[coldtea]

>The only advantage of using PHP in my eyes is: incredible cheap and hassle-free hosting for beginners.

Well, clearly the engineers working on Facebook's PHP (and several other large projects, from Yahoo! to Wordpress.com) aren't "begineers" neither looking for "cheap, hassle-free hosting".

I don't buy the "it's so crap, it's ONLY used because of cheap hosting" argument.

It's also a pragmatic language, with tons of libraries and features for web use.

So, it might be far from perfect, but than again, Javascript is far from perfect too, C++ is also flawed and Java has tons of bad decisions in its design (and culture). Still, those are some of the more widely used languages.

[anonyfox]

Facebook just can't "switch" their backend. The mountain of built PHP stuff, including HHVM, is just too big to give up. They're of course not the typical beginners, but it's really easy to "get shit done" in PHP, so it happened that they used PHP when it all exploded in popularity, and mostly had to think on how to scale a running system massively, and not to rewrite everything from scratch again.

On the libraries side: compare with javascript... all the NPM stuff and frameworks out there, and all the clientside-libraries in addition (think alone jQuery plugins). There is much crap in the JS-Land, but the sheer amount beats PHP clearly i'd say.

Or take the JVM: the VM is a masterpiece of engineering/programming and has a lot of libraries availably, not only for web stuff, and supports many languages on top of it.

Or, if you have some experience in the .NET world and know your visual studio, you can literally drag'n'drop your website together out of layouts and components.

So far you can't share PHP code seamlessly between server & client (-> JS), your runtime doesn't run quite everywhere and allows you to use the language you like (-> JVM) or is preinstalled on every windows system today and has an excellent visual development tool (-> .NET).

Yes, every language and ecosystem has it's flaws, but mostly they have also some single strengths that outweight the disadvantages. When you must nail down what PHP's is: I say incredible cheap hosting, and tons of legacy stuff (ironically often dropped on shitty cheap hosting platforms).

You may find more stuff pro/con for all the samples i mentioned above, but i hope you understand the core problem.

[cpeterso]

Unless the Facebook backend is a giant monolithic service, they seemingly could have used a loosely-coupled service-oriented architecture and rewrite individual services in some new language or platform. That's how Twitter migrated from Ruby to Java.

[lmm]

> So, it might be far from perfect, but than again, Javascript is far from perfect too, C++ is also flawed and Java has tons of bad decisions in its design (and culture). Still, those are some of the more widely used languages.

Still, I wouldn't take a job in any of them. Javascript is crap, only used because it runs in the browser. C++ is pretty crap, only used because it has manual memory management. Java has its problems, but it has a decent design at least for the time; there is a terrible culture that I think adopted Java because it was popular rather than the other way around.

But yeah, in 2013 there are really much better languages than PHP available; if you want a similar-feeling replacement Python or Ruby are much saner, if you're willing to step further afield there are wonderful modern languages that push the boat a bit further (I'm in love with Scala at the moment).

[justinhj]

Define 'better'. Personally I think Clojure has a lot going for it, and it's better than a lot of languages in a many ways. However, for the kind of application I work on PHP is significantly better fit than Clojure. Most of the points made in this talk apply to my situation. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/php-history

[lmm]

The main "better" I care about is "fewer gotchas and special cases to memorize"; that's not the only thing that matters about programming languages, but it's a big factor. I don't have time to watch a 40-minute video; arguments I remember hearing from something similar are the very fast coding feedback cycle (easy with modern-day rails/django/etc.), "it's better than it used to be" (not really an argument), availability of frameworks (but I've never seen an actual example of the advantages that you don't get in other languages/frameworks), large standard library (again, present in other languages), dependency management (which seems more like php catching up with other languages than overtaking them), deployment (may have been a good argument in the pre-wsgi days and when Apache was the only webserver around, but not true any more IMO). What is it you see PHP as better than ruby/python at?

[justinhj]

Well firstly the gotchas very rarely get me. I found the same with Javascript. The inconsistent and odd data conversions make fun slides to denigrate the language, but in practise they seem to be easily avoided.

I realize posting a 40 minute video to support my point is a bit lazy and unfair but you seem aware of some of the key points fortunately.

First let me admit that we have a php legacy codebase, so porting that to another language, even if we had a strong desire too would probably be prohibitive.

I definitely feel super productive in PHP. I've been able to knock out a new app feature in 1 day, which to build the equivalent in Java would have been at least 5. It's very easy to write code fast, and then come back and refactor it later. Using PHP Storm as an IDE with a very good debugger and PHPUnit to build a suite of tests for everything we do means that gotchas are always eliminated before production, and with PHP I find things are either working or completely broken with not much in-between.

