) isn't trivial compared to the
difficulty of writing the actual code, then either your project is a toy, or
your web host needs to get its act together.

~~~
dagw
I take it you have never tried to get major changes to core server
infrastructure approved at large bureaucratic institutions. Writing your code
in php is often orders of magnitudes faster, easier and cheaper than getting a
decent RoR setup installed.

~~~
escoz
That's your experience, and highly subjective. And yes, I deploy code to
dozens of enterprise servers for a global company. And that company is looking
into Rails, not PHP.

~~~
michaelchisari
Looking into rails? What are they using currently?

~~~
escoz
.NET, like most enterprises, afaik.

