Slashdot Mirror
PHP vs. Node.js: the Battle For Developer Mind Share
snydeq writes: Simplicity vs. closures, speed of coding vs. raw speed — InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a look at how PHP and Node.js stack up against each other. "It's a classic Hollywood plot: the battle between two old friends who went separate ways. Often the friction begins when one pal sparks an interest in what had always been the other pal's unspoken domain. In the programming language version of this movie, it's the introduction of Node.js that turns the buddy flick into a grudge match: PHP and JavaScript, two partners who once ruled the Internet together but now duke it out for the mind share of developers."
I'd have thought most people are just getting on with whatever the preferred toolset is at their company and never give this mythical war a second thought.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
PHP is far more available in cheap hosting solutions. The apps are simpler to deploy (simply put them along your static html files in a web server that supports its extension), and simple apps are simpler in php. The ecosystem around was not touched in the review, Compose vs npm, joyent vs the community behind php, the future of both platforms.
In the other hand, PHP is (or at least, used to be recently enough) a fractal of bad design
This isn't merely useless, nor just bad, it's completely misleading. For it may look like he's giving the high-level, the author appears to have no depth to draw on to say more than the shallowest things. As such, he's presenting pond scum, not the high points from an expert deep sea fisher.
And this is pretty bad, given that infoworld says about themselves:
while the TFA says about the author:
I'm loath to seek out his writing, in fact fairly convinced to stay well away, while at the same time morbidly curious just how bad his "more than 16 books" will misinform.
TFA is a bunch of blabbering from someone who has no idea what he's talking about - void of anything useful.
To get this out of the way:
Node.js is a serious contender to topple PHP off the server-side, for the simple fact that we would then have one PL less in the entire webstack, which is way to
complex anyway.
I myself have been pondering trying out Node for larger non-trivial projects. I'd be the first to switch if it were possible.
I haven't yet - Node is just not quite ready for prime-time.
Why?
1.) The tools don't exist yet and Node seems to gather the same problems Rails has: A bloated, instable and unreliable mumbo-jumbo of countless libs, tools and extensions - various package managers included, each built on a whim and powered by a neat logo and a 6-week fad that sweeps the community and adds to the mess already there. In short: The Rails problem of to much navel-gazing and not enough of solving real world problems.
2.) Callback hell.
In fact, its Node/JavaScripts callback hell that made me realise a thing that is so great about PHP: What you see is what has been made, for you, for that specific request. LAMP is such a bizar solution no one in his right mind would suspect it could work, yet most site on the internet run on it. The stack is so vertical it actually makes any Java solution look like an ADHD driven Visual Basic School projekt in comparsion. And I mean vertical right down to the way it actually works!
Try building anything like Joomla or Wordpress with other solutions such as JS and you'll end up with problems that completely leave the domain of your work. The simple fact that a PHP request is dead and gone when its finished sending its request reply and all the rest it offers is custom built around any strange problem the
Any concern you have right at the moment when developing for ther server side web PHP has neatly covered ... ok, forget I said neatly, ... but covered and everything else is put aside. PHP is born out of a template engine, and as bizar as it sounds, that's its advantage. Any problem the Web domain can come up with puts PHP in a very strong position. Serverside things PHP just shrugs of with some strange custom internal function has JS and Ruby tripping and falling flat on their face with no chance for rescue.
3.) PHP is 10 years ahead of the game. No joke.
Try finding a product like Typo3 or Wordpress in Java, Node, Rails or any other backend runtime you fancy. Won't happen. It take me 5 minutes to download Typo3, 2 hours to set up - mostly because configging Apache and setting up T3 is an arcane science unto itself - but then it's there. Everything I would ever want for a web product.
Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and co. are even way easyer. The only other contender holding up is Pythons Zope/Plone. All else is a decade behind at least. Rails included.
Bottom line:
As soon as Node gets their shit sorted out and offers a serious upside vis-a-vis LAMP, PHP is going to continue to rule. It gets the job done. Node and Rails don't. End of Story.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Proper systems and apps developers wouldn't touch either of these noddy languages with a sterilised bargepole.
So what would these "proper" developers of yours actually use?
Python - No way in hell .. the language has to bend to my will, not me bending to its will. .. "It's a trap" /Ackbar
Java - Antiquated and full of perversions, along with the spectre of Oracle hanging over you.
C/C++ - I know it is done, but would you?
C#/VBV.Net - Even with MS opening up things
Perl - Are you sure its actually serving pages and not just a prank obfuscated programming contest entry?
Go - You and the 3 other people using it should get together sometime.
Erlang - If its good enough for FB, shit does that mean we are going to get assimilated?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
And plain wrong in many places.
There's nothing about either Node or PHP that forces you to use or not use HTML or service calls.
Same for separation of concerns (which pretty much boils down to the same thing).
For instance; both PHP and Node handle SQL equally well, i.e. they can both hook up to most databases and let them deal with SQL.
Same for JSON. Just because it kinda looks like Javascript and started out loosely based on it, doesn't mean Javascript handles it differently.
I also don't think these two were ever "old friends who went separate ways". They started out separate.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
C#/VBV.Net - Even with MS opening up things .. "It's a trap" /Ackbar
I would love for some Star Wars fixated Slashdot geeks to explain just how the current situation and plans are "a trap"? I've developed on the .Net platform for the past 7 years, I've not been trapped yet - MS hasn't attempted to gain control of my code, hasn't limited where I can deploy, hasn't told me off for deploying MS libraries on non-MS platforms etc etc.
Today, I have a choice of multiple front end web frameworks competing with the MS offerings on the .Net platform but not one of them has suffered ire from MS for that competition.
Meanwhile, Java, the once golden child of Slashdot, has gone from a high point of being GPLed, to rapidly becoming something that you are told to avoid on this here site.
So where is this trap that Slashdotters have been shouting loudly about for the past decade?
Firstly, no whoosh needed, I understood the meme but just think its horrifically overused and just plain shit. But then I am tiring of all of the memes that call Slashdot their home these days, people tend to use them for a quick laugh or a "I'm in the group!" stamp rather than putting forward actual enticing arguments for their views.
Secondly, MS does have a history - so does all large long lived companies. I was on the anti-MS band wagon back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but then I grew up and watched as MS changed along the years. If you are going to avoid MS on the basis of its history, then you also have to avoid Ford, Boeing, IBM and a tonne of other companies.
On the technical side of things, everything I have learned while coding on the .Net platform is eminently transferable to other languages - the concepts and patterns are no different, the language is ahead of where Java is currently so it would be a step back to make the move, but the move could be made easily enough.
Yes, MS platforms have their specifics, but then so does Linux and Mac - there is a reason the Linux kernel is so hard to compile on anything other than GCC.
The idea that you are forever locked into MS is one which has long been untrue. Hence my question stands unanswered - why is it a trap?