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PHP Sucks

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Re: PHP Sucks

#51

The thing that hurts PHP the most is lack of structure and patterns used in the most popular projects. These popular projects are usually where the bulk of work lies, where developers point to when they're considering PHP. When juniors start they're typically working on WordPress or Drupal. The problem is that WordPress and Drupal are terrible guides of how to write a web app and that knowledge is completely useless…

I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy. There is a lot of boilerplate in Laravel today and it was changing too fast for me to keep up with it.

The thing that kept me away from it for actual enterprise use was the fact the project is run by a single person. Where would it be without Taylor? Django and others have actual foundations that will keep it going for the long-term, more mindshare and more committers as part of the core project team.

Re: PHP Sucks

#52
post #8

I used to feel the same way a lot of times, a shame it seems for being a PHP dev. Now, I don't care. I've been using it since 1999, and I use it to get stuff done. My customers and users of my applications don't care what it's written in. But, you should definitely learn more languages as a programmer. > And to anyone considering programming as a career, or trying to get into it... stay away from PHP. This is the par…

If you're doing it as a job, though, you probably end up having to work on a lot of legacy codebases with the old issues.

That, and I've noticed that the typical legacy PHP codebase is worse than the legacy codebase in other stacks.

Re: PHP Sucks

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy. There is a lot of boilerplate in Laravel today and it was changing too fast for me to keep up with it.

Honest question, didn't they switch to focus on enterprise and slower release schedule? Wouldn't that be easier to keep up with?

I have no idea since I don't use Laravel or PHP anymore, but I tried it a couple of months ago and it seemed completey different from a year ago or more.

Re: PHP Sucks

#54
post #2

Is the success thanks to PHP or in spite of PHP?

PHP became successful when hosting companies began offering cheap PHP hosting. PHP runs on low cost servers with very little memory,so hosting companies could put many customers on a single server.

It was then just a matter of uploading a few files via FTP to have a working website. .Net deployment, Java deployment were always more complicated and expensive. It was also easy for administrators to deploy Wordpress or Drupal, with next to no PHP knowledge whatsoever. That feature (ease of deployment) was often underestimated by other solutions, until the PAAS era.

Could PHP have been made better language wise while keeping the same features absolutely, but PHP was not taken seriously by people who could have fixed it early on.

Re: PHP Sucks

#57
post #7

I hate PHP too, but I write it almost every day at work. There's something to be said for how stable it is. I spent a large amount of my career doing .net development and deployed very rarely. It was a big day when I deployed. I would say to my wife, probably going to late tonight, we're deploying. Because something always went wrong when deploying. Here, I deploy every other morning. Usually, while my coffee is gett…

That sounds like more a company/environment issue than an issue with either language.

The thing is different languages lend themselves to different processes. Let's say you have the exact same bug in a web app, maybe you need to modify the where clause in the data layer of the app (or something small like that). In the C# version, you'll have to compile it and then push it. Maybe recycle the pool depending on factors in the architecture. In PHP, you just modify the file and throw it out there. Because of the slight differences, the nature of the way work is done leads to companies designing processes around it.

Re: PHP Sucks

#59
I worked at a PHP-based company and after a year of intense interviewing, we finally decided to switch core languages and tech stacks because we weren't attracting strong enough candidates.

What we found is that most good programmers didn't want to work in php and most php developers were designers that learned how to code php. But they didn't understand CS fundamentals or even a decent idea how to code. They could cobble together a web site that worked and even looked great, but they didn't know how to write maintainable, modular code.

It got to the point where I would ask the candidate to merge two sorted arrays and 70% couldn't do it properly.

In terms of language, I thought php itself was a surprisingly productive language. I just quit though because I didn't want to be known as a php developer because of the stigma and there poor quality of other php developers that I encountered.

Re: PHP Sucks

#60
post #7

I hate PHP too, but I write it almost every day at work. There's something to be said for how stable it is. I spent a large amount of my career doing .net development and deployed very rarely. It was a big day when I deployed. I would say to my wife, probably going to late tonight, we're deploying. Because something always went wrong when deploying. Here, I deploy every other morning. Usually, while my coffee is gett…

We deploy constantly as a .net shop. Octopus deploy is probably one best pieces of software I've used for deployment.

It's a company issue.

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