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Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

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Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#51

Post by chromatic »

hackermom wrote: post #44
Daishiman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?? Do you have any idea of just how many programmer hours have been wasted by the absence of features, just how insecure so many web apps are due to the weird casting system and lack of safety-oriented features. My impression is that people who claim PHP has not cost them development time have simply never looked at alternatives that solve many of the problems.

Without going off on a limb, I'm guessing you're a not too experienced developer. You comment as if instead going for Perl, Ruby or ASP inherently makes an application safe, saves buttloads of manhours etc. And you're wrong. Gravely wrong. Excluding the obvious issues caused by bugs that are a natural part of any programming language's development, security problems are not caused by the language chosen, but by the d…

A well designed language or library can decrease the likelihood of specific bugs, and especially security problems. Imagine the existence of a library which made it easier to use SQL placeholders than to concatenate user input into a string. Imagine PHP without register globals.

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#52

Post by rje »

shabble wrote: post #34
hackermom wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like someone else already said, "small thing"... like Facebook? Like Flickr? Like Wikipedia? Like Digg? :)

It's probably fair to say that all of these started out pretty small (and quite a lot time ago). If you're a one-man company with a great idea and possibly not a huge amount of programming experience, then PHP is a fair choice for prototyping your design and getting things off the ground. Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop…

Quora's decision to use python seems to support your theory:

"PHP was out of the question. Facebook is stuck on that for legacy reasons, not because it's the best choice right now. Our main takeaway from that experience is that programming language choice is very important and is extremely costly to change."

From: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Quora-choose-Python-for-its-dev...

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#53

Post by lhorie »

marte wrote: post #45
lhorie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Fwiw, many of the complaints apply to other "better" languages also: - PHP has inconsistent naming of built-in and library functions. - C has types like int, size_t, jmp_buf and FILE - PHP performance is abysmal without caching - MRI Ruby is pretty slow too - Functions are case insensitive - Lisp anyone? etc etc The whole meme of PHP warts seems more like an exercise in confirmation bias than objective analys…

Yeah, but if we continue that logic and fill up that "etc etc" it would seem that the other languages have their own bad features and PHP combines them all.

That "all" is what I'm referring to when I mentioned confirmation bias. PHP programs don't segfault when you have a typo. You don't have macro expansion problems. It's not particularly verbose. Most languages have a ton of issues. Imho, the stuff in the PHP list is pretty minor compared to some of the warts in some other languages.

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#54

Post by lhorie »

jrockway wrote: post #47
lhorie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Fwiw, many of the complaints apply to other "better" languages also: - PHP has inconsistent naming of built-in and library functions. - C has types like int, size_t, jmp_buf and FILE - PHP performance is abysmal without caching - MRI Ruby is pretty slow too - Functions are case insensitive - Lisp anyone? etc etc The whole meme of PHP warts seems more like an exercise in confirmation bias than objective analys…

Yeah, the minor details of PHP don't really matter. It's the whole language and ecosystem when viewed as one that is really repulsive. It's also difficult to write good code, because there are no abstraction mechanisms. Well, there's one -- Java-style OO. But incidentally, Java is almost impossible to use for the same reason.

I'm curious why you think the ecosystem contributes to the bad rep. If anything, I think that's one thing PHP has going for it. In general, yes, seasoned programmers who are new(ish) to PHP tend to have a bit of a NIH-based bias against the frameworks, but you gotta admit that other languages simply don't have the one-click-install-everything-you-will-never-need sort of thing that Fantastico or whatever gives you.

>> Well, there's one -- Java-style OO. But incidentally, Java is almost impossible to use for the same reason.

Tiobe begs to differ :)

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#55

Post by jamesmontalvo3 »

I'm wondering, as a fairly inexperience programmer with most of my time in PHP: is there any good reference for "How to start web development in ___ with previous experience only in PHP". I would love a tutorial that explained how to accomplish in another language all the things that PHP makes simple for newbies. I'd also be totally willing to help an experience person develop such a tutorial.

