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PHP in 2019

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Re: PHP in 2019

#51

Post by simias »

As far as I'm concerned the bridges have burned a long time ago and I definitely can't see myself giving PHP a second chance. That being said, if I'm wrong and PHP has really managed to become a decent language (or at least something that's not completely insane) its defenders should focus on actually showing what modern PHP code looks like.

Is performance that much of a big deal for most people? In a world where Ruby on Rail exists I find that hard to believe. Server are cheaper and vastly more powerful now than in PHP's infancy, I'm sure that for the vast majority of use cases PHP's performance (whatever it is) is good enough.

The infamous "Fractal of Bad Design" wasn't about that, it was about the ridiculously inconsistent and error-prone API, the insane defaults, the counter-intuitive behaviour of '==', the headless chicken development roadmap where maintainers would add features because they were popular in other programing languages without trying to figure out if they had their place in PHP,...

Surely a lot of this has turned into technical debt? Even assuming that "modern" PHP managed to come up with better ways to deal with all of this, I assume that these obsolete functions and operators still linger for backward compatibility? If so how do you avoid them?

Again, I personally don't really care, but if you want to win new converts who haven't been as scarred by PHP as I have been I think that's where you should focus your efforts. Maybe somebody should write a point-by-point rebuttal to the "fractal of bad design" article?

Re: PHP in 2019

#52

Post by tannhaeuser »

ptx wrote: post #49
simion314 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claims are vague, do you have a specific example of a new feature and a new mainstream framework that has the security issues you mention?

I think the point is that if you use a "new mainstream framework", you lose the traditional unique strengths of PHP by using it essentially the same way as you would any other language, so you might as well use a different language. So instead of trying to be like other languages but with worse syntax and weird quirks, PHP could try to improve on the things that make it different and lead to its initial popularity.

Exactly my point. Thanks for explaining it much better than I could.

Re: PHP in 2019

#53

Post by simion314 »

hguhghuff wrote: post #41

The thing that matters is language consistency... A language with a pure clean vision of itself in which the programmer can guess at syntax because they understand the general syntax principles to which the language adheres. Nothing here says PHP has been fixed in this regard. Python made the big leap and fixed some huge problems when it went to python 3 - yes it's migration approach was a total fail, but it further…

That would break too much things and the benefits will not be enough. They could add some new things, deprecated the old things and keep them all but then you get a manual twice as big. All the changes in PHP feel pragmatic, like better SQL support, better cryptography support, better defaults, better performance and less on cool looking syntax or latest cool features.

IMO pragmatic is good, especially when you have to use an existing code base and you have to upgrade it to the latest supported version you don't want a Python 3 migration story(I migrated a medium project to latest version and the only problem was a cryptographic function that was used to generate some random looking strings that was deprecated, I replaced with the new safer function and done , my project is now compatible with the older and the new version).

Re: PHP in 2019

#54

Post by brightball »

cntainer wrote: post #28
owenwil wrote: post #2

I'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…

Agreed, Laravel provides the best dev experience in the PHP world. The funny thing is that Laravel basically took the Ruby on Rails philosophy and applied it to PHP. Just looking at their site it's clear they have a very similar vision: simple, fast and fun. One can always find differences but the basic principles are the same. IMO this is great kudos to the Laravel guys, whatever language I use I always look for the…

Yep. Laravel is basically PHP on Rails. They do a great job with it too.

Re: PHP in 2019

#56

Post by richardwhiuk »

simion314 wrote: post #45
Arbalest wrote: post #6

One 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.

Unfortunately this is true and it can't be changed, the functions are named and parameters are soemtimes inconsistent like strpos and str_replace, I would have to use the docs all the time if my IDE wouldn't show me the param names. But after you get productive with PHP there is no feature that I think I am missing from other similar languages.

It can be changed.

You have some syntax to opt into a later release (e.g. doing `In a major release, you then get rid of a load of cruft.

Re: PHP in 2019

#57

Post by golfer »

So much of the web is powered by PHP. Wikipedia (MediaWiki software) and Facebook are two of the largest footprints of usage. And of course, WordPress. PHP has a lot of firepower behind it.

Re: PHP in 2019

#58

Post by paulcarroty »

Thanks, modern JavaScript is much more better & profitable than not_a_crappy_language_anymore today.

If you're 60, you can still use PHP for legacy projects, but no sense to learn it now and kill your career. Market matters.

Re: PHP in 2019

#59

Post by Lazare »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #30

Rather than chasing MVw or OO trends of the JavaScript ecosystem and become more like JavaScript or Java, so to say, why don't the PHP developers identify and build on the unique strengths of PHP? Which are IMO: the large installed base in classic web hosting, and the original purpose of PHP as a high-level scripting language embedded in otherwise static HTML as in " ". There is a huge room for improvement there sinc…

> why don't the PHP developers identify and build on the unique strengths of PHP? Which are IMO: [...] the original purpose of PHP as a high-level scripting language embedded in otherwise static HTML as in "".

I really don't think that's a strength of PHP. It's very bad at that, and that's not been a focus of the language for decades. PHP, even with the work you suggest, is always going to be inferior compared to something like Liquid, Jinja, or Twig.

It's arguably true that PHP should focus on improving the things that make people use it, but nobody is using it because of that. Even the ability to run PHP on shared hosting is increasingly irrelevant as we move past that being a useful feature.

Re: PHP in 2019

#60

Post by ceejayoz »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #44
Intermernet wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Composer is very useful in penetration testing. Lot's of good information in the composer.json files people keep forgetting to block..

A Laravel or Symfony app operates out of the public/ directory, so composer.json shouldn’t need any blocking typically - it’d be outside the web root.
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