Seriously, HN? Downvoting a post by the guy behind the actual project so much that it (currently) ends up at the bottom of the discussion? Wow!
(That said, I don't agree with the author's opinion but it just seemed so disrespectful. Obviously quite some work went into this already and visually, it shows.)
I doubt that 'you can easily find good programmers' for other languages than PHP, depending on the location and the language and your definition of 'good'. PHP is widespread, making it easy to find developers while a lot of the more 'sophisticated' languages are not and I seriously doubt that all developers coming to Ruby or Python are immediately 'good' at it. (There are enough companies which are sticking to PHP because it just works and they can't find good developers for other languages in their region.)
Besides that, it's just really tiresome to see PHP bashing on HN again and again. Don't even get me started on the actual article.
Not too interested in those stats actually, but being a huge hip hop fan I think Rap Genius is a great site and if they can stand that kind of mass-crawling, even better for them!
I am far from an elitist (mainly coding PHP for a living prevents that anyway) but I never thought I'd see posts like this on HN with a decent amount of upvotes. It seems that anything involving PHP bashing gets upvoted instantly lately.
Can we compare PHP and node.js without it appearing as bashing ?
Im critical of PHP, my impression is it has no advantages apart from being more established. I've written code in both, to do similar tasks so feel I can compare them fairly.
My impression is PHP is more messy, with no real advantages to balance out what I would call 'legacy syntax cruft'. I really see node.js as a natural evolution from PHP.
To be fair, its well known that Javascript has some bad parts, some of its own legacy syntax crud, but you can write in a modern style that avoids most of that - so I think its an order of magnitude less cruft in practice than PHP, and small code size reflects this assertion.
I know modern PHP in OO style can be more readable, more amenable to programming in the large than old-skool top-to-bottom PHP... but I think the lispy functional features of Javascript lead to more readable 'code as thought' : map/reduce, passing functions in variables in practice is more useful to me than OO is, it leads to simpler code.
A lot of people feel emotional attachment to PHP, if you love it use it. But all the things I do love about PHP, I love more about the node.js/javascript combination. You might like it too.
Sure we can. And Node.js definitely shows off some functionality that PHP should be jealous of (referring to that 'PHP is meant to die' article). I am probably going to experience it myself soon when tapping into Node.js territoriers. But it's not a proper comparison if you put plain old basic PHP up against an ExpressJS project instead of using a current PHP framework such as Laravel 4.
Having worked with both php and javascript I can definitely see how the syntax alone with node.js would be a breath of fresh air to someone used to PHP. Modern frameworks like Laravel do a lot of good to smooth things out but PHP's implementation of anonymous functions, for instance, feels like such a kludge compared to javascript.
PHP and Windows are often enough at odds that not having a nice REPL is probably going to be the least of your problems. The other poster is right, bring up a VM and be happy.
Huh? PHP and IIS work perfectly fine together. MS has worked really hard to make PHP a first-class language on their OS. PHP 5.3 and IIS 7.5+ are dead simple to get working. Azure features PHP support as one of their main features.
I've even got a client on an ancient Windows 2000 box running PHP. Took all of an hour to get running. Yes, not the most preferred stack, but they aren't at odds.
If you are using IIS/PHP how interchangeable is that with LAMP? In other words if I develop locally using IIS/Windows can I just drop the same code onto a LAMP server without breaking anything?
I run PHP on Windows but with the full LAMP static (Apache running on Windows) and deploy to Linux without modification. I suspect you could also do that with IIS (as PHP abstracts the server interface) but I have not tried it.
I just wanted to point out that it unfortunately doesn't work on Windows. And thanks for the suggestions, I am regularly setting up and using VMs already.
Sometimes I wish Apple had gone with BeOS instead, so that both major desktop OSs wouldn't be native POSIX and thus make developers more aware of portability issues.
It would be better if MS has gone with Posix Standard instead of causing everyone trouble and making proprietary non-standard OS. Portability takes a lot of work, which could've been used to improve the program, instead of trying to get stuff to work with the crappy Windows API. We need less fragmentation, not more. I would hate to write separate programs for Windows, BeOS/Haiku/Mac and *nix.
In my opinion, Unix is much nicer than BeOS. Also, BeOS uses C++, and not all programming languages work nicely with OO. In contrast it is easy to use all languages with C.
Also, why don't you complain when someone makes a program that only works for Windows? There percentage of Unix-only programs is really small compared to number of Windows-only programs.
> It would be better if MS has gone with Posix Standard instead of causing everyone trouble and making proprietary non-standard OS.
POSIX only offers support for command line stuff and daemons. There isn't any GUI POSIX standard, so you only get half-way portability anyway.
Plus anyone with commercial UNIX experience knows that POSIX is like HTML, just because the standard is supported, it does not mean it works the same everywhere.
> Portability takes a lot of work, which could've been used to improve the program, instead of trying to get stuff to work with the crappy Windows API. We need less fragmentation, not more. I would hate to write separate programs for Windows, BeOS/Haiku/Mac and *nix.
Welcome to the 80-90's.
> In my opinion, Unix is much nicer than BeOS. Also, BeOS uses C++, and not all programming languages work nicely with OO.
This is becoming a niche with major OS and compiler vendors slowly focusing on C++.
> In contrast it is easy to use all languages with C.
If the OS has a C ABI, yes.
> Also, why don't you complain when someone makes a program that only works for Windows? There percentage of Unix-only programs is really small compared to number of Windows-only programs.
Because I use computers since 1986 and UNIX used to be just one among many OSs. I only cared about it somewhere around 1994, after an history of several home systems.
No, cygwin won't provide POSIX process features, you need to use something that is not Windows. As others say, use a VM. Unfortunately the hard truth with PHP (and many other languages) is that if you're trying to use Windows as a development environment, you're already starting off at a significant disadvantage. If Windows provided equivalent features in its process model, I'd use them, but AFAIK, it doesn't/can't.
I use Ubuntu on my personal computer and for my side projects, but I'm stuck using Windows at work. In any case, I don't develop in PHP so the question was academic.
(That said, I don't agree with the author's opinion but it just seemed so disrespectful. Obviously quite some work went into this already and visually, it shows.)