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#56

Post by sanderjd »

arnorhs wrote: post #8
hsarvell wrote: post #4

PHP is great if you need to get some small thing up and running yesterday. PHP is also great if an out of the box solution will almost fit the bill due to the fact that there are so many. Just take a box and do some small modifications, voila, done!

...or big thing running yesterday, right? Take Facebook for an example. To me, Facebook seems like a pretty complicated piece of software. The concept isn't very complicated but there are so many features all over the place.

Seems to me as if Facebook used PHP for the small thing running yesterday aspect - since they've gotten big they've had to switch to different tools.

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#57

Post by hackermom »

chromatic wrote: post #51
hackermom wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without going off on a limb, I'm guessing you're a not too experienced developer. You comment as if instead going for Perl, Ruby or ASP inherently makes an application safe, saves buttloads of manhours etc. And you're wrong. Gravely wrong. Excluding the obvious issues caused by bugs that are a natural part of any programming language's development, security problems are not caused by the language chosen, but by the d…

A well designed language or library can decrease the likelihood of specific bugs, and especially security problems. Imagine the existence of a library which made it easier to use SQL placeholders than to concatenate user input into a string. Imagine PHP without register globals.

PHP already does that via PDO. PHP's "Register globals" was deprecated exactly one year ago, in 5.3.0.

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#58

Post by sanderjd »

rick888 wrote: post #39
shabble wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably fair to say that all of these started out pretty small (and quite a lot time ago). If you're a one-man company with a great idea and possibly not a huge amount of programming experience, then PHP is a fair choice for prototyping your design and getting things off the ground. Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop…

"Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features." Using Ruby on Rails, .NET, or python won't magically give you great programming skills. If you are…

"I carefully choose php for all of my projects because it's better than all of the alternatives. I know I'm not alone in my thinking."

I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better', would you care to describe what features work better for you than what the alternatives offer?

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#59

Post by rick888 »

sanderjd wrote: post #58
rick888 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features." Using Ruby on Rails, .NET, or python won't magically give you great programming skills. If you are…

"I carefully choose php for all of my projects because it's better than all of the alternatives. I know I'm not alone in my thinking." I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better', would you care to describe what features work better for you than what the alternatives offer?

"I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better'"

Why "more practical"? There are a slew of other languages and frameworks out there that could be used.

PHP gives you the flexibility to create more complex projects without being pigeon-holed into one specific framework. I noticed this with some of the newer languages (and frameworks) such as RoR and Django. The higher the level you go, the more difficult it is to get around the built-in features that try to make it easier to develop an application. PHP is at the perfect level for me. Higher than say c, but lower than something like RoR.

Also, the c syntax makes it to move onto other languages.

It's also been around for 15 years, which means a plethora of support and examples. The language itself may have some issues (naming convention, Unicode support, non-standard namespace convention), but it can still be used to create solid applications that scale well (if you know what you are doing).

Since PHP has been around longer, people really need to come up with reasons NOT to use it (and why I should be using new language X). So far, I'm not convinced.

Re: Stack Overflow: Defend PHP - convince me it isn't horrible

#60

Post by Daishiman »

hackermom wrote: post #44
Daishiman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?? Do you have any idea of just how many programmer hours have been wasted by the absence of features, just how insecure so many web apps are due to the weird casting system and lack of safety-oriented features. My impression is that people who claim PHP has not cost them development time have simply never looked at alternatives that solve many of the problems.

Without going off on a limb, I'm guessing you're a not too experienced developer. You comment as if instead going for Perl, Ruby or ASP inherently makes an application safe, saves buttloads of manhours etc. And you're wrong. Gravely wrong. Excluding the obvious issues caused by bugs that are a natural part of any programming language's development, security problems are not caused by the language chosen, but by the d…

Really? So the fact that you are unknowingly casting integers to strings and vice-versa does not lead to security vulnerabilities is just fiction? Being able to escape characters? Making prepared statements and having sane exception management?

If your statement were true, then by that measure making a program in assembly would be as safe as doing it in C#. Evidently, it is not. Languages make certain idioms easier or worse, and they have a culture of security or they do not, which is reflected in development methodologies, libraries, and code samples.

PHP fails massively in all those regards.

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