That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
Yeah, no. Family recipes rarely work like that anymore. My mom’s lemon meringue pie recipe is from the Pillsbury cookbook from 1960-something. My chocolate cake recipe is straight off the back of the Hershey cocoa box. It is way more common for grandma’s fudge to be the Fantasy Fudge recipe off the back of the marshmallow creme package than it is to be some heirloom recipe. Do non-cooks not know this, and actually think everyone’s mom’s recipe for everything is the equivalent of a traditional furniture build?
As others have pointed out, you do need low-gluten flour, which you can indeed buy at any US grocery store, but it’ll cost more than just buying cake mix, unless you make a lot more cakes than anyone I know.
The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.
Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.
Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.
No, that’s incorrect. Krusteaz Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix (which, at least where I live, ten miles from Krusteaz HQ, is the only “Krusteaz” anyone cares about) contains flour, sugar, dextrose, baking powder, salt, starch, soybean oil, and buttermilk. Unless I’m using enough of it to justify buying an entire canister of powdered buttermilk - which, by the way, is not cheap, and probably throws that $1/kg calculation off - I can’t mix it up in a shelf-stable way. And if I am using that much of it, I can get it in bulk for ~$2/kg.
Even if your math had been accurate, it’s breathtakingly condescending. If you live in a modern society, and you want to buy pancake mix (pancake mix! of all the inoffensive products!) you should get to buy the damn pancake mix.
In that case it's plausibly a good deal, and of course it would be extremely deplorable to try to take away people's ability to buy pancake mix, or smoke, or drink Coke, or drink Everclear, or snort cocaine. People are almost always better at making the choices that are best for themselves than anyone else would be, because they both know more about themselves and care more.
But that doesn't mean they're necessarily good at it, and explaining how to get better at it is the opposite extreme from being condescending. Condescending is, "Oh, you wouldn't understand," not, "Here's an demonstration of how to work this out for your own situation, which you'll be able to understand," which is what my comment is.
Maybe you think it's condescending because everyone already works out hourly wages for thriftiness-directed activities, but I can assure you that your friends are very unusual if you think that.
Sorry, I still think an off-the-cuff “buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke [unless you’re rich]” is condescending, especially when coming from someone who presumably is not a domain expert, and has not in fact done the relevant math. If it turns out you work for the USDA developing the Thrifty Food Plan, or something similar, I’ll retract my comment.
I'm not a domain expert in Krusteaz, and I certainly have a lot to learn about thrift, but I've been living on an income of under US$8000 per year for over a decade, so I do know a lot of things about thrift that not many people do. I think I probably also qualify as a domain expert in self-destructive choices!
Then you’re certainly a domain expert in making that kind of calculation, so I do retract my comment. I do not, however, retract my assertion that nobody in a modern society should have to make that kind of calculation to such an extreme. $8k/year is hardcore, and if you’re doing that successfully, I both tip my hat to you and am a little horrified. I hope you’re doing it because you want to and not because you’re forced to.
I made some bets, metaphorically speaking, that didn't pay off, or took a long time to pay off. I'm not sure they were bad bets, given what I knew at the time, and it's been very educational at least—especially about the central question of why so many people in modern societies live in such scarcity. To an enormous extent it's structural issues, which I think you could sort of sum up as insufficiently capitalist societies.
Hopefully I'll be in much better shape materially soon! I've just overcome some big external obstacles.
How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?
The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.
My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.
By the time I’ve soured some milk (to take the place of the buttermilk in the mix) and measured out the oil, I’ve spent five minutes and used a pyrex measuring cup or two that I didn’t otherwise need. That’s apart from getting out the kitchen scale, dragging out the dry ingredient canisters, taking the time to weigh or measure everything… I just don’t get it. Why do I have people telling me I should dirty even one extra dish? Or spend even five extra minutes? All so I can, what? Be proud of my homemaking skills? I’d rather be coding a side project, thanks. Your mom is more than welcome to make her pancakes from scratch. I’m glad she enjoys it. Personally I prefer Krusteaz. I do not understand why I am getting pushback on this.
I'm not pushing back at all, especially since I made two pancakes from Krusteaz this morning. What I like about Krusteaz is scaling down to 2 small pancakes without thinking about the proportions.
