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0 pointsjerf15y ago0 comments

"you could say that all other web platforms are blub because they don't see the value that PHP brings to the table."

I do not recall at any point in Beating the Averages [1] in which pg used "ease of installation" as part of the definition of a blub language.

Blub has a specific meaning. It's not a synonym for "bad".

There are plenty of other technologies that are as reliable as PHP. Ruby was not really one of them. Ruby went through a bad hype cycle a couple of years ago and was never quite as good as it was sold to be, especially on the reliability front. It's a great anecdote but a bad argument.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

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3 comments · 1 top-level

PaulHoule15y ago· 2 in thread

You don't get it.

In my mind the important thing about "blub" is that there's a valuable feature a language has and the blubbers don't understand the valuable feature.

For instance, ALGOL-type languages use Chomsky's generative grammar to define a syntax that people find intuitive. LISP is blub because it rejects this major innovation.

Languages that are !PHP are blub because they don't recognize that "ease of installation" is a valuable feature.

jerfOP15y ago

Everybody understands PHP's ease of already-existing-installation is just about the only thing keeping it going. The idea that this is news is a strawman, I've seen this discussed for years and years.

The thing that makes it win though is not that PHP is intrinsically that much easier to install or run, what makes it win is that it comes pre-installed on most hosts. That's not a problem a language community can solve, that's a problem only the cheap web hosts can solve.

On one of my VPNs, I've had the experience where Django is actually easier to install, because all the mod_python and stuff was already in the distro, and it took less configuration than PHP to make it work and not be a menace to the net. PHP has a lot of really stupid things you better get right if you're trying to configure it from scratch, or you're insecure by default.

mgkimsal15y ago

But, it didn't used to come pre-installed. On many hosts in the 1996-1998 range, Perl was the default, and sometimes only, option for dynamic apps. But typically you had to only put files in /cgi-bin, futz with permissions, remember to include content-headers, etc. PHP 'won' because it was genuinely more straightforward than the competition in most use cases.

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