back to article Developers more 'satisfied' with PHP than other codes

You down with PHP? (Yeah, and Ruby) The surveying snoops at Evans Data say developers that use PHP are more satisfied with the scripting language overall than those who program with Ruby, Perl, Javascript, Flex, and VB script. Evans Data said it polled over 500 developers and IT professionals world-wide, asking them to rank …

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  1. E

    @Beat me to it

    On what do you base your claim that PHP programmers have little exposure to other languages?

  2. Christopher E. Stith
    Thumb Down

    There is celarly some misunderstanding.

    Perl doesn't have one of the three best communities? I guess http://perlmonks.org, http://use.perl.org, http://cpan.org, http://search.cpan.org, comp.lang.perl.misc, comp.lang.perl.moderated, comp.lang.perl.modules, #perl on freenode, http://www.pm.org and the global PerlMongers user groups that site represents, the annual Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC) in North America and in Europe, the annual Perl Geek Cruise, http://www.perlbuzz.com, and O'Reilly's Perl.com have all been outdone?

    Let me know when Ruby runs on more platforms than Perl, please.

    PowerShell and Ruby offer better client-side scripting than Flex and ActionScript? Do these people know what "client-side" means? What clients are we talking about? The Windows OS? A browser? A Unixish OS (please show me PowerShell there!)? ActionScript is in every Flash client out there. Flex can target every Flash client. HaXe can target JavaScript, the neko VM, or Flash, but wasn't even included.

    Anyone who ranks PHP so high for maintainability has never had to upgrade the runtime system for it and had to rewrite a good portion of their code. Those of us who have know better. A single namespace for everything doesn't exactly aid maintainability, either.

    PHP is near the top for security? Really? Over JavaScript, Python, and Perl? If you search just for vulnerability reports on SecurityFocus you get 428 pages of reports for "PHP", containing 6,414 reports. "Perl" returns 40 pages with 595 reports. "Python" returns 5 pages with just 71 results. "JavaScript" (which has many disparate implementations included) returns 29 pages including 423 results. "Ruby" is 3 pages for 32 results, and "Flash" gets 7 pages for 101 results ("ActionScript" by itself gets just one page with 6 results). "F#" did worse than several others, too: 20 pages for 299 results. "VBScript" got 3 pages for 31 results. "PowerShell" oddly enough has had 0 vulnerability reports. "Flex" gets just 3 vulns. Keep in mind, too, that Perl and Python are over 20 years old, and have had most of those vulnerabilities fixed for a very long time.

    Now, some of these reports will of course be spurious, but they show a trend. The PHP vulnerabilities reported on SF are 6,414 as stated before. The sum of all the others is 1,561. So for security, we're supposed to choose a language with more than four times the vulnerability reports of all the other languages in the survey combined? Clearly the tools offered for the PHP language are themselves buggy and also do not very well support writing secure code (as some of the reports are with applications implemented with the language).

    It appears people were not selected for the survey very carefully. They are giving impressions of languages that are just incorrect. The languages included miss completely on Unix shell languages (such as bash, ksh, zsh, csh), Tcl, C#, HaXe (okay, so that doesn't have a very big following yet), Lua, all the Lisp variants used for scripting (eLisp, InterLisp, NewLisp, guile,...), and probably more.

    Perhaps the survey is an accurate representation of someone's views somewhere, but that sampling of people seems isolated from the real world.

  3. Unlimited
    Boffin

    all good

    Survey is completely flawed, but most of the comments are even more flawed.

    All the widely used languages are good. Why do you think they are widely used?

    They all have an appropriate place to be used.

    To those who say php is awful:

    Client comes to you and says: I need to build an app which can be deployed on nearly all shared hosting accounts. What are you going to choose? .NET? no, way too many linux hosts. Java? Nope, not widely supported enough by web hosts. PHP? Supported by practically every web host on the planet? Yep.

    For anyone who says: "I do all my coding in X"

    Are you doing all your coding in your parents basement? Or are you in a commercial environment, insisting on using your favourite language no matter what the project?

