6
kiki
307d

To be honest with you, I’ve never had a bad experience with PHP.

Yes, it’s “dirty” compared to something like Haskell, but it’s not a bad thing. Dirty things usually bring simplicity and allow implementing the intended case super quickly, at the cost of breaking apart at scale. There are no bad tools, there are wrong tools for the job.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The more I launch new projects for me/other companies, the more I come to the realization that the vast majority of the projects out there will never see scale. They will be proven non-viable/impractical and deemed obsolete way before they outgrow the $20 VPS they were hosted on.

Sometimes (all the time, really) launching quickly like there is no tomorrow is the most viable business strategy. If (yes, “if”, not “when”) your project outgrows PHP and gets to the point when PHPs abstraction model is the bottleneck, you’ll have the money to rewrite the project in any language out there, trust me.

As someone said on biking subreddit to a person that asked how to buy the newest super-aero helmet, “if the aerodynamics of the old helmet is what holds you back, someone will be sending you the new one for free”.

Comments
  • 1
    It's not that PHP is bad, it's that this attitude of cutting every corner in the name of done is what leads to both building with PHP and creating a tangled mess of half-assed abstractions and unmarked cross cuts like WordPress.
  • 1
    Also PHP's import model is averse to static analysis so dev tools suck.
  • 0
    Counter point: rewriting the whole project later is not how it's done because that's the single biggest strategic mistake you can make. That's why WordPress is a pile of PHP garbage, but successful.
  • 0
    Php has always served me well enough and very rarely gotten in my way.
    More often it’s stupid solutions and quick fixes that’s burned me.
  • 0
    @aviophille maybe that's why I liked it… I don't use frameworks

    why use them with php at all? it has everything built-in, that's the appeal
  • 2
    @kiki great for quickly delivering something that has a higher likelihood of being easy for new hires to dive right into.
    Frameworks like Laravel has a ton just a pkg or configuration away.

    That being said, some of the best projects I’ve inherited has been built from the ground up, carefully crafted for the domain and users.
    Sad thing is, just because it’s not a fancy framework, it’s often considered legacy…
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