Hello,
I was wondering about this: Popular Sites Programming Language
Is it possible to program all those popular sites just using PHP ?
I was just wondering (never really actually program websites using C++ / Java before - don't even know if you could such language to program websites)
Remember that everything on a web site has two parts: the part that comes to your browser (client side) and the part that stays behind on the server (server side). Client side is primarily javascript. Server-side, any general purpose programming language can work, so long as it does what you need. PHP will handle almost everything, so all those sites could have been written with PHP, but you could also write it in Perl, or even straight C (with some appropriate libraries, I suspect).
Is it possible to program all those popular sites just using PHP ?
For the most part, I'd say yes. Scripting languages have a lot of overlap with regards to what they can do. Some languages are easier to use for certain things and more challanging for others. Frameworks help you develop quicker and expose methods that make the job much easier.
for example, take bing, yahoo, and google. All very fucntional search engines. All three developed using different server side scripting languages. why does bing use asp.net? Well, if they used PHP, people would wonder why MS wouldn't use their own products.
I'd say no... Hell no, there are things that C++ do in terms of speed that you would never achieve with PHP. And when you're talking about google and youtube speed is a absolutely critical.
Much why a lot of banking web apps have java backends as opposed to PHP ones. Their CRUD has almost the same speed of say C++ except their rich framework java provides outweighs these costs.
@iamthwee brings up a great point. I was meerly indicating that you can pretty much develop a site like the ones mentioned using a variety of server side scripting languages. You see developers building "look alikes" all the time. Of course, developing using a scripting language or back-end storage infrastructure that is meant for the perormance requirements and cost may not/isnt going to scale well to handle hundreds of millions of users.
As much as I love php, there as some things it should not or cannot be used for. Some of the big sites out there even use a mixture of server-side languages. I don't suppose too many of use will be building those types of sites in our bedrooms late at night, so for most of us, PHP will suffice most of the time, even if it's behind a framework.
BTW - great unique title for the article.
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