php requests

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Isn't a programming forum somewhere someone would go to learn a little something about programming? I think that's what the OP was trying to do before his thread got hijacked.

To be fair, he did get answers.

 

[GaryJohnson]

To be fair, he did get answers.

Ah, then by all means, please continue the bonus superflous argument.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Isn't a programming forum somewhere someone would go to learn a little something about programming? I think that's what the OP was trying to do before his thread got hijacked.

Certainly. I was referring to EricMartello who has demonstrated no interest in actually learning, just religiously defending his language of choice.

 

[EricMartello]

And you did? I'm not writing a research paper and I'm not going to spend an hour hunting down references for a web forum post. And you proclaim to be good at searching Google and Wikipedia, so knock yourself out.

You cannot provide any examples to support what you are saying because none exist.

How would you propose they migrate millions of lines of code? You don't migrate that. To a large extent, you're stuck with it. As far as I know, they are writing some new code in other languages.

Simply because you cannot think of a method to do this does not mean it is impossible. If the devs at Facebook wanted to migrate to another platform they could have long before they got to the point they are at now. I wonder why they didn't...hmmm...

I don't know why you think it's convincing to drop names of big companies like that. Big companies make just as terrible of decisions as anyone else, and particularly with large code bases, inertia is a problem that locks you into whatever you decided many years ago, however flawed that decision may have been.

When you can support this with a real world example, combined with a suitable alternative, you may be onto something...till then...you got nothing.

Sure, everyone realizes this stuff. My point was that PHP has no compelling features other than being easy for newbies to get started with. Being easy for newbies to get started with has little relation with being a high quality language that is suitable for maintaining large applications over the years, and in fact probably negatively impacts it. (In PHP's case it certainly does)

Uhuh...spoken from experience. Are u mad?

You're such a big baby. Can't you discuss something without talking like an immature brat?

Yeah, u mad...they made forums for people with sub-average intelligence. Check out 4chan...you'll feel right at home.

Okay. Again, a really convincing argument. I know nothing and just search the web to respond to people on web forums.

You really have done nothing beyond troll someone else's thread.

Sure they care. Lots of other people hate PHP and love using better languages.

Who are these people again?

Clearly you can't behave like a grown up. Maybe you should troll somewhere else.

Clearly you've out of things to say because you've been repeating yourself for the last 3 posts.

 

[EricMartello]

Certainly. I was referring to EricMartello who has demonstrated no interest in actually learning, just religiously defending his language of choice.

Do you really think that you and the other [TOS] can provide a compelling reason to change from PHP to another scripting language? Used for its intended purposes, PHP does exceptionally well...oh and, you're still a moron. Just thought I'd point that out so we avoid using big words or complicated concepts when talking to you.

You've been warned repeatedly. Cease the ad hominem attacks and profanity in this forum or take a vacation.

Markbnj
Programming moderator

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Do you really think that you and the other dipshit can provide a compelling reason to change from PHP to another scripting language? Used for its intended purposes, PHP does exceptionally well...oh and, you're still a moron. Just thought I'd point that out so we avoid using big words or complicated concepts when talking to you.

Wasn't your argument earlier that PHP is an excellent general-purpose language? Why are you backpedaling now?

Who are these people again?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/php-sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter.html
http://maurus.net/resources/programming-languages/php/
http://www.bitstorm.org/edwin/en/php/
http://spyced.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-php-sucks.html
http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/php/
http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2003/Aug/13/HATE-PHP
http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/09/why-i-hate-php.html

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Do you really think that you and the other dipshit can provide a compelling reason to change from PHP to another scripting language? Used for its intended purposes, PHP does exceptionally well...oh and, you're still a moron. Just thought I'd point that out so we avoid using big words or complicated concepts when talking to you.

You have yet to make a case for your language of choice faith.

 

[EricMartello]

Wasn't your argument earlier that PHP is an excellent general-purpose language? Why are you backpedaling now?

I dunno, was it? Go ahead and show me where i said that. Funny that you talk like you believe "you got me" but you're still slogging through your own [TOS] as everyone just laughs at you.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/php-sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter.html
http://maurus.net/resources/programming-languages/php/
http://www.bitstorm.org/edwin/en/php/
http://spyced.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-php-sucks.html
http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/php/
http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2003/Aug/13/HATE-PHP
http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/09/why-i-hate-php.html

Ahh yes, a series of objective, recent articles...2003? Lol...nice.

You have yet to make a case for your language of choice faith.

I don't need to make any case. Look around you...what is this forum using and countless others like it? You're taking the position that there's something inherently wrong with PHP. It does what it's designed to do and it does it well.

Got anything new to add? Doubt it...how much do you make? Like $15K per year? Or is that a high estimate...I heard they bumped up minimum wage but I'm being generous in presuming that you actually work at all and don't spend most of your time shoving donettes down your throat.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

This kind of aggression isn't generally tolerated in the technical forums, Mr Martello. But I wouldn't expect anything more from a PHP script kiddie.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

There is clearly no point in trying to speak to him like a rational human being.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Isn't he the guy who couldn't read a no parking sign in DC and created a massive troll thread? LOL. Got pwned about a dozen times in that and resorted to arguing about what no parking vs no stopping means? Oh right. That's him.

