Microsoft arms half-wit developers with PHP handgun Terrible things are about to happen in Microsoft's web application hosting environment, Windows Azure. Redmond's Slugworth, desperate to keep up with Mountain View's Chocolate Factory, has introduced support for PHP on their web application platform. Microsoft's Windows Azure is a competitor to Google App Engine and is trying to …
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Google does an adequate job of keeping out the troublemakers by restricting App Engine to Java or Python.
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Seems a bit arbitrary to me. Is there a coincidence here? GWT (Google web toolkit) relies on Java - that couldn't possibly have anything to do with Google's policy could it?
PS: As for PHP - why would anyone waste their time with that when they could be coding in GWT or RoR?
Good programmers can turn their hand to new languages with minimal learning curve and can architect, scale, maintain and extend with the best of them. With notable and talented exceptions, these programmers are degree or postgraduate level educated. They are expensive.
Average programmers learn their languages well and can write efficient, maintainable code. They have taken some higher education or got decent "on the job" training. They command more than the national average wage.
Poor programmers can make a hash of whatever language they learn (figuratively, not literally: why hash when you can run a loop comparing plaintext strings?). They tend to learn VB, PHP, MySQL etc. as they are widely taught in evening classes, consumer magazines and books from Waterstones. It is cheap as peanuts to hire one of these guys.
Now, what do you want, and how much do you want to pay?
There should be no place for snobbery here. Get off your high horse. It's only code. You're not Chaucer.
If anyone is paying over the odds for the wrong type of programmer, more fool them, and good on the programmer!
Yeah, I always like to be told what I'm doing wrong by someone who thinks his startup's going to steal a worthwhile amount of business from Amazon -- of course, that's the startup he started in the wake of the collapse of his previous startup, which was supposed to steal a worthwhile amount of business from Google. I am beginning to think that maybe there's a credibility issue here, you guys.
Dziuba might have a pair of programmer's balls the size of boulders -- I'm sure he does, and that he keeps them in a special room in his house where he goes sometimes late at night to look at them -- but Milo.com? Pressflip.com? I've flushed better business plans than these. Can maybe next time the Reg needs a periodic ranter, y'all pick out somebody who can be taken a little bit seriously?
-- signed, someone who no one needs to take seriously.
PHP ain't a particularly good language. In fact, its OO model sucks like a supermassive galaxy-core black hole.
Nevertheless, it's the most popular Web programming language out there for a reason. I have been a pro C++ programmer for a couple of decades, and I'm really, really familiar with snooty bastards declaring that "C++ is the spawn of Satan", and that it gives "Too much power to bad programmers", "LITHP ith the wave of the futhutre, etc." yadda, yadda.
BTW: I now program primarily in PHP. After writing some really slow crap using the OO model, I rapidly reacquainted myself with my procedural roots, and it does me well.
I don't particularly like MS, but their .NET platform is an excellent venue for corporate-scale Web applications. If I were running a big Web shop, I'd seriously consider it.
Since I'm doing most of my Web stuff on the side by myself, PHP lets me write some very powerful stuff without having a team of programmers and a massive set of preflight test servers.
I've once seen an app written in VB -almost exclusively macros, if you ask-, backed up by... wait for it... excel spreadsheets for data management. PHP was but a foetus at the time, but I'm sure the *erm* "developper" responsible for this has now *erm* coded a couple web interfaces -in PHP- for his various VB masterpieces. It might sound a bit extreme, but go have a walk around the web and it won't sound that extreme anymore...
Funny how people keep saying "PHP is great if you know what you're doing". NOPE. PHP is a piece of smelly swine waste, _because_ it allows for the sloppiest coding practices known to Man. Also, Perl sucks moose balls and Java is for sissies, if you ask me, but PHP clearly gets the "dumb queen" crown -OK, make it a draw, after all there _are_ VB programmers around.
