Ryan Tomayko

A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular —

Paul Bigger, author of the phc PHP compiler, explains why Facebook’s HipHop is interesting and why the translator/compiler technique might be a better design than a JIT or something more… elaborate. Good article all around, even if you don’t care about PHP.

There’s some salt in there too:

I’m also slightly annoyed that people all of a sudden care about PHP compilers. I worked on one for 4 years and I could not convince anyone to give a shit. But now that its got the Facebook logo on it, all of a sudden PHP compilers are the greatest thing ever. Bah.

Lesson in marketing. Merit is not conducive to mass appeal.

HipHop for PHP: Move Fast —

Wow, okay, so it translates PHP into C++ and then compiles it with gcc. That’s… interesting. Here’s what’s more interesting, if you ask me:

We are proud to say that at this point, we are serving over 90% of [Facebook’s] Web traffic using HipHop, all only six months after deployment.

That’s pretty damn fast, and super impressive if true. I can’t imagine the amount of infrastructure that would need touching for this kind of transition. You have to work with the backend devs and the sysadmins and pretty much everyone. That’s no small feat at a company the size of Facebook. Kudos.

Gay People, Come To Rails —

Well said. It appears PHP’s culture of stupidity isn’t limited to technology. What a bunch of assholes.

How to usurp PHP’s place: an outline —

Aristotle Pagaltzis on eating PHP’s lunch: “It will have to be more than just a programming language, because PHP itself is really more than a programming language. It includes a crude web framework (an invocation model reminiscent of CGI, with extensions) plus a crude deployment solution (just make all the libraries part of the language and let the sysadmin worry about it – who in turn often defers to his operating system vendor). This is PHP’s way of taking the worse-is-better philosophy to dazzling new depths …”

I was having this conversation at work the other day and came away with the conclusion that even if something were to reach feature / ease of use parity with PHP today, it would be many years before it actually surpassed the language in real deployments. PHP is everywhere.

Opentape —

PHP-based Muxtape clone that you host yourself. From the project page: “Opentape’s creation and design are proudly inspired by Muxtape’s success and sleek interface. We were sad with it’s untimely shutdown and wanted to let the web mixtape movement continue.”

muxtape.com was RIAA’d a couple of weeks ago. And while the EFF believes they could have decent legal footing if they wanted to challenge the take-down, it seems unlikely that the site will reopen anytime soon, if at all.

refactormycode.com —

Awesome idea. Nice syntax highlighting. (Via Simon Willison)

Maintainable Programmers —

This was a really great lesscode.org piece by Aristotle. The follow-up discussion in the comments was superb as well. Being in the middle of everything really warped my view of what was going on back then, I think.

Why PHP is good but bad —

Not sure how I missed linking to this. Pretty much mirrors my feelings on PHP to a T, except more thought out.

The immediacy of PHP —

David Heinemeier Hansson: “PHP scales down like no other package for the web and it deserves more credit for tackling that scope.”

Agreed!

Websphere CTO Jerry Cuomo on REST & Project Zero —

Whoa. I apparently haven’t spent nearly enough time looking into IBM’s Project Zero. It seems to come down to REST + (Groovy|PHP) and sneaking practical technologies in the front door with a “SOA” label on it. Interesting strategy.

What PHP Deployment Gets Right —

Ian takes a look at some of the attributes of PHP’s deployment model, why they work so well (for PHP), and why other environments have such a hard time duplicating them.

What nine of the world’s largest websites are running on —

Linux, Apache, PHP, and memcached are the big winners. Nice to lighttpd represent.

Immature developer attitudes revealed in flames regarding CDBaby at Pervasive Code —

“What matters a lot more than choice of programming language is the ability to get the project done, meaning tested and correct and launched. Apparently for Derek, PHP is the way to get that done, and Rails ain’t.” — it really is that simple. Period.

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails —

“But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It’s do-able with a lot of glue. But it’s damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you’re really doing this.)”

J2EE SUCKS HUGE DONKEY BALLS. —

“Then they spend one day debugging shit that’s gone wrong with Eclipse (or its mangling of the CVS repository, or some ant dependency problem, or)… And meanwhile they whine that 256 megs of RAM isn’t enough to edit a fucking text file (and do NOTHING el