But when I'm on the ball, pancakes from scratch are really not much more trouble. My trick is that precise measurements don't matter. I eyeball all of the measurements into a big measuring cup, and it works just fine. From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway. How would humanity have spread to all corners of the world, if they had to weigh the ingredients for their pancakes?
> From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway.
I believe this is where the cup measurement came from. Baking is all about ratios, so you could take any (drinking) cup you happen to have and use it to measure your various ingredients, as the ratios will all work out by using the same cup.
I recently saw a very expensive chef’s spoon that was supposed to be a perfect teaspoon(?) and had various other features. It was sold out. Out of curiosity, I went into my drawer, pulled out my normal spoons I eat with and compared them to what my measuring spoons held. It was the same. I just use my normal spoons to measure now. Good enough. I can then use the spoon to eat with, depending on what it is.
That is a good point - scaling down to pancakes for one is a great use case for mixes.
As it happens, my preference for Krusteaz is not all convenience; they’re also what I grew up eating, and they’re still my favorite. I bake a lot from scratch, mostly cookies and bread with the occasional cake, and pancakes are the one thing I never make from scratch because I’m tired of trying everyone’s mom’s amazing recipe and finding it meh. (I’ll gladly spend a weekend morning making these amazing waffles, though: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/light-and-crispy-waffles)
I agree precise measurements don’t matter at all if you’re not too particular about how the finished product comes out. If you have strong preferences about how your baked goods taste, or you want to be able to communicate a recipe to someone else in a reproducible way, that’s when precise measurements start mattering. Kitchen scales were commonplace in England by the Victorian era, so it depends on your definition of “modern.”
The main issue with a premix is like the article. It’s fit for a single purpose. I only make pancakes from scratch, admittedly I use baking powder and regular whole milk instead of buttermilk and baking soda. But the benefit is those staple ingredients can be used for all sorts of other recipes. I’m not going to bread chicken with Krusteaz. A premix can’t be adjusted either such as for altitude. Premixes and single use kitchen gadgets are areas where corporations really seem to have done a good job marketing that their products are more convenient than the readily available alternatives.
I don’t know how big the market is for high altitude. The adjustments above 3000m / 10000 ft mean that box mixes are no easier than from scratch. The mix has too much baking powder or soda.
In the UK we eat pancakes (crêpes) once a year (for some reason). It takes me no more than five minutes to make the batter from scratch. I do it the night before so it's ready to go, but you don't have to. I use one bowl. I imagine if you did it more frequently you'd become even more efficient than I am.
I do make crêpes from scratch, on the rare occasion I make them. They’re simpler than buttermilk pancakes, with fewer ingredients, and it is a one-bowl operation.
It’s not. I’m a mom with two kids at home, I write software for a living, and pancake mix is one of the staples in my pantry. Why this is so bizarre you would think it ironic, I have no idea.
The first-past-the-post system, combined with our current primary system, is set up such that most Americans do not get the representation they actually want, and Congress is made up of extremists. We don’t have the Congress we have because most Americans actually want it that way.
> I’m going to reach for the tool that always works vs. sometimes works.
This is only logical if you're limited to one tool. Would you never buy a power tool because sometimes the power goes out and a hand tool is your only choice?
How so? What do they have now that they will be losing under the new system? It seems like having childcare paid for would be beneficial to any single working parent.
I find some of the language around FrankenPHP difficult to parse - is FrankenPHP always in loop mode (ala ReactPHP) or is it simply an option? I can't tell.. my gut reaction upon reading the intro material is that they "simply" replaced Apache/Nginx with Go's inbuilt, and much lighter, server structure and that PHP itself is left to run completely isolated as per usual?!
“You’ll have issues” was my way of saying “I wouldn’t recommend them.” IMO if you want to run in a loop, pick a language where that’s the standard practice.
This is a preemptive plea for people who last wrote PHP in 2012 not to opine on what writing PHP is like in 2025. It is not a hammer with two claws. It’s a modern language with types and tooling and package management.
I've certainly seem some lovely PHP code. Even phpBB has been very clean for a long time.