And that's because of the first and only Rule in the IT world, from which all the other can be derived: when you design a tool that *can* be used in a clueless way by braindead morons, you know it *will* be used in a clueless way by braindead morons. Especially if you give them an automated tool to commit their atrocities.
Now I must admit that it's probably possible to write a coherent piece of PHP if you really want*, but if you have the skillz, why not use a real language? Back to The Rule: when you have real languages on one hand, and PHP in the other, you know the real coding will be done in a real language, while PHP will be used to build piles of hacks upon hacks upon hacks (skyscrapers held together with duct tape, as a previous commenter rightly typed).
The article is quite funny too.
Now for the article's downsides: where the feck are the fracking "f*ck"s? Also, the proposition "which means they both fail at failing." is a failing fail. Should have read:"which means they both fail at fail".
*purely hypothetical, I doubt anyone ever tried
I've seen some absolute rubbish written in PHP. Java and Python weed out the weenies by making it harder to do things.
That's not to say that PHP is a bad language. Its just in a majority of cases, its used by idiots in the worst possible way. As a bonus, half the time you can't even see what's wrong.
The PHP/MySQL combo is just a bottomless well of pain to anyone that does any real development. MyISAM tables sure are fast, but they don't have referential integrity, or transactions. Ugh. Ask a PHP developer about prepared queries, and watch them dribble.
You can do great things with PHP. Its lightweight, and decently fast, its just most of the people out there with PHP experience are pure crap, writing slow, shambling, resource hogs.
Firstly...
Anyone on here arguing that one form of code is better / more supportable / more readable than another really needs to get hold of a copy of Havels "The Memorandum". Languages are messy and unstructured because they are used by humans for human situations. Humans are messy (and unstructured).
Secondly..
VBA macros, Access databases and PHP all get used largely because an enthusiastic amateur in the business department got the job done cheaply and efficiently while the IT department were still writing the thrid draft of the High Level Business requirement. Sometimes scalability is more important in people than languages.
Paris, because she knows that a quick bang is (sometimes) better than a slow burn....
I am assuming that at least some of the posters here are native-born UK/US citizens, boasting at least a secondary school education. Sadly, I suspect that many have advanced college degrees, which is really, really depressing.
How about we learn our own spoken and written language before we go about arguing over computer programming languages?
Yes ok PHP is nice an easy but lets be honest now, the majority of dynamic websites out there run off the back of PHP, so it can't be that bad.
Oh and I am guessing you really don't know the weight of a rifle these days!
"For those of you that aren't web developers, this is a bit like trying to kill a person with a rifle by clubbing them in the foot with it, hoping that the blunt end of the weapon will break the skin somehow, and your victim will die of an infection because he's in a place so remote that there's no access to antibiotics."
Considering if you hit someone hard enough with the "foot" (heel or butt I think you may have been looking for there) in the head you could quite easily kill them!
"I am assuming that at least some of the posters here are native-born UK/US citizens, boasting at least a secondary school education. Sadly, I suspect that many have advanced college degrees, which is really, really depressing. How about we learn our own spoken and written language before we go about arguing over computer programming languages?"
As a non-"native-born UK/US citizen", I could have been hurt by your implicit assumption that non-native English speakers have a poor grasp on the language*. But more importantly, you apparently assume that UK and US citizens share a common language. Maybe you should try a little experiment: if you're a Brit, go to the US and try to use your Ol'Blighty English on a native(+5 points per New-Yorker, +10 points per californian, +100 points per mid-westerner and per yuppie). If you're a Yank, go to the UK and try to communicate with the locals (+30 points per mancunian, +50 points per Scott, +10 Baaaahh per Welsh).
In any case you're in for a surprise (and I'm not even talking about strine).
Just sayin'
*But I'm past that. Of course. Erm.
...some of the finest Queen's English I've ever heard has been spoken by Dutch German, Italian and African folks.
