It's also the worst time to compare macs since they're just about to release a new version and the current versions have been out for awhile.

We had this argument in this thread right after the latest MacBook air came out and the cheapest people found was only a few hundred cheaper and couldn't compete on some things like warranty, battery, size, screen, etc.

on to the next troll. this one is about php!

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09...of-bad-design/

(i know the author. apparently this article caused quite a ruckus on HN. not as entertaining as the wat talk, but a LOT more thorough.)

Yeah I really don't like PHP. It has produced boatloads of zombie-lolbad spaghetti coders. For that alone...it deserves to be laughed at.

It also seems vastly inferior to many other options available these days so the main reason I see for using it is backwards compability or reuse of some stuff (forums?).

I don't care that you can technically write ok code in it either. It just offends my sense of style. Other people can use it if they wish but I'd rather flip burgers than code PHP for a living.

I always thought back in the day PHP and Classic ASP were very similar. Both in their time were very exciting and powerful and great stuff built in both, but obviously .NET has come Classic is truly dead (or should be). The same hasn't really happened for PHP as far as I can tell, it's still sort of plodding along and there's better stuff out there now.

Really well-written and well-argued

EDIT: the HN responses are really annoying, btw. The "if you know what you're doing" argument (which can be used to justified any complex or bad design) is really common among programmers and is remarkably dumb, especially when used by those who take pride in being logical and rational people.

This is so clearly true.

Funny timing with the php criticism, was just about to take a shot at it. Whats the best alternative?

The 2+2er who co-founded and sold Milo.com to eBay mentioned the same thing in his thread. He said $1M/head is fairly common for startup acquisitions. Founders are obviously worth more than $1M.

You're not buying *a* person for $1M, you're getting an entire team/company with built in management, processes, and efficiencies that allowed them to produce a killer product that your company wants at the ballpark valuation of $1M/head. From everything I read, it's still *really* hard to find good devs. There was an article about poaching between Facebook/Twitter/Google and how the companies have moles inside eachothers orgs so they can make a counter-offer before an employee ever announces their intent to leave (or at least have one prepared). The counter-offers were in the mid 6-figures + equity to keep people around.

I think the instagram valuation at $1B is pretty absurd, but I'm not in a position to make billion dollar decisions. It certainly has the 'cool' factor that would appeal to facebook. People can't really explain why they like it, but they do.

Ruby (+ Ruby on Rails) might be a good option to look at

Thanks, will do that

If you just want to quickly make a website PHP is awesome. If you want a language that you'll like, omg do not use PHP.

Also, it encourages a lot of bad programming practices

Well I'm not really looking to do anything with it right now. I come from a background of coding microcontrollers in C/C++ and Assembly language, and just feel like a complete idiot when people talk about web development and stuff so I was looking to educate myself and get a feel for it. I thought PHP was THE language for web stuff so am thankful you guys are educating me on the issue

+1 to this.

About 3/4 of all web apps are written in PHP (I think that number might be weighted by traffic or something). Less than 1% are written in Ruby. So, PHP is, in fact, THE language that everyone uses for web development. It's probably not the language that everyone should be using for web development.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...CLI6H8#t=1097s (That video's awesome for other reasons, btw.)

There's a lot of fail in that PHP article. OK, not a lot, but some.

First is his assertion that only bad programs get written in PHP, which is provably false.

And, his complaints about PHP not automatically filtering data or protecting against CSRF is completely nonsensical.

Actually saw that video a while back, its really worth watching.

Just because 3/4 of all web apps are written in PHP does not necessarily make it a good choice. A lot of those applications are now lumbered with old technology and are struggling to move forward. 75% off web apps might be written in PHP but I would guess that significantly less new web apps are started using PHP.

My other major issue: his complaint that PHP doesn't include a templating language. It is a templating language.

Nah.. it's new stuff too. Facebook, Zynga, Wikipedia, 2p2, etc etc.

I mean.. it's not like a completely unworkable language. It has a ton of pluses, and it's really really easy to use right out of the box. When you compare it to other modern scripting languages, like Python and Ruby, it's got a lot of obvious flaws. But, that doesn't mean it should be avoided at all costs, and it's not a huge problem that so many people are still using it.

I wrote a 2kish line website in PHP last month because I know it much better than Ruby and I haven't bothered to figure out how to get a website up with Python yet. It's really not a bad experience.

+1 to all this. With a decent framework, it's fine. You can write good code with tests, etc. However, having done a lot of php coding and only recently learned ruby and rails, it's obvious that the hype around the latter is not just fanboyism. It is legitimately a much better programming experience in every way.

I'm not even sure it's fair to say that FB uses PHP.

Their hand written PHP turns into c++ from a home grown compiler which gets compiled and served as g++. The entire FB site gets served as a single 1GB+ binary (minus static content obviously).

That's a much different PHP than joe blow's PHP which is running on a $4/month shared host.

If they write their site in PHP then they are clearly "using" the PHP language. I don't see how compiling it to something else changes that fact.

The funny about people that complain about PHP is they often write awful code. They'll move to languages like Ruby/Python and write slightly better code, because those languages do force better design decisions, but the new code is still very awful... just less awful. Eventually they'll quit writing Rails apps because it's a "bad framework" and move onto the next thing.

I find it interesting how the programming world rarely practices self evaluation and often blames the language for any mistakes that arise.

looking for some random quick advice. im on VC++ express2010 and trying to switch from SDL to SFML and just got the binary or w/e you call it form the SFML website and when opening a sample project visual studio is saying "You should only open projects form a trustworth source. The project sfml-audio could present a security risk by executing custom build steps when opened in MSVC that could cause damage or compromise personal information"

And idk what to do.

Which reminds me...Raspberry Pie is shipping, right? I'll probably get one in half a year or so to play around with it. Probably going to try to write an OS or something

They also use other languages i.e. Erlang for the chat thingy iirc