Life After PHP

As someone who also made the jump from <i>primarily</i> using PHP to Python a while back, I have to say that a lot of this is very trivial stuff.<p>Maybe my experience was different because I was already heavily using ORM's (SilverStripe in particular) to build complex apps very rapidly, and moving to Python+Django was a far more natural process.<p>&#62; <i>"the fact that Django makes most of the decisions about how the database will be structured just baffled me"</i><p>You define your structure with your model, so this is baffling to me. If you're worried about trivialities like column or table names, you're worried about the wrong things.<p>Anyway, I think that a bit of time with Django and you'll never want to go back. I certainly don't.

So far I'm proficient enough in php to be able to do almost everything I want. Your article is very honest. I never understood the php bashing. If you don't know how to use a type of screw driver use a different kind, at the end of the day the screw will be driven.

Interesting my experience was very different when i switched from PHP to Django 5 years ago.<p>Everything just felt easier, many task where you had to repeat yourself got abstracted away (forms) and the documentation was just awesome one of the main selling points at the time and it still is.<p>The ORM took me a while to get used to it but after the initial hump i learned it was very powerful and easy to use.<p>Overall my efficiency went up a lot i was able to prototype in days instead of weeks for feature rich applications. It made me able to toy around with ideas and the first time in my life i had this experience that i hadn't had to fight the framework to get something i wanted.<p>And you can express yourself so much better in python than php and till today i enjoy the community which is nice and helpful across the board.

<p><pre><code> &#62; Moreover, the fact that Django makes most of the decisions about how the database will be structured just baffled me – why does Django know better than me what the database should look like? </code></pre> If that is really true (I don't have any Django/Python experience) the simple answer is "It doesn't". In the long run, relying on the ORM to provide high scalability is not a sane choice and I'm pretty sure Django must be able to allow some flexibility on how tables and columns are defined according to your needs.<p>The thing is that lately I'm finding myself unhappy with the idea of ORMs and how they handle things. When I see that a framework has a lot of dependency to some ORM, I get instantly unmotivated to learn more about it.

This entire article reads more like "my first Django app" then it does any impressionable reason for discarding one particular language or framework for another.<p>The lessons learned from this article don't really apply specifically to Django or Python, but seem to represent an overall learning of how programming languages can work in general.

If you're going to be doing serious django development it would do a whole world of good to learn about the tool chain to make dependencies and deployments super easy.<p>Use virtualenv, pip, and Python's own built in scripting tools (check out the OS and sys modules of the Python standard library). Try to learn some of the best practices before complaining about dealing with dependencies.

Strange read. That guy used PHP for years and seemed to have fully ignored modern web development, he was baffled by using an ORM?!<p>To be honest, i would never contract this guy to do some web work for me (he's is some freelancer of some sort? He mentions making tons of money with PHP). Or any work. Really, who developed web stuff for quite some years and finds it strange that not to write pure SQL statements? Or dependencies? He find's it hard to deploy Django or node.js?<p>It reads to me like he has been living under a rock for years. And that's probably the worst thing you can do in the fast paced IT sector. You need to catch up and constantly learn new stuff to be up to date. I strongly believe that to be a good developer/IT guy the most important skill is to be eager to learn new things, to strive to improve yourself and learn, read, learn, learn, learn.<p>I always hate talking to overpaid contractors/freelancers about technical stuff and see how many people don't even know basic stuff. Talking about node.js or NoSQL or puppet or ansible or other "new technology" and be greeted by ignorance. And then i think "And this guy earns 100$ an hour and has a dozen certificates!?".

Seems to me that CodeIgniter to Django is a much bigger leap than PHP to Python.<p>Or even in general, unless you're dealing with a language that has a fundamentally different approach, frameworks constitute a much bigger learning curve.<p>Especially if you're coming from a simple, lightweight framework like CodeIgniter to Django. Much of what the author describes would also apply if you go from CodeIgnitor to Symfony, even though it's still PHP.

&#62; [Cloud hosting] leaves me helpless in the case of an outage<p>Not if you design your application correctly. HA is really not that hard to do, in the cloud or otherwise, so that single points of failure (e.g., vm or dyno outages) do not result in service unavailability. Also, consider that if you're not building HA into your apps, you are still at the mercy of things beyond your control with local physical servers. What if your upstream network provider accidentally publishes a BGP route that sends all your traffic into the void? Or, in a timely example, what if your authoritative nameservers get DoS'd? Build HA apps, aim to physically separate key redundant infrastructure pieces (built in to most big PAAS services and configurable in most big IAAS services), and you'll have no worries using a cloud service.

&#62; Django from CodeIgniter<p>Life after CodeIgniter.

It seemed like I was reading the story about myself. I started to code very early too! It was PHP and MySQL. First — no frameworks and libraries. Then — CI (later Kohana, Fuel etc.). Then I was bored and I started to learn Python. Time went by and I were a Django developer. So here we are. :)<p>P.S. Python is totally ready for web development. Django was released in 2005 and it's stable. There are other frameworks too. YouTube and, of what I'm heard, half of Google is using it (maybe they are rewriting some things to Go now). Ton of popular sites uses Python and Django too! When it comes to deployment, I stick to Nginx that serves static or sends request to gunicorn. It's stable and fast. :)

By the time he started praising Tank auth I was looking for the parody button. And praising PHPMyAdmin? Has he ever once looked at the steaming mess that thing calls a codebase?

PHP was my first language and it helped me stay interested enough in programming to stick with it. I commented on this a few years ago, and it's now an ancient thread, but there's some good stuff in the history books: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324578" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324578</a>

Why does this site look like a knock-off of Svtle.com, more specifically dcurt.is?

Laravel!

In some ways, Python is the new PHP :)

great thing about NodeJS Ruby and Python is their interactive cli , which is just mandatory imho , for testing language features , framework features ,etc ... The PHP interactive cli is too poor and something really should be done about it. there are a few php-shell out there but they are not up to the task. I hope php core developpers will do something about it.