Some of the best writing I've seen has been done by folks with thick Cockney accents, Welsh brogue, Alabama Redneck or Brooklyn Italian accents.
It's when we get snooty with each other over computer languages in barely legible prose that I get so depressed; especially when you consider that any college worth their accreditation (in the UK or the US) has a minimal English language requirement (except maybe Gallaudet University).
BTW: I'm not a native-born US or UK person myself, and I don't have an advanced degree.
Why don't we have an icon of a smiley face sticking out its tongue?
Yes, it exists for .Net, it's called; ReSharper (jetbrains.com/resharper), StyleCop (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis) , Visual Studio, nDepend (http://www.ndepend.com/), Reflector + dependency plugin (http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/), chess for multi-threaded heisenbugs (http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Peli/Getting-started-with-CHESS-in-Visual-Studio-2008/) and nunit (http://www.nunit.org/index.php).
These tools LITERALLY FIX BAD CODE AUTOMATICALLY. So in your face :p!
Loved the article and sent it to my friends.
" Shit code is shit code no matter the language. Find something else to bitch about."
Now that's clever. Hey, why don't you try and code an unreadable-by-lack-of-indentation piece of Python? Or a piece of Java unmaintable because variables are not declared? Waddayamean, you can't? So maybe some languages are less tolerant of bad coding practices than others? And maybe a "language" that allows (encourages, even) bad code is a pile of fail waiting* to happen?
*not really waiting anymore, if you ask me and the intarwubz.
Just substitute Islam for PHP and you can see the USAian "fear of the unknown" leaping off the page. Some bad man has told Ted a scary story about PHP and then he made the rest up for our own good.
This drivel isn't amusing and has all the information value of a Rush Limbaugh diatribe.
"Yes, it exists for .Net, it's called; ReSharper (jetbrains.com/resharper), StyleCop (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis) , Visual Studio, nDepend (http://www.ndepend.com/), Reflector + dependency plugin (http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/), chess for multi-threaded heisenbugs (http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Peli/Getting-started-with-CHESS-in-Visual-Studio-2008/) and nunit (http://www.nunit.org/index.php)."
Wow you must be a bunch of code monkeys to need all that!!!
Silly lad. Your choice of tool reflects your ability eh? Maybe it reflects what you have to hand/what you have a budget for (including time).
PHP is really good for most simple data-backed web things. How better to learn scalability than through failing to scale? But how better to secure funding for your well-designed large-scale creation than a decent cheap POC?
Oh, and I've seen a whole hear of little cheap PHP & Perl ideas work just fine, with no budget and no fuss. I've seen no 'proper' software projects deliver without extreme pain, and many many which did not deliver at all.
Tools for the job my friend.
Cheers, al.
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I also have 10+ years experience in C++, quite a bit harder than Java, and saw some pretty horrible code. Making a language harder doesn't prevent programmers to abuse it. Where did you get that notion? Ever heard of COM?
I played with PHP for a few months and saw as much clean code as ugly code.
It's just different. One's a scripting language the other's strongly typed language. You can create shite with both.
to "jake" sayin that software can't kill anyone.
well software running a control system of a highly dangerous activity CAN KILL
yes this software does exist, and I hope it isn't running on php.
I will leave as an exercise to everyone to see if they can imagine how bad software CAN kill people.
You spout ire and doomsayer comments about an enabling technology...
The fault is not with MS or the PHP developers... you are blaming MS for opening up resources that you wish were a protectorate of the PHP geekdom... from a wide base of poor coding comes a world of developing developers and enablement for many.
Please keep your perspective and respect the Register readers intelligence
Everyone thinks that their car is the best, and everyone else on the road is an idiot. In all probability a 2.0 Ford Focus in the hands of The Stig will go around the track quicker than a super car driven by a numpty (fast through the straights, spins off on the difficult bits).
IF you can afford a super car, and IF you are prepared to spend the time learning to drive it, then the results will be worth the effort. But those are two pretty important "IF"s
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