But at the same time, you run into the same problems that you often see with C++. Yes, there's a clean, semi-modern dialect of the language that has 80% of what you'd ideally want. And 80% is often more than enough for practical engineering purposes. But the actual project you get hired to work on may not be written in that cleaner, modern dialect. The last C++ project I cracked open had gone almost 20 years since its last serious update. It wasn't terrible. But wow, did it take a lot of very tricky code to accomplish anything before boost and TR1 became popular.
And old PHP was one of the worst languages ever invented: the core C code was hopelessly insecure (I had to read it for a client during the dotcom boom), the database APIs were different for every single database (and all of them made SQL injection techniques too easy), the default configuration allowed hostile users to inject global variable values using CGI parameters, and I could go on for a week. Yes, I saw some ugly stuff in other languages during the dotcom boom. But ancient PHP was often on a whole other level.
And when a language's history includes that much ugliness, you need to be very careful about old production code bases. Maybe you get a nice Symfony app! Buy maybe you get mixed HTML/PHP/SQL with a hundred security holes inherent in the APIs being used.
Not to mention, the people who've been writing code in 2012 are still writing PHP code like it's 2012, and plenty of people are learning to write PHP the same way.
I haven't seen too many PHP codebases in the past decade, but every one has been full of a mix of commits that are beautiful, clean, functional code... and just the worst mishmash of garbage I've ever seen.
PHP might be fine, but I'm still not sure if I'm ready to work with other PHP developers.
Last time I touched PHP in 2018. It was a website my company bought from a french developer. After many unsuccessful attempts to add even basic functionality to the site, I announced my employer that they paid for the domain and the audience, but the code has to be rewritten from scratch.
It was typical PHP mix of HTML and PHP code in one file, an unreadable sequence of several crazy long HTML lines, then several lines of PHP code, then again HTML.
Lots of copy paste.
SQL statements were created by concatenation of user input with the text of the query. In 2018.
Back then I promised I'll never ever touch any PHP code. Live pretty much happily since then. I know there's some typing added to the language and other modern features. Still pretty sure, that if I open any random PHP file from any random PHP project, I'll still find the same mess as ever before.
I don't understand. The point of my comment was that from my experience PHP code always has worse quality than code written in other programming languages. It's a broad assumption and I have no proofs. But it is my experience, I've never seen exceptions. Any PHP codebase I've looked at, had lots of issues with code readability, maintainability, robustness, security.
I think it was a huge mistake to allow mixing code and HTML. On the other hand, without this feature, PHP probably wouldn't become popular at all.
More seriously I picked php because it lets me get away without having to strictly define anything and just get away with fuzzy logic. I want to jump on the bed god damn it!
PHP got a lot better. Their types are actually awesome and better than average. The problems are now about the developers more than the language. Legacy PHP is the majority of PHP and it'll still make you go insane since you'll have to deal with that awful, ugly code someone wrote in the Summer of 2004 when they were an intern that is now core to a business. The people that have been writing PHP and only PHP for two decades also don't usually have great patterns they follow, so when you step into their code base, there's hell to experience.
Had this at my last job where I wrote PHP full time for two years. There were so many bugs caused by things that PHP has since remedied. I updated everything we could and it was huge step up (the available linting and static analysis tools are very solid), but there's still some deep, dark legacy code there that no one wanted to touch. Hell, a good part of my problem with that code base was actually because of Apache and mod_php.
If you have a fresh PHP code base, it's not that bad anymore. It wouldn't be my first pick, but definitely not my last.
Edit: I never got to work with Laravel, but I've played around independently and read their docs and it seems like a good dev experience.
The developers come in all flavors, too. I spend my time writing Drupal code and the average quality is fairly high. (Code quality in the Drupal project itself has always been high, in fact, even when PHP was a disaster on wheels.) So it depends on what those people writing PHP for two decades have been working on.
They have, in fact, been willing to break backwards compatibility when it matters. mysql_real_escape_string(), for example, my personal favorite bugaboo from the early days, was removed in 2015.
I have recently had to delve in PHP and it was much better and more mature than what people painted it to be 10+ years ago.
A night and day difference.
