Path Dependent

Programming, Complex Systems, Trading, and Introspection

Posts Tagged ‘php’

Consumerism and Programming Polyglots

October 28th, 2009

This is a follow up to Monday’s blog post, Back to PHP. In the scope of the project I need to develop, PHP is the best choice. My conclusion was correct. The reasoning I used to reach that conclusion was (mostly) incorrect. The post was basically a list of justifications that were a product of “Programming Polyglot Syndrome.” This post is a half-hearted retraction Monday’s post.

I dislike shopping for clothes. Unfortunately for me, social and professional conventions dictate that I must spend some time and energy dressing myself in something other than grey sweatpants and Birkenstocks. Shopping is a necessity and I shop hastily.

For example, I recently noticed my black dress shoes had a hole worn through the sole (oh, Aerosmith) last week. I headed to DSW. For me, the costs imposed by wearing cheap shoes are negligible. For most men, shoes are shoes. If they don’t look dirty, are properly shined, and are not 95% creased they look fine. Moreover, I care more about my checkbook than my feet (the later are mostly self-repairing, the former is not). Once I find a pair of shoes that are not pink, are not expensive, and are not four sizes too large, I am done. I am satisficing.

People who enjoy shopping are not satisficing. That frustrated me until this morning. An introspective friend of mine was describing why she enjoyed shopping so much. She was able to recognize that, for her, shopping is about buying possibilities. She doesn’t shop for new tops. She shops for the experiences she believes – rationally or irrationally – the top will elicit: the attention of some man she finds attractive or the jealousy of some woman she dislikes.* She is buying hope.

Now, because this conversation was taking place via GChat, I was doing other things at the time. At one point, I checked the traffic stats for the unexpectedly popular post I wrote on Monday, Back to PHP. In the Back to PHP post, I tried to justify switching back to PHP, a language with a lot of warts. Thinking about it in the context of my friend’s consumerism, I noticed that it’s roughly the same thing. I have a project that I have no strong interest in but I must write. By switching to PHP I was trying to optimize away most uninteresting parts of development – mainly deployment. Cognitive quirks lead me to half-conclude that PHP would make the development go swimmingly well, with no bugs, deployment issues, or mental energy required. Magic!

This is not the first time I have learned or relearned a language because I fostered the delusion that it would {motivate me; dissolve all complexity; …, cure cancer; bring about world peace}. Actually, for me, this is often the primary impetus. In most cases, given the context of the problem I actually set out to solve, this turns out to poor investment of my time.

That is not to say that learning many programming languages is a bad thing. Different languages have different conventions, paradigms, common practices, etc. Learning many languages and paradigms pays a dividend. You become a better programmer and you carry new ideas across language lines. There is nothing wrong with learning for the sake of learning. However, if you are learning something new to avoid doing something you don’t want to do, you are probably not going to make any gains in productivity for that project. You are just procrastinating.

In the case of my project, PHP is the best choice because initial deployment in environments that I do not control is one of the most important considerations. PHP is very simple to deploy initially and is very common. However, most of the justifications I provided were not related to this issue. I just wanted to (re)learn a language.

Although, to be fair, Factor might be my best bet. Forget all this introspection!

* This is actually pretty interesting if you think about it. “Peacockery” in fashion is more apropos than realized. Not only do people wear things that are ostentatious to attract attention, but doing so becomes a requirement for those who otherwise would be happy in sweat pants. Adopting fashion trends is less about conformity than it is about leveling the playing field for attention. It may be less about showing fitness with clothing acting as a proxy for wealth and more about Fisherian runaway. F*cking, peacocks.

P.S. “Programming Polyglot Syndrome” is almost an extension of NIH. Coding something from scratch can be more interesting than learning to properly deploy and use someone else’s code.

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Posted in Introspection, Programming

Tags: php programming polyglot syndrome

Going Back to PHP

October 26th, 2009

I consider myself a programming polyglot. I am proficient in five to seven languages and am competent in many more. Consequently, like many programming polyglots, I am a bit of a snob. PHP programmers tend to be unilingual or bilingual (Javascript). They are unenlightened. If you asked the average PHP programmer to explain a closure, they would probably express bewilderment. Brutes! Like I said, I am a bit of a snob (and the preceding text was satirical…mostly).

As is the case with much snobbery, this is ill-advised. Prior to PHP, I remember writing applications through CGI, mod_perl, or full-blow C extensions to Apache httpd. It was not very productive. Enter, PHP. From the beginning, PHP was designed as a template language to make web development easy. As such, additions to the language and its tool set were evaluated against a fitness function that emphasized ease of use and productivity for web development. At the time, it was the strongest solution to a problem of increasing prevalence.

Fast forward a few years. I had been out of the web development scene completely when a bout of temporary insanity inspired me to attempt building an online dating site (thanks, Markus Frind). Since I used Ruby extensively for non-webdev, Rails was my obvious framework choice.

Does Rails have advantages that cannot be replicated in PHP? Of course! The most glaring advantage of Rails over PHP is the fact that PHP is not Ruby. Ruby is lovely language. Seriously. Ruby allows you to think in code. It is incredibly productive. You can take very complex abstractions and implement them in Ruby with ease. However, web development is not very complex. Most web development is CRUD. Sure, Ruby might be slow (although 1.9 is looking nice) but most applications really do not require high performance. And when scalability does become an issue, Rails is rarely the bottleneck.

Do I miss ruby gems? Sure, but Pear works. Moreover, integration with PHP is often easier than it is with rails. When was the last time you noticed that popular api or library lacked a PHP interface? Most sites release official PHP libraries (s3, ec2, facebook, gdata, …)

Conversely, PHP has one several advantages over Rails. Most notably, immediacy. Deployment via SCP is very satisfying. Moreover, PHP now has many rapid-development frameworks that employ MVC and active record patterns (e.g. CakePHP). While you don’t have the elegant sexiness of Ruby, you have almost everything else.

Do PHP programmers tend to be weak programmers who produce mediocre code? Maybe. If so, it can probably be attributed to the law of large numbers. There is a virtual army of PHP programmers; there are very few DHHs. For large-scale, very complex problems it may be better to use a language that naturally excludes poor to mediocre programmers, but this is not true for web development. Besides, there is no shortage of criticisms of the rails community.

Finally, there is nothing to stop you from using PHP for the CRUD front-end and Ruby or some other language to do more complex heavy lifting (e.g. spidering, categorization, etc). It seems to have worked well for facebook.

echo "Hello, Old Friend";

UPDATE(OCT-27-2009 @ 1:39)

I mentioned below and repeated in the comments section that I have used Capistrano (a site which, given the current context, ironically uses PHP) and Passenger, but, for reasons I could not qualify, I thought PHP was simpler. Mark just helped finalize the thought for me: PHP is usually preinstalled and ready for rapid deployment — i.e. immediate initial deployment. Heroku is wonderful, but not every hosting service is Heroku. If you want an application with diverse end-users, PHP is more likely to be eligible for simplistic initial deployment. It may seem like a minor issue, but in my experience, it is not.

END_UPDATE
This post was motivated by an open-source project I am currently coding. It is not yet released but for the purposes of this footnote, pretend it will have a deployment pattern similar to Wordpress. I started writing it in Rails. However, after speaking with several people who will be end-users, I realized that the most important factor would be ease of deployment. While Phusion is a game-changer for deploying Rails applications, I think PHP is still easier for most web developers.

Also, for the sake of disclosure, I should make it clear that I am not an expert web developer. As you might notice from this blog, most of my work is in complex systems. Most of my time is spent writing code in C or C++ with Ruby acting as glue.