 

[Markbnj]

The personal attacks and profanity in this thread need to stop, or once again we'll have to lock a perfectly reasonable topic and apologize to the OP who, after all, probably just wanted an answer to a question. The thread will be reviewed by the senior moderators for infractions. Now clean it up or IBTL.

Markbnj
Programming moderator

 

[Kirby]

Ah, then by all means, please continue the bonus superflous argument.

Came for the answers, stayed for the lulz.

 

[ScottSwing]

http://maurus.net/resources/programming-languages/php/

"Here’s what makes PHP a toy and not a tool."

Indeed. That's why I like using it.

You don't program in C like it's Java. You don't use Perl like it's Python. So why are you expecting PHP to be all of these at once?

I don't understand flaming the original poster for wanting to use PHP as a daemon even though that's the language he knows how to use.

 

[Markbnj]

"Here’s what makes PHP a toy and not a tool."

Indeed. That's why I like using it.

You don't program in C like it's Java. You don't use Perl like it's Python. So why are you expecting PHP to be all of these at once?

I don't understand flaming the original poster for wanting to use PHP as a daemon even though that's the language he knows how to use.

To be fair I don't think the OP was flamed. In the context of the question it was pretty clear that an explanation of the role of a web script vs. the role of a running background process would not be wasted.

The thread then got derailed on the subject of php's fitness for the daemon task, which didn't involve the OP at all.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

I don't understand flaming the original poster for wanting to use PHP as a daemon even though that's the language he knows how to use.

I think it is probably his best choice, and it's not the worst thing in the world. It's just unfortunate.

 

[Ken g6]

http://maurus.net/resources/programming-languages/php/

That's the first thing about PHP I've seen that really concerns me at all: the references mess. But I haven't used them at all, and I guess most people are using PHP 5 now?

On the other hand, "1"==0 doesn't concern me as much. Try that in Perl and you'll get the same. Compare numbers as numbers and strings as strings: "1" eq 0 in Perl or strcmp("1",0) in PHP will get the right answer. It's just one of those things you have to know about the language.

By the way, I found this interesting and relevant, linked from Coding Horror: "a lot of skilled PHP coders have become incredibly elitist and rude." 🙄

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

The thing about PHP's badness is that it's not really about specific things. Every language has quirks. The reason PHP sucks is that quirks are the rule, not the exception. It's extremely inconsistent and unpredictable. It's a hodge podge mess that was thrown together over many years without any regard for conceptual consistency. To get anything done you have to constantly refer to documentation for trivial things like parameter order or calling convention or tedious things like that. The language has no soul and slaps together whichever features they thought would be easiest to implement.

This is the background of why PHP is bad. Now, to make it even worse, this background caused good programmers to gravitate away from PHP. Sure, they might have to do it for their day job to pay the bills, but they don't enjoy it, and they don't contribute high quality libraries. They're busy doing that for languages they actually enjoy using. Their surplus mental capital is being spent elsewhere. They expend the bare minimum of thought on their PHP work because it's painful to expend any more, and hey, everyone else is doing it too.

So the bad language scared away good programmers, which lead to a dearth of high quality libraries, which again scares away more good programmers. It's a vicious cycle.

Here's a fun story. One time, I needed to do some time zone arithmetic. Not realizing that it was in PHP's standard library, I used a PEAR library which was incredibly out of date. I found a blatant bug which caused horrible side effects by mangling the $TZ environment variable. Doing a time zone calculation by manipulating an environment variable screams *hack*, but whatever, I worked around the bug and submitted a bug report and went along my way. My bug was never responded to, of course. Later, I realized the PEAR time zone library had apparently been pulled into PHP itself, pretty much wholesale, so I was able to drop the dependency, which was nice. I also figured the bug was probably fixed! Woohoo! But it turns out that in the PHP version, the same bug still exists. You can't do time zone calculations without triggering a massive bug which alters the state of your program and causes any date/time-related code after it to be completely wrong. And no one has noticed or fixed this in *years*.

Another interesting thing is searching for "<language> time zone." What do I get with Python? I get well-written third-party libraries, thoughtful blog posts, official bug reports, Stack Overflow posts. These are all things I want to find and are highly useful.

What do I get when I do the search for PHP? Crap. I get the terrible official documentation, I get low-quality forum posts on sites I've never heard of, where ignorant people teach each other hacks that no one should be doing; I get low-quality "blog" posts on big ad-filled commercial websites that probably paid someone $2.00 to write the article, and I get freaking w3schools, straight out of 2002.

Of course, this is just one anecdote, and you could say it's not representative. But my point is that it is! Working with PHP consists of hackish, ugly workarounds. All. The. Time. And the community is representative of that. I know the "X is a ghetto" thing is passe now, but PHP is a ghetto.