Jira gave me the same experience. I hated it remembering the 2020 times, yet going back to it now...I actually liked it way more than the alternatives.
Working with Drupal as a user is not the same as working as a Drupal developer. If you know Drupal well enough that you’re not flailing around trying to figure out how to do things—if you actually know the framework and you build sites with it regularly—it’s remarkably pleasant from a code perspective. The main problem with Drupal is the learning curve. It’s much easier to get started writing, say, a Laravel app. But for the narrow case where you need a heavy-duty content management system with features like multilingual and robust cache integration, and you’re willing to put in the time learning it, Drupal is not a miserable experience. It’s actually good software.
I've heard that a lot, but my gripe with modern PHP is what's the hook? What feature does it offer that other scripting languages don't?
- Can you use the same rendering logic on client and server like JavaScript?
- Does it have the performance of Java or C# or Go?
- Does it allow for expressive DSLs like Ruby?
- Does it have an extensive, cutting edge ML ecosystem like Python?
Back in 2010, PHP's stand out features were very straightforward installation, good support for templating, and a large collection of C library wrappers (even if the interfaces were a bit raw). Those hooks were compelling enough to make people put up with the PHP4 core language.
But other languages have caught up on those three points, which leaves modern PHP utterly unremarkable. It doesn't have any feature that stands out enough to make me want to switch back.
The appeal of something like PHP these days is not that it has any particularly unique features, but that it is ubiquitous, has withstood the test of time (meaning it's relatively bug-free), is well supported (meaning it won't disappear any time soon), and is relatively easy to find developers for. Those features alone make it a contender for projects that don't need a specialized language.
I don't buy that. You can't have it both ways. You can't discount PHP4/5 criticism because PHP7+ is good and then in the same breath hold PHP above other tech stacks for passing the test of time, not when PHP7 is younger than Rails, Django, and React (and even Vue). Those frameworks have passed the test of time more than PHP7+.
> What feature does it offer that other scripting languages don't?
It has pretty much the best type support of all other similar languages (typescript is a different category). It also has the best implementation of class-based object oriented features (interfaces, classes, abstract classes, etc). These features are incredible for designing OO systems from scratch. The only big feature missing is generics.
- Kinda with templates, but I don't think this is a pro for JS tho
- Yes there is LLVM for example
- Have you heard of Laravel ?
- No, there is already python for that, use the right tool for the right job
Today PHP is a really really good language to get scalable apps up and running, moreover with frameworks like laravle that comes with tons of batteries included without tanking the performances.
But so so many people remains on the good old PHP dead trend just because it's easier to ignore all the great evolutions pf the past decades
That’s a perfectly valid argument. I’m not saying people shouldn’t make that argument. I’m just saying I don’t want to hear about mysql_real_escape_string.
To answer your question, I don’t know that modern PHP has big advantages over other modern languages. I’m not knocking on doors to spread the gospel of Symfony. But there’s no need to switch away from it either. And hosting is still easy and cheap. Prototyping your product as a Laravel or Symfony app is a reasonable choice.
My problem with php is that I’ve never seen modern php with types and tooling. I’ve seen a lot of php, and it was all awful 2012 style nightmare magic stuff lol.
Which is probably because php isn’t the top choice for new web based projects anymore. I have nothing against modern php, but old php causes me lots of pain, and that’s the only php I’ve ever known!
> It’s a modern language with types and tooling and package management.
Last I used Php (v4 to v8), it had type hinting, which was fine but I think its going to become harder for newcomers to approach as there stronger and stronger types, which is what made Php so special to begin with IMHO.
I get your point but I disagree with your timeline. 2012 was already past 5.3 which was a long-lived version with most of the quirks of early 5 fixed.
There was a lot of what people call modern PHP, basically just without the types. I'd say the PHP 4 days are the darker ages that most people reference, but maybe your experience in 2012 was like 2007ish. (TLDR: If you found it fine in 2012 it's probably still fine in 2025, but I don't see the huge wins. I stopped using it for reasons other than "dislike").
I picked 2012 because that’s when the claw hammer discourse was happening, but I agree with you. You could write pretty nice-looking PHP by 2012, and a lot of people did. The claw hammer thing was itself looking back at PHP from several years before.