I guess having a strong unit test suite, or really it's more of an acceptance test suite, is something you can do in most languages, but the assurance it gives us enables us to share large code bases between teams, doing frequent merges of features. You can have large numbers of programmers with varying abilities and even programming styles hitting the code without too much headache.

The talk also mentions state. Not sharing state between requests except explicitly. You don't have to worry about complicated background threads, resource leaks, memory leaks. Even crashes are less of a big deal since you just lose one request to it, not the whole server like with Java et al.

PHP's array is a swiss army knife with lot's of useful functions for transforming data, which is a lot of what we do on the server. I can map, reduce and filter data. I can dynamically handle arrays or single objects in the same function, or handle arrays of different kinds of data without any fuss. In short going from what I want to happen to having it happen is very fast.

Background tasks are queued and run on other systems including some written as bash scripts or in Python, Go and node.js. These languages are a better fit for these jobs and so we ditch PHP for those.

What Facebook is doing with HHVM (run faster) and Hack (add type safety as needed) is pretty interested and we've adopted the first but not yet the latter.

Hopefully that's flavour of what I like about using PHP. I have not written more than a few lines of Ruby so I cannot comment on that. I have done some maintenance work on a Python server but not with a modern framework. I'm not sure Python with a modern web framework offers all of the advantages I've mentioned above but I am open to being enlightened on that.

[lmm]

> the gotchas very rarely get me. I found the same with Javascript. The inconsistent and odd data conversions make fun slides to denigrate the language, but in practise they seem to be easily avoided.

They don't tend to actually "get" me, but I feel like they're always there in the back of my mind, taking up space that could be used for something more useful. It's not a huge difference, but it's there.

> I definitely feel super productive in PHP. I've been able to knock out a new app feature in 1 day, which to build the equivalent in Java would have been at least 5.

Well sure, we're talking about a very different style of language. But I think Ruby or Python get you the same thing. Certainly you have map/reduce/filter (and Python's for comprehensions go one step further), and dynamic typing.

> with PHP I find things are either working or completely broken with not much in-between.

Interesting; what bothers me the most when using PHP is that it feels easier to introduce security flaws than other languages. Not that it's hard to code safely, but sometimes the most obvious way to e.g. access a database is the unsafe way (which is partly just because there're a lot of old libraries and bad advice floating around). Charset handling is a similar area; I've seen lots of PHP code that appears to work fine but goes wrong when given non-ascii characters. It wouldn't surprise me if there were similar issues with timezones, though I haven't dealt with them enough in PHP to be sure.

[justinhj]

> Interesting; what bothers me the most when using PHP is that it feels easier to introduce security flaws than other languages. Not that it's hard to code safely, but sometimes the most obvious way to e.g. access a database is the unsafe way (which is partly just because there're a lot of old libraries and bad advice floating around). Charset handling is a similar area; I've seen lots of PHP code that appears to work fine but goes wrong when given non-ascii characters. It wouldn't surprise me if there were similar issues with timezones, though I haven't dealt with them enough in PHP to be sure.

Well in my case we work on mobile apps so the client doesn't do anything unexpected with respect to character sets and time zones. Probably that's harder when working with random web browsers. Security wise I agree with you it's easy to do wrongly, especially with the simple DB API's that can be used naively.

[anonyfox]

Scala is incredible, but after learning it for a few weeks i realized that it is just too much. I just can't explain it better. Additinally the last time i toyed around with Scala, SBT was a joke compared to RubyGems/CPAN/NPM. Not the language matters, but the library-ecosystem around it.

[MichaelGG]

The engineers working on FB's PHP have reimplemented the runtime. I doubt that was a bonus or a reason they considered PHP. I find it highly unlikely anyone started off using a platform with the goal of "we get to completely re-implement this platform because it will not work for us otherwise."

[coldtea]

That's a flawed argument. The only reimplemented the runtime to get better performance, for their humongus needs. The PHP semantics and language remain the same.

So, them re-implementing the runtime is no more an argument against PHP than using PyPy instead of CPython or JRuby instead of MRuby is.

Not to mention that have they been using say Ruby instead of PHP, they'd have the same, or even worse, problems regarding getting the most performance out of their runtime.

So this is totally orthogonal to the issue of PHP's merits -- only has to do with performance, so the same things could have been said for Python or Ruby that are in the same ballpark as PHP in this area.