  4. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

    News: Evans Data reveals the bleedin' obvious

    What's next for this brilliant team of analysts? Survey 500 couch-warmers to discover that a majority prefer a buffet of unhealthy, poorly-prepared fast food to taking the time to cook a good meal?

    Considering the quality of the average web app, "winning" a contest like this one is nothing to be proud of. PHP - a grotesque collection of ill-considered ideas - can have its well-deserved cardboard crown.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Scripting language....

    Pah... I bet they eat quiche too :-p

  6. Kevin Bailey

    @Chewy

    If you check I think you'll find that .NET 1.1 did not have any classes for transferring files over FTP. .NET 2.0 introduced it but it was horrible.

    As for moving ASP.NET sites around

    http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=ASP.NET+problem+moving+site&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

    will give you an insight into the World of Pain. Did you have 1.1 installed, did you remove it before inatalling 2.0 - or was 2.0 installed over. and that dll will not compile because... ...... ..... losing will to live.

    Another client has a .NET site which they can't move on to another machine - it will only compile on this Italian guys machine. I mean - compile? It's supposed to be a portable 'scripting language!

    Two other major problems with ASP.NET:

    1. For anything non-trivial you have to buy visual studio. I tried to use the basic Web Matrix tool mto keep the code clean before realising that everyone else was using VS and just allowing the tons of bloat into their code.

    And when I installed VS .NET itself stopped working on that machine.

    2. ASP.NET is not cross-browser compatible. Page repositioning after round trip only worked on IE. I even had some MSCE twonk trying to excuse it by saying double speak about extra IE only features were a bonus and not everything had to be for all browsers. Double think at it's finest.

  7. Pierre
    Joke

    Old news

    A developper satisfaction polls says PHP developpers are easily satisfied. Move along, nothing to see here.

  8. Andy

    Only 500?

    What is the point of asking 500 developers exactly? hardly a large enough group fpr proper results.

    Also whatever a developer uses most (by choice!) he (or she) will think is best...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @ Kevin Bailey

    "As for VB script - last time I looked in couldn't even transfer files over FTP - I had to call the command line ftp command!"

    Utter uninformed rubbish. I maintain countless VBS scripts that do FTP directly with no recourse to shelling the command line FTP client.

    I you think this is the only way to do FTP using VB Script, you need to take a refresher course. Neither wonder it gets a bad reputation with ham-fisted deployments like this.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Rubbish Survey skewed in PHPs favour

    Why on earth were people even asked about VB Script when it's been dead legacy technology for about 6 years or more now.

    Completely biased survey, engineered to bring PHP to the front by not including asp.net (either c# or vb.net) and including asp (VB Script) instead.

    I've tried PHP, Perl, ASP/VB Script, JAVA and .NET and can categorically say that, for my uses, .NET is by far the most intuitive and most powerful by far.

    PHP is a mess, coded by hobbyist and full of countless bugs and gaping sql injection type security holes.

    There's no way to separate style from content for starters, the error handling is shocking and the whole language is frankly useless for any type of medium size and larger object orientated or n-tier project.

    Look at facebook, for an example of how badly PHP runs on a large scale project.

    If you're a serious web developer who knows their stuff you'd be working with one of the object orientated frameworks and not still using the joke that is web scripting.

    If you're a hobbyist or one of those idiots that think ASP.NET and ASP are the same thing (like MANY of the php developers that I know) then it's probably accurate that you'll be more satisfied with PHP.

    Someone mentioned it's not cross browser compatible, last I checked my current project worked on all the current browsers so I don't know where that came from. If you're really having problems then .NET has the App_Browsers namespace for dealing with it.

    Also, copying a .NET website from one server to another is only a "world of pain" if you're not very good at your job.

  11. Fenwar

    a few replies

    """I like how "all those code samples to copy/paste" is considered a bad thing. Because saving time on a project by reusing code someone has already made is such a terrible thing and should never be done!"""

