PHP lifespan

[Paul Mooring]

I currently work mostly in the web-ops SaaS space and just wanted to throw in my 2 cents here.  Ruby, Python and node.js are all in the same performance class.  Ruby is perfectly capable of handling a full-scale SaaS app, twitter just goes a bit beyond full-scale.  We (Opscode) recently migrated off running our main code base in Ruby as well.  While twitter and opscode both still run a fair amount of ruby in their infrastructures there's one import thing you missed in your reply, they certainly are not moving to python or node.js because that won't help for real scale.  We moved to Erlang and Twitter to Scala, notice those are both functional, concurrent languages using the actor model for concurrency.

I bring this up not to discourage using Ruby, Python or Node.js (well maybe I would discourage node.js a little ;) ), but to bring up that for 95% of the SaaS business out there the performance of the language/framework will always be irrelevant and if they have less than millions of users performance issues are probably in their code rather than their tech stack.
--
Paul Mooring
Systems Engineer and Customer Advocate

www.opscode.com

From: Eric Cope <eric.cope at gmail.com<mailto:eric.cope at gmail.com>>
Reply-To: Main PLUG discussion list <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>>
Date: Friday, April 5, 2013 3:41 PM
To: Main PLUG discussion list <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>>
Subject: Re: PHP lifespan

I don't see PHP going away for a long time, unless the PHP core developers fly off into left field and make some crazy decisions.
If I was going to learn new languages, I'd learn:
Ruby - because its becoming ubiquitous, but its too slow for full-scale SaaS stuff, just ask Twitter :)
Python, node.js - for performance.

Just my two cents.

Eric


On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Paul Mooring <paul at opscode.com<mailto:paul at opscode.com>> wrote:
I think most of the technologies you listed got sunk by changes in the tech eco-system as a whole.   FoxPro was killed by MS  but COBOL and dBase are still alive in there own niche's.  I think PHP will suffer the same fate, there's definitely better languages for writing full scale SaaS applications in (Ruby and Python seem like the big front-runners) but for a simple site you want to upload via FTP and forget I see no reason anyone would want to put much effort into "replacing" PHP.

On a related note, much of PHP's reputation isn't really deserved in my opinion.  There's a lot of awful code out there, but it's eco-system now has a pretty scale-worthy stack (laravel/symfony/ect, php-fpm and nginx) and like any language, it has some poor design decisions, but for the most part bad code is due to bad programmers rather than the language itself.

--
Paul Mooring
Systems Engineer and Customer Advocate

www.opscode.com<http://www.opscode.com>

From: keith smith <klsmith2020 at yahoo.com<mailto:klsmith2020 at yahoo.com>>
Reply-To: Main PLUG discussion list <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>>
Date: Friday, April 5, 2013 12:25 PM
To: Main PLUG discussion list <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>>
Subject: PHP lifespan



Hi,  I do not want to start any flame wars.  I would like to open a discussion though.

I was thinking of what the life span of PHP might be.  I have lived through a number of them.

In the early 80's COBOL was still taught and was in use.  I know it is still around, however I do not think anyone would choose COBOL for a new project.

I also lived through the whole dBase, Clipper, FoxBase+, and Visual FoxPro cycle.  FoxPro was acquired by M$ 15 or 18 years ago, which started it's slow decline.  M$ finally killed it last year.

So I am wondering about PHP.  What might it's lifespan be?  What might be the next big thing... etc.

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.

------------------------
Keith Smith

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