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PHP the Wrong Way

phpthewrongway.com

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Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#151

Post by brightball »

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

The underlying issue is that PHP is bad at frameworks and because of that there are dozens of them. If there was one, clear, dominant framework it would be one thing...but there's not so investing in using any particular PHP framework is just about as risky of a proposition as rolling your own.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#152

Post by throwanem »

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

> On the other hand, if the codebase has been written from scratch by Greg, a real carpenter of a programmer, who is no longer with the company, then good luck. I'm at his mercy entirely.

You're at his mercy if he used a framework, too. There's nothing to require that he used it in a sensible way. The only difference is that now you get to discover the innermost details of the framework, too, at the same time you're trying to figure out what Greg was doing, and you also get to figure out which is which.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#153

Post by paulryanrogers »

brightball wrote: post #151
V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

The underlying issue is that PHP is bad at frameworks and because of that there are dozens of them. If there was one, clear, dominant framework it would be one thing...but there's not so investing in using any particular PHP framework is just about as risky of a proposition as rolling your own.

This is likely more an artifact of the PHP community and philosophy being focused on ease of use and deployment, circa early 2000's.

Consider that Ruby has a few dominant frameworks--like Rails--built on a language with read-hostile features like monkey patching. Unlike Python Ruby often has many ways of doing things, and that's reflected in community gems. (EDIT: swipe-typing fail.)

Regardless, there has been some coalescing around more modern PHP frameworks like Laravel recently.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#154

Post by throwanem »

gedrap wrote: post #92

>>> The wrong way: Always use a framework on top of PHP I haven't been actively working with PHP for quite some time but... From what I've seen, I wish many people didn't take this advice (including the teenager me). It's similar to ORM. Often, if you don't use one, you end up building one, a very poor one. Yes yes I know there are exceptions and all but, in general, that's truth. Same with frameworks. If you don't u…

> It's similar to ORM. Often, if you don't use one, you end up building one, a very poor one.

Whereas, often, if you do use one, you end up using one, a very poor one. Sometimes you can get away with that. Sometimes you get to spend a Friday morning root-causing and reverting a production defect in a highly visible application because the developers of the extremely popular ORM you inherited failed to mention in their documentation that a specific and entirely innocuous-looking schema option causes the ORM to produce a query containing a Cartesian join.

You can use an ORM. Or you can write SQL, work with arrays, and keep your code and data separate. None of that is terribly difficult, and you are responsible for the results no matter what you do. If you can't trust yourself not to get basic things right, you have problems at a level that no library will solve.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#155

Post by mgkimsal »

rimantas wrote: post #143
mgkimsal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because those tools exist doesn't mean people use them. There were decent libraries and high quality code back in 2008 (and 2000) but people didn't necessarily use them. It's arguable somewhat easier today, but that's a relative term. If you're FTPing code from BBedit or Dreamweaver up to your godaddy shared hosting and clicking buttons in cpanel... composer/symfony won't help.

> Just because those tools exist doesn't > mean people use them. But, oh, they do! At least there in most of the jobs you will deal either with Symfony or with Laravel. > here were decent libraries and high quality code back in > 2008 (and 2000) but people didn't necessarily use them. Please, name a couple from each year. PHP started to mature since PHP 5 and that was released in 2004. While you could have working an…

Much of what was in PEAR was decent, if not good, and was used by a lot of folks as the basis for their projects.

All judgements of quality are relative to the capabilities of the tech/lang/platform at that time.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#156

Post by paulryanrogers »

pvdebbe wrote: post #17
yedpodtrzitko wrote: post #4

I just skimmed the website, and I am still not sure if it's meant seriously or if it's some kind of joke? Feels a bit contradictory eg. "dont use framework" vs "make software secure by default". Isn't a security one of the gains of using frameworks, beside other things? You would need to be a security expert to cover all potential security issues when writing something from a scratch.

Being married to a framework is arguably worse than using separate, isolated and composable libraries to handle the equivalent things. You can fight architectural problems of a library easily, but not when there's one inside a framework and between its internal components.

Some frameworks are more composeable than others. Even some 'full-stack' ones like Symphony are becoming more component-ized

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#157

Post by spdionis »

Between composer and symfony and php 7 I would say PHP is ahead of both ruby and python communities in terms of code quality, perfomance and ease of deployment.

There are some minor drawbacks in the core language, nothing compared to the python 2/3 split and all the virtualenv and packaging mess, and the sub-par arhitecture of rails (as far as i heard).

Mind you this is limited to web development, php does not shine in any other field.

People FTPing their code to a server or writing code in pure (probably sub-optimally designed) PHP beyond trivial scripts and web pages are not representative of the PHP community at all. At least not in europe.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#158

Post by TeMPOraL »

kyberias wrote: post #149
TeMPOraL wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the author does not miss the point - though I assume he may not understand it fully. The quote is written in context of Lisp macro facilities, which let you DRY your code from a lot of things, including GoF-style design patterns . So e.g. if you see yourself using "Memento pattern" (or whatever) in many places in your code, writing the same kind of methods doing the same thing everywhere, you should consider writ…

No, I don't think so. That's not a critique towards design patterns. It's critique towards ANY CODE THAT IS REPEATED. If I use a certain design pattern once in my code, I didn't repeat anything. Macros don't remove the design pattern, they just allow me not to repeat myself.

You rarely use design patterns only once in a project. And while this quote does not cover it, you can also use macros to better communicate that one-off design pattern instance - instead of identifying a pattern by noticing a set of familiar methods or a typical inheritance graph, the person reading your code can just see the the macro invocation and know he's dealing with a particular design pattern here.

Design patterns aren't bad per se, even if they imply some problems with language's capabilities to abstract - because they shift an abstraction from code to programmers' shared knowledge. The problem is with what I would call "design-pattern-driven development" - attempting to fit your problem into the bunch of design patterns you know. It's unfortunately very common.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#159

Post by omginternets »

nilved wrote: post #116
andyfleming wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you are correct. Most developers today would understand a framework includes your code, as where with libraries, your code includes them.

I think that's generally a good heuristic but fails in a lot of cases. The distinction between frameworks and libraries is murky and mostly semantic.

I don't think it's murky, I think it's contextual. Code can be used as a library (i.e.: I call it), or code can be used as a framework (i.e.: it calls me).

Some code can be used either way. Sure it's semantic, but meaning is rather important...

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#160

Post by spdionis »

ungzd wrote: post #57

PHP community had always been anti-frameworks and anti-libraries. I worked at company where use of third-party libraries was entirely forbidden on most projects. I think it's because: - Quality of PHP frameworks is low (at least it was last time I used it) - PHP parses and evaluates whole libraries and framework code on each requests. There's proprietary commercial (lol!) software to enable at least caching of byteco…

The biggest problem in the modern PHP community is that you will be shamed for not using DI for a page counter so i don't know what you're talking about.
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