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PHP in 2019

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Re: PHP in 2019

#91

Post by GrumpyNl »

zaphar wrote: post #81
simias wrote: post #51

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 Rub…

Yeah, I've been burned too badly by PHP. There are languages I haven't done in years that I would go back to if there was a compelling need to. PHP is not that language. Far to many sleepless late nights trying to clean up some security hole. PHP is like that abusive Ex that everyone says has changed. It may be true, in which case, good for PHP But I won't be putting myself in that position again.

You can be burned by every program language if you dont know the in and outs. It all boils down to, pick the right language for the job and more important, know the language you choose.

Re: PHP in 2019

#92

Post by jeltz »

jbrooksuk wrote: post #25
coblers wrote: post #21

Maybe it isn't, but other languages/frameworks have improved the past ten years as well. I don't see the selling point in building something in PHP in 2019 when you have similar if not better/more mature languages/frameworks at your disposal. Won't your prototyping be faster in Go/Python/Node/Ruby anyway, with a more stable surface to build upon it? I really fail to see where PHP has its place in 2019. For your "buil…

> Won't your prototyping be faster in Go/Python/Node/Ruby anyway, with a more stable surface to build upon it? One of the most understated pros of PHP (IMHO) is that it's so easy to get setup with. You can start hacking on something so quickly. In my experience, Go has not been like that. Node.js also was never as quick.

But other languages like Python and Ruby are even easier to get started with than PHP.

Re: PHP in 2019

#94

Post by return1 »

johnday wrote: post #5

Thanks 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. T…

Yes, that is the reason why i chose to write stuff in it (also because i knew it relatively well). PHP has not been fancy for 15 years now , which is a good thing if you have more interesting things to do rather than refactoring your old websites because some college kids wanted to "move fast and break things that work". If PHP decides to go with major breaking changes, i will probably quit it.

Re: PHP in 2019

#95

Post by GrumpyNl »

simion314 wrote: post #76
pdimitar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your points -- but then it turns out that PHP is still the same old crappy language it was ten years ago.

Is that and more, I mean everyone uses classes and namespaces now and structures code better so there is this improvement. Projects use autoloaders now and things again are better. Have a look for example http://image.intervention.io/getting_started/installation how you would resize an image if you used a framework, it is much different then you would see in a code that was written 20 years ago.

You mean to say that namespaces and classes are an improvement?

Re: PHP in 2019

#96

Post by jplayer01 »

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…

> 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 cleaned up what was and already clean and consistent language.

People keep saying it was a huge failure, but honestly, I don't see how it was supposed to be done better otherwise. Either you make breaking changes that will impact your entire ecosystem or you don't and live with the same cruft from 20 years ago.

Re: PHP in 2019

#97

Post by pornel »

alexandernst wrote: post #63
richardwhiuk wrote: post #55

And yet ~everything in https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ is still true. All that's happened is that the language is even more complex, has even more baggage.

I'm not really sure why this comment is getting downvoted, but literally every single thing in that post still holds true.

No, it's not. PHP has disabled or removed the major anti-features like magic quotes, globals, URL includes and the bad mysql extension. It has a proper AST-compatible parser which removed tons of quirks, and added syntax sugar to look more normal to outsiders.

The remaining things are:

• the endless whine about inconsistent underscores in function names and haystack/needle. These are a bad look, but aren't really an obstacle to using the language (PHP devs memorize the common functions, rely on IDE or docs for the rest, and move on).

• being offended about use of backslash as the namespace separator. It really doesn't matter at all.

• old constructs and edge cases that exist, but are not used in new code.

• general upset about dynamically-typed languages, and all the consequences and compromises that dynamic typing brings.

That post is just a rant. It presents insignificant/arbitrary choices as flaws (e.g. "clone is an operator?!" — so what?). Some complaints are totally ridiculous, e.g. exceptions thrown in destructors were fatal errors, and that was bad. When the restriction has been removed, the post has been updated to complain that this is bad too, because now you can throw literally everywhere! Apparently, no matter what PHP does, it's bad.

Re: PHP in 2019

#98

Post by baybal2 »

swah wrote: post #86
baybal2 wrote: post #43

> PHP isn't the same old crappy language it was ten years ago But it is too late. JS on the backend has nearly completely ate its mindshare in its target demographic. I think, JS itself risks ending up like this if core developers in Node and TC39 will not begin to think of the need for JS 2.0 and fixing fundamental design issues, and bug-o-features.

I usually code a backend in Go or Python, but recently been thinking if I should just abandon my "prejudice" (JS sucks, Node sucks, Node is single threaded, there are no SQL libraries, etc) and move to JS on the backend as well, since that's what I already use on the frontend - be it web or React Native. (I actually find JS very expressive and oriented towards a style of "table-oriented programming" which is useful f…

> (JS sucks, Node sucks, Node is single threaded, there are no SQL libraries, etc) and move to JS on the backend as well, since that's what I already use on the frontend - be it web or React Native.

My prejudice is the same. A lot of JS and its ecosystem feels to me to be broken by designs, but you have an option to use a boutique option of Scala/Dart/Go that nobody uses (relatively speaking,) or JS which is broken as a language, but is OK as a work tool.

JS will fall just like PHP, when it will be bested by the next better tool for "quick and dirty" programming, because Node and TC39 delayed the "2.0" change for too long.

What I feel already is increasing awareness of real world JS performance limitations, and people beginning to speak about JS sponoffs with native types, and further direction of work on things that sprung up from ASMjs

Re: PHP in 2019

#99

Post by mgkimsal »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #75
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…

I've been coding in PHP for almost 20 years now. I think I can count on one hand the number of times where I have had an issue regarding inconsistent function signatures. It becomes second nature, and if I forget, the documentation is available online or in worst case built into my IDE. I can understand why people make this into such a pain point, but quite frankly it isn't for anyone who works day in day out with PH…

23 years here (php/fi in jan '96) and I probably hit the 'parameter order' issue more than you. I still need to look param order stuff multiple times per year. Normally I can get it in the IDE, but doing remote vim stuff, for example, I need to look it up.

Yes, it's technically a non-zero problem. I get it. Having spent several years in the Java/Spring world, the classic ASP world, and the Perl world... they all have problems, both with the languages and the ecosystems. There will always be people who will throw out Rust or Go or Erlang as 'better' by some metric.

For the types of projects I work on, the modern PHP stacks of the last 5-6 years are all probably the best ROI. Colleagues/friends are running medium-sized SaaS on Rails, and it works, but we compare headaches sometimes, and it's not carefree in the Rails world. There's issues there. Regardless of whether your language is 'clean' or 'discoverable', the rest of the ecosystem can still present problems.

Re: PHP in 2019

#100

Post by coblers »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #38
coblers wrote: post #19

It might not be, but how does it fare against similar languages? I have no idea why you'd choose it over Go/Node.js/Ruby or similar for your standard webdev stuff.

All apps I saw, written in Ruby, were awfully slow. I