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by nickrio 3196 days ago
The problem of PHP is it's a old & narrowed language. It been designed to run in as a Web Service dedicatedly, and of course limits it's potential.

It's just like no one had motive to make HTML turing-complete. A language dedicated as a web script is good enough as long as it output web page, right? :(

BTW:

> I claim that PHP’s simpler “think; edit; reload the page” cycle makes developers more productive.

Does this can be simulated by automatically recompile and restart the application? I don't think it can be an serious advantage here.
1 comments
stephenr 3196 days ago
Old compared to what, exactly?

PHP being largely targeted st web app development is a bonus: how many times do ruby apps need to rely on a swath of gems to achieve functionality PHP has in its standard distributed extensions?

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nickrio 3196 days ago
You just notice "Old"? Old usually are not cause any problem, but when you combine old and narrow, that is not a good thing.

It just like Morse Code which designed for telegram operators to send and receive message.

By that time when telegram was new, it was a good invention, everyone who wants to use telegram must know Morse Code. And because of it's designed for telegram, it come with every each bonus to make send and receive telegram faster.

However, one day, a new technology been invented, it's called Telephone. Not long after that, telegram started to fade away.

What fade away with it, is of course, the Morse Code. Because it only good at sending and receiving telegrams which not many people still do today.

Now the PHP. It has a lot of old burdens (To make it good at outputting HTTP respond) and poor design decisions. They need to find a way to organize those things and carefully redesign that language. Then, maybe it can become respectable.

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dvfjsdhgfv 3196 days ago
It's almost the opposite of what you're saying. As PHP was designed for web development, "newer" languages often need a lot more (configuration, modules, etc.) to produce what PHP can easily do by default.
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stephenr 3196 days ago
Your analogy doesn't work.

We haven't moved on from http for web applications.

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