On Saturday, 21 November 2015 at 10:29:57 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
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.
Not what I've heard. Thankfully, I've been able to avoid using
PHP, but like John, I wonder what you think it does right in its
scaling.
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.
Actually, it is. What percentage of the PHP code out there needs
to scale much? Facebook is the exception that proves the rule.
I disagree with your notion that all the large orgs you mentioned
as PHP users are dispassionately comparing a bunch of languages
and chose PHP because it was the _only one that scales_ to the
extent they need, and that was so important to them that they
overlooked all its other problems. And even if PHP scales better
as you claim, that's not particularly important for most of the
PHP code out there.
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.
Several people argue in those reddit threads that the problem
likely isn't weak engineers but a corporate culture that doesn't
value a designed architecture and code quality. Perhaps that
hasn't mattered so far, but it likely will at some point.
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 ?
If you give away a free app that lets people share pics with each
other and that's funded by VC millions, you can get very popular.
Instagram and Snapchat have also shown that. That doesn't mean
the tech is any good or that the company will last.
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.
Doesn't that prove it? Why create something that you feel is
better otherwise? And assuming Hack _is_ better, not like it's
killing PHP yet, further supporting the law. ;)
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.
Well, to begin with, none are running their core services on
node.js that I know of. Is it possible that they all have their
usual quota of morons simply picking node.js for smaller projects
that don't matter because it's the current coolness? Very likely.
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.
Of course they got something right, as there are scores of
languages that sit unused. But that doesn't mean they are
technically any good or even worthwhile solutions for what
they're being used for. Users choose tools for the wrong reasons
all the time.
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.
Not proud, I've argued in this forum in the past that scripting
languages have an audience that D is unlikely to make much of an
inroads into. They simply optimize programmer convenience over
efficiency and that's an acceptable tradeoff in certain niches.
However, even in that market, there are badly-designed languages
that do unreasonably well.
Not interested in an argument here, so I'll end with a
constructive question: what do you believe D "should learn from
[PHP/JS] rather than dismissing it?"