    Reusing well-written code libraries rather than reinventing the wheel is one thing. Googling your current task and pasting in the first snippet you find that seems to achieve it, without any understanding of what it's doing, is another. To be fair, I guess the same thing can happen in whatever language you choose. IM[recent]E it just seems more prevalent in PHP, but a decade ago, this was exactly how I learned Javascript ;-)

    Don't get me wrong - PHP is one of the best tools around if you're knocking together a website. Feel free to drop out of the interpreter during nested if/else statements if dumping HTML is going to get the job done quicker; I'm not going to keep a man from his pint! And having tried both, I'd much rather be working in PHP than ASP.

    My personal aversion to PHP is partly fuelled by the fact that I had to pick up the pieces of a site written using pretty much the above Google-and-paste technique, and figure out how to accommodate the fact that it was about to be translated into Chinese...

    Maybe it's also because even after extensive rewriting, introducing an OO approach, and even applying consistent formatting, PHP code still looks dog ugly. "$object->member" is just a brain-wrong compared to "object.member". Stare at a screenful of PHP and a screenful of Python for 8 hours and I know which one will make you wish you'd put all the sharp objects in a locked drawer. Even squiggly brackets and public static void main( String[] aaaargh ) are easier on the eye than that.

    """ why don't you get involved in it's development and fix what you think is broken instead of spouting your somewhat arrogant ignorance about the language? """

    I don't know if it's possible to submit "ugliness" as a bug report. I've just taken a peek at the forthcoming namespace syntax (backslashes...!) and I don't see it getting any better. All because somewhere really early on it was decided to use the dot for string concatenation, and that meant they decided to use -> for object accessors, and... and... PHP's syntax betrays the fact that it's been built kludge-on-kludge.

    Which brings me to this:

    """On what do you base your claim that PHP programmers have little exposure to other languages?"""

    This wasn't my quote - but someone seemed to "agree" with the above; my own point was with regards to the survey sample.

    Surely the only way PHP can ever outscore Python on "Maintainability/Readability" is if the person doing the marking has never actually read (let alone written or maintained) Python code. Of all the languages I've come across, Python has been the easiest in terms of quickly understanding Someone Else's Code without even needing reference to documentation. (And if you can't follow an indentation convention properly, please don't ever make another person read your code in any language.)

    I've never used Ruby myself but even a cursory glance suggests to me that its readability is similar to Python's (i.e. miles nicer than PHP).

    In the other categories, fair enough. Python's online documentation, although complete, is horrible to use (the current search facility is a case in point, retrieving and drawing the results one at a time using a needless AJAX-y step, and sorting them *alphabetically* - try finding the entry for "str()" ...) and performance as a server-side language is significantly slower than PHP.

    But does anyone seriously think PHP is more readable than Python?

  12. Kevin Bailey

    @Greg Fleming

    OK - paste in a link to the FTP class in the VB script used in .NET 1.1 and I'll accept that I didn't find it.

    Here's a few showing that it ASP.NET 1.1 didn't have it

    http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2004/05/ftp_net_11.html

    <quote>

    Recently, I was asked by a client to create a programmatic interface to FTP. I expected to turn to the help files and find an FTP class with methods like get and put and so forth. Oops. No such class. Fortunately, the FTP protocol is very simple, and the .NET framework does provide enough of the plumbing to make creating an FTP client very easy. My newest article on the O’Reilly Network shows how to do it; it is easier than you might imagine.

    </quote>

    I especially like the 'Oops. No such class.'

    This one's from Microsoft - who maybe clueless I admit - but they should know about any FTP class they have written:

    http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/netfxnetcom/thread/b6a7c2c9-e889-4536-afbe-a0ff0df801be/

    <quote>

    .Net 1.1 doesnot include any class FtpClient but .Net 2.0 does. So many people have open source implementation of Ftp Client for .Net 1.1! You can use one of them.

    Seee:

    http://www.csharphelp.com/archives/archive9.html

    http://www.dnzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=223

    Cheers ;-)

    </quote>

    One more - I think you get the point.

    http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t77839-ftp-and-net-11.html

    <quote>

    This is a one time announcment: I have posted an article on the O'Reilly web

    site on how to write an ftp client in 1.1.

