Showing posts from April, 2011

Your Language Sucks (and about PHP again)

I've found a good wiki-article about programming languages faults and want to share a link: The "winner" is PHP as usual, but Python is also noticed (as well as Ruby :) ). I agree with almost everything there, but in my own eyes Python is still the best choice for programming.
Nevertheless, I also want to point out some other recent links related to PHP (I really shouldn't but just can't help doing it):

PHP SucksPHP Must DieWhat are the horrors of PHP?What factors during the development of PHP contributed to it being such a poorly designed language? And a quote from the interview with Rasmus Lerdorf  (the creator of PHP): I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

Facebook and PHP

There is a common mistake about "If everybody use it, so I also have to use it - millions of people can't be wrong". Apparently, they can, and huge codebase, support and knowledge mean nothing, otherwise we would still use Fortran, Cobol, Basic and other almost died monsters.

Also there is an another common mistake about "If big corporation use it, I also have to use it". It's very doubtful, almost always decision are made in hurry and/or by wrong people and/or without serious consideration. And after some period of time, it's difficult to nullify previous decision because it would require huge efforts. Good example - Facebook.

Let me quote the presentation HipHop for PHP Tech Tasting:
PHP is problematic for Facebook:
High CPU usageHigh memory usageReuse of PHP logic in other systemsExtensions are hard to write for most PHP developers But huge codebase, strange affection towards PHP (in what universe "loose typing and universal array" are good t…