PHP lifespan

Fri Apr 5 19:55:10 MST 2013

I agree with Eric and Paul. The following is moving off topic a little,
since it talks about concurrency performance of Node vs PHP.

Node seems to be the cool kid on the block nowadays in Silicon Valley. It
could be a fad, but I think there might be more to it.

Paul, I'm trying to understand why Node may not good for scaling and/or
concurrency. Maybe it's just not as good as Scala? Here are some resources
that illustrate why it may be a good contender:

1. This link points to some potential upsides for Node over
PHP<http://loadimpact.com/blog/nodejs-vs-php-using-load-impact-to-viaualize-nodejs-efficency#respond>,
specifically concerning user concurrency. Does this only hold true for
concurrency of < 1000 users?

2. You *may hav*e implied that after some threshold of concurrency (maybe
>> 10k users), it may not make sense to use Python / Node or Ruby? If this
is so, this link seems to say that Node can indeed handle a large amount of
concurrency<http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-nodejs/index.html>.
This leads me to believe that for scaling, Node may be a good contender?

3. This also states that actors may not be good for
concurrency<http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/2010/01/actors-are-not-good-concurrency-model.html>,
at least not anymore? Not sure how accurate this is.

Unfortunately, since I've never actually implemented a Node server with
high concurrency myself, most of my ammunition on this position is academic.

On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 4:29 PM, Paul Mooring <paul at opscode.com> wrote:

>   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>
>
> Reply-To: Main PLUG discussion list <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>
> 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> 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
>>
>>   From: keith smith <klsmith2020 at yahoo.com>
>> Reply-To: Main PLUG discussion list <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>
>> 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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