    You can access this article at

    http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet...net.htm?page=1

    You can find a complete list of my other on-line articles by going to my web

    site: http://www.LibertyAssociates.com and clicking on Books, and then on

    Articles.

    Thank you.

    Jesse Liberty,

    Author Programming C# 3rd Edition

    Programming ASP.NET 2nd Edition

    </quote>

    So, to be clear - ASP.NET 1.1 using VBS did not have any commands for transferring files using FTP. I know, I was pretty shocked myself - and I then used the command line version.

    Remember - 'Microsoft never fails to let you down'

  13. Jax

    F#

    Erm... I don't think that is a scripting language. It runs on the .NET CLR and is compiled into MSIL which then is translated into machine code.

    Unless there is another F# that exists?

  14. Kevin Bailey

    @Isamu

    Steady on old chap - you astro-turfers are getting a bit heated are you not?

    >>There's no way to separate style from content for starters

    Ummm... There's a whole MVC thing going on in many, many ways - look at the Zend framework for the one we like.

    >>Look at facebook, for an example of how badly PHP runs on a large scale project.

    Ummm... I see they chose not to use .NET. FB isn't entirely PHP - but I'd say it shows how well PHP can scale myself ...

  15. Pierre

    Here is the title

    Sounds like someone got pissed that their fave MS piece of swiss cheese isn't even ranked for ease of use...

  16. Mark Pawelek

    The poll makes no sense

    The poll doesn't make sense. If they are polling about languages then what about c++, c#, java, vb.net, etc. [How did F# get an entry in there!!%#?]

    If they are polling about 'scripting languages' then in what sense is PHP a 'scripting language'. PHP is a web-development framework, as such it should be compared with ASP.NET, Ruby, GWT and various Java frameworks. Of all the web developers I've polled - they all prefer GWT (in terms of ease of use, maintenability). The vast majority of developers don't have much experience with multiple web-development frameworks so only a tiny minority can be polled to say which is the best.

  17. Christopher Hogan

    To stir things up

    >>And Ruby, does it even have a language specification?

    And how many languages have an ISO standard?

    APL, that old beast has .NET, web deployment, object orientation and functional programming (not many languages can do both properly), array handling like a dream, generally more features than you can shake a stick at.

    OK, readability you cry (if you've even even seen it), but if you can't read mathematical symbols, then you aren't good enough to write APL anyway

  18. Alastair

    @Kevin Bailey

    Err:

    http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=PHP+problem+moving+site&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

    returns about 300,000 more results than the ASP.NET one. So by the criteria you just made up, PHP is worse. Personally, I've had 'worlds of pain' before setting up PHP (especially when I try and use GD to (gasp) read GIF files), but I don't try to claim that every install of PHP is faulty.

    "Another client has a .NET site which they can't move on to another machine - it will only compile on this Italian guys machine. I mean - compile? It's supposed to be a portable 'scripting language!"

    Err... no it's not. It's supposed to be a compiled programming language. What you *want* it to be is something else entirely. As for your Italian problem, I'd suggest you've set it up wrong.

    "For anything non-trivial you have to buy visual studio. I tried to use the basic Web Matrix tool mto keep the code clean before realising that everyone else was using VS and just allowing the tons of bloat into their code."

    Visual Studio Express will cover most bases. Not all, I'll admit. Coupling SharpDevelop (for nitty-gritty coding) and VSE (for tying up to the clientside) would probably sort you out. But it's a paid-for MS product, what were you expecting?

    "ASP.NET is not cross-browser compatible. Page repositioning after round trip only worked on IE. I even had some MSCE twonk trying to excuse it by saying double speak about extra IE only features were a bonus and not everything had to be for all browsers. Double think at it's finest."

    1.1 was terrible, cross-browser wise. Later versions were much better, but in any case I usually ignore the client-side Javascript provided and use a JS library instead. A route MS are taking themselves by adopting JQuery next time round- full cross browser compatibility. Besides, PHP doesn't offer that stuff at all...

    I'm not trying to say that ASP.NET is the best solution ever, but good grief, at least come up with some reasonable objections rather than "there have sometimes been problems installing it" and "I have to compile it"...

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