onekay

I have a lot of debates about this with people. One of the most common reasons given for why PHP is so popular is because you can’t swing a cat without hitting a PHP developer. I say thats crap, and that you can swing a whole lot of cats before you hit a halfway decent PHP developer. Good developers who know and want to work in PHP are hard to come by. Consider that perhaps PHP is so popular because it does some jobs really well.
Terry Chay recently made an extremly funny and quite insightful post about Ruby (on Rails) in which he mentions:

“look at the top 100 websites on the internet: about 40% of them are written in PHP and 0% of them are written in Rails.”

Which is pretty interesting. To me, it says that PHP is a pretty good scripting language to be getting stuck into, that its something that you should be using if you want to develop web applications that are used by hundreds of thousands of users across the world.

I’ve met developers who consider PHP to be second-rate and who are ‘embarassed’ to admit competance in it on thier CV. Developers who just plain dont want to do PHP because it would ‘damage’ their career prospects to have used such a poor quality language for too long. I say this is crazy-talk and that the sort of numbers that Terry mentions (which I appreciate may not be accurate to three decimal places) just shows that PHP is a language that is being used in environments that other more traditional OO scripting languages are too delicate for. I wonder what sort of percentage of the top 1000 traffiked sites use PHP, or the top 100,000?

To me, PHP seems like its a stronger career prospect than ever.

Saw this article about a forum in Rails. It all looks very pretty and everything.

The thing that caught my eye is the text ‘under 500 lines of code’, I brought the domain onekay.com with the original intention of writing publicly availiable code that did cool stuff, in under 1000 lines (onekay, 1K, geddit?). I changed my mind because of the following reasons:

• Obscure code
  In order to get down to the required number of code, clarity can get thrown out of the window - nicely written commented blocks of code become horrendous one liners that cryptographers would have trouble deciphering.
• Included librarys
  It doesn’t mean a thing if your script only has 500 lines, if it needs another 500k lines of code in its required class librarys/framework/whatever in order to execute.
• Arbitary restriction
  Unless you’re intending to have your piece of software run on a coffee maker or a C64, the number of lines of code your software has, just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make it any more portable, scalable, or useful.
• Feature loss
  You’re not writing the best software you can when you attempt to write code with unnecessary restrictions in place - what features are you not implementing? What features are you implementing incompletly?

While I am sure that Beast is clever, well written software, and not all of the above apply here but ‘Under 500 lines of code’ is a gimmicky marketing ploy that seems to work every time.