PHP in 2019
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PHP in 2019
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Re: PHP in 2019
#2I've actually been really impressed with Laravel after switching back to PHP for a few projects. Not only is the developer tooling experience some of the best I've experienced, it's just really the only framework I've ever experienced with a high quality ecosystem of tools—from Forge[1], which makes it dead-simple to deploy a Laravel app into production to things like Horizon, for managing Redis queues.
A great example of this in action is Laravel Spark[3], a first party base for building paid SaaS apps. I built and launched a writing tool, Write Together[2], to the world in under three weeks, payment systems and all, and got 150 paying customers in a matter of a few weeks. One hell of a great way to MVP an idea and build something useful, in a low amount of time.
I'm basically developing two Laravel apps full-time at the moment, and it's the most fun I've had in years...compared to the hellscape of NPM dependencies and other complexities I'm usually bogged down with. Composer, the package distribution system, really needs work and is incredibly slow, but other than that—I'm really happy.
Re: PHP in 2019
#3> Do you remember the popular "PHP: a fractal of bad design" blog post? The first time I read it, I was working in a crappy place with lots of legacy PHP projects. This article got me wondering whether I should just quit and go do something entirely different than programming.
Seems like a pretty extreme reaction - how about trying a job with something other than PHP?
Re: PHP in 2019
#4Is the debugging experience finally any more bearable?
Re: PHP in 2019
#5Thanks for sharing. The thing that I am most concerned about with PHP is not, strictly speaking, the language itself. The syntax is slightly odd but otherwise fine. And the semantics are much the same as any similar language.
The real problem that I find with PHP is that the designers seem (from an outside perspective) to take a similar approach towards language backward-compatibility that, for example, C/C++ have. There is some rejection of the idea of getting rid of the old, bad stuff. Plenty of new, cool features is all well and good - but there are still holes in the floor that new learners will fall through.
[To clarify, I understand the case made by the C/C++ committees on supporting old code. But nobody's programming pacemakers in PHP, one would hope.]
Re: PHP in 2019
#6One of the main takeaways I got from the original Fractal of Bad Design post was the myriad of inconsistencies in both representation and execution of code. This was barely touched upon, mostly this post focused on how PHP has added features and ecosystem. But then so has Javascript.
Re: PHP in 2019
#7Not only did PHP clean itself up a lot in the last few years, it also managed to do so while maintaining a great deal of backward compatibility.
It's not uncommon to pick up a really old library that used to work in PHP 4.4, stick it in a PHP 7.3 project -- maybe you need it to import legacy data -- and experience no issues whatsoever. You can probably also use the library in question in parallel with a modern dependency management system like composer, or any framework built on top of it, without any conflicts. This is Windows-level backward compatibility, and I mean it in a good way.
Why would anyone want that in this day and age? Because there are tons of legacy PHP code that still power a very large fraction of the web. Not everyone is writing new projects from scratch. Not everyone can afford a total rewrite. PHP's backward compability allows people to transition gradually at their own pace. It might not be sexy, but it gets the work done, and it just keeps working. That's all that matters for many, many businesses out there.
Re: PHP in 2019
#8Is the debugging experience finally any more bearable?
Xdebug remote debugging is great, especially when paired with Laravel Valet (which supports more than just Laravel apps).
Re: PHP in 2019
#9"While async and await are not available yet, lots of improvements to the language itself have been made over the past years"
It's 2019 guys. Please.
Re: PHP in 2019
#10I've actually been really impressed with Laravel after switching back to PHP for a few projects. Not only is the developer tooling experience some of the best I've experienced, it's just really the only framework I've ever experienced with a high quality ecosystem of tools—from Forge[1], which makes it dead-simple to deploy a Laravel app into production to things like Horizon, for managing Redis queues. A great examp…
Last time I used composer (about 3 years ago) it had a nasty memory leak that eventually meant I had to run the build on a higher specced instance than the actual application. This was mainly due to the ridiculous dependancies of the application, but it was almost a show stopper. Has this improved?