[SATLUG] IO-InfoOnly: PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast

[R. Tyler Ballance]

On Nov 27, 2006, at 11:25 AM, Bruce Dubbs wrote:

> R. Tyler Ballance wrote:
>
>> Disclaimer: I hate Ruby, I hate PHP, but most of all I hate rails  
>> (and
>> those garsh darned trains that use them!) ;)
>>
>> What complete pseudo-science, new lines of code is a miserable  
>> means of
>> measuring productivity, or growth.
>
> Perhaps SLOC (Source Lines of Code) is a poor measure of productivity,
> but there are few alternatives.  Function points anyone?  When judging
> growth, SLOC is not a bad measure.  Comparing SLOC in different
> languages needs to be calibrated somewhat for productivity.
>
> BTW, Beem's research indicated that productivity *in terms of SLOC* is
> somewhat comparable for any language.  For individuals, the  
> productivity
> is highly variable.  Its just that in absolute terms you get more
> "functionality" per line of code in some languages, say perl, than
> others, such as assembly.

Look at it this way, if you judge your developers, or somebody else's  
developers based on lines of code, they will intentionally bloat  
software just to meet target lines of code. Any other judge of  
productivity besides goals, or tasks met, is absolutely insane (in my  
opinion, its been a long weekend, I like taking extreme points of  
view on mondays ;))

Government contractors I've held discussions with talk about judging  
their software systems' progress in lines of code, and that's equally  
absurd. Sure, any dope that can use an IDE can bang out a searching  
function that is horrendously un-optimized, and thousands of lines of  
code, a talented developer will write it usually in far less, and  
thusly, far more maintainable lines of code, and hopefully, be able  
to optimize it in the future.


You can write hundreds of thousands of bad PHP code, or you can write  
tens of thousands (or even just thousands) of well thought out,  
object-oriented PHP code. That's were I see the main issue with their  
metrics, especially given I've written crap PHP code, and good PHP  
code in the past, we can smell our own :-P

>
>
>> Not to mention, in the past three
>> years, PHP has become the "common" server side scripting language to
>> where the crappiest of the crappiest hosting plans still provide the
>> capability to serve PHP pages.
>
> Don't confuse the tools with the workman.  The advantage of PHP is  
> that
> it is easy.  The disadvantage of PHP is that it is easy.  To do a  
> decent
> job programming (whatever the application), one needs to know more  
> than
> just the syntax.  Any language can be misused.

I wasn't saying that PHP was crap, I was saying that even cheapie  
hosting plans provide it, i.e. its very well entrenched to be that  
common place (kind of like airbags have become in cars, back in the  
day, only high end cars had them, now they've become common enough  
that Kia and other low-end companies provide them)


R. Tyler Ballance: Lead Mac Developer at bleep. software
contact: tyler at bleepsoft.com | jabber: tyler at jabber.geekisp.com