On Saturday, 21 November 2015 at 07:20:07 UTC, Joakim wrote:
PHP scales. This is why people use it. And this is why people
will continue to use it. This is why Facebook, wikipedia,
Baidu, wordpress and many others are using it. There is always
a reason, and if you don't understand it, you are doomed to
miss the point.
Whut? PHP scales?! If you simply mean that it is easily coded
by lowest-common denominator programmers, so it's easy to throw
a bunch of those low-skilled coders on the job, then perhaps
that's why you end up with monstrosities like this:
Yes PHP sclaes. PHP scales like crazy? PHP scales better than
whatever modern framework you'll present me. There is just
nothing that came up with the same execution.
You can say whatever you want about the languages (and there is a
lot to say !) but it gets its execution model right for scaling,
while everybody gets it wrong. And apparently, getting your
execution model right is more important than all the quirk you
pour into the language.
Actually, that's not surprising, Rasmus Ledorf is a specialist of
the web, while he doesn't knows much about PL both theoretically
and practically (by his own admission). As a result, you get a
passable language, but you know what ? That's not the important
part.
http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-the-facebook-ios-application-is-so
http://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-problem/
Potshots at your employer aside- ;) I could have done the same
for Wikipedia and Wordpress, don't know much about Baidu- I'd
honestly like to know how you think PHP scales, because it's
success has always been a perfect example of Gresham's law to
me:
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2015-06.html#e2015-06-14T09_17_33.htm
You can go for it, I've read these article already. Yet, Facebook
as the strongest engineering team I've worked with, and not by a
thin margin. Maybe some of the people writing on the subject have
a strongest team, but statistically, it is very improbable that
more than a ridiculously small fraction of them actually do.
Nobody cares about what some guy on reddit think about the number
of classes there is in the iOS app. What matter is delivering
value to users and customers. And as a matter of fact half of the
top 10 apps are Facebook owned. This is not a one time lucky
shot, this is just a working methodology that delivers.
Just from the comment this one is delicious : "This kind of
attitude is so anti-user." Yeah sure, Facebook is anti users. It
has just more than a billion of them, how many do your app has ?
As to Gresham's law, it's kind of defeated by the move to hack
(http://hacklang.org/) isn't it. But let's not get the facts get
in the way of a good story.
Long story short, nothing reach the level of usage PHP, Node.js
or other techno has at random. You can only go so far not knowing
what you are doing. When you see something that big, and when it
has obvious flaws (I mean, it is not like it is difficult to find
problems in Node.js or PHP), it is really need to take step back
and wonder, what did they get right ? Because obviously, they got
something right. In fact they got something SO right that it can
get over flaws on other aspects. These are lesson in delivering
value to users. One should learn from it rather than dismissing
it.
Node.js is used at linkedin, paypal, ebay, netflix, uber, and who
know else. Realistically, what is the probability that all these
companies are staffed by morons and still succeed at the scale
they do ? Negligible.
Get over your proudness. Node.js and PHP answer actual needs that
is what matters. It doesn't matter how much inconsistency there
is in the languages when no alternative does better.
