> During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A
> new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The
> first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online
> demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could
> tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT
> flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The
> safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to
> worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java
> developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit
> frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical
> side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting
> looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.
I don't know why this is voted down. I'll go on record as someone who's currently working primarily in PHP and though the phrase "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is certainly true ... PHP has a lot of advantages for hacking.
Free, with robust sets of libraries, frameworks and support in the community. Used by a number of "big guys" (Facebook springs to mind) ... furthermore ... it's 'forgiving' in terms of rapid development.
It has brackets (a small thing I know - but I think better with brackets)
Certainly, if I'm looking around for "my next language" - I think Node.js+MongoDB might be the most exciting stuff out there. But again - there's an advantage for rapid development in PHP on this one. I can get ridiculous bandwidth and storage on a $10 hosting plan if I develop in PHP - wheras if I'd like to take on node.js I've got to buy actual server accounts (not a significant increase in price - but actually a huge leap up in required knowledge).
What about PHP indeed? Or maybe"why not PHP?"
With respect to PG's position, I think he comes from a LISP background - so for his purposes, it's the hammer & nail scenario. His knowledge of LISP makes him aware of what a powerful tool it is (wheras to me - it's just about talkin' funny)
With respect to the other 'hacker languages' it's probably that the differences between .py and .php aren't significant enough to mention both.
PHP is the best tool if it's what you know.
I really don't know why you were downvoted for what seems a legitimate question. But who cares? At the end of the day, Hacker News Karma is roughly as valuable as owning in World of Warcraft ... people who're involved care but the rest of the world will really wonder what you're excited about.
Comments
This snippet from http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html comes to mind:
what about php
I don't know why this is voted down. I'll go on record as someone who's currently working primarily in PHP and though the phrase "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is certainly true ... PHP has a lot of advantages for hacking.
Free, with robust sets of libraries, frameworks and support in the community. Used by a number of "big guys" (Facebook springs to mind) ... furthermore ... it's 'forgiving' in terms of rapid development.
It has brackets (a small thing I know - but I think better with brackets)
Certainly, if I'm looking around for "my next language" - I think Node.js+MongoDB might be the most exciting stuff out there. But again - there's an advantage for rapid development in PHP on this one. I can get ridiculous bandwidth and storage on a $10 hosting plan if I develop in PHP - wheras if I'd like to take on node.js I've got to buy actual server accounts (not a significant increase in price - but actually a huge leap up in required knowledge).
What about PHP indeed? Or maybe"why not PHP?"
With respect to PG's position, I think he comes from a LISP background - so for his purposes, it's the hammer & nail scenario. His knowledge of LISP makes him aware of what a powerful tool it is (wheras to me - it's just about talkin' funny)
With respect to the other 'hacker languages' it's probably that the differences between .py and .php aren't significant enough to mention both.
PHP is the best tool if it's what you know.
I really don't know why you were downvoted for what seems a legitimate question. But who cares? At the end of the day, Hacker News Karma is roughly as valuable as owning in World of Warcraft ... people who're involved care but the rest of the world will really wonder what you're excited about.
PHP was a one person project until 1998, the article talks about Viaweb from 95-97.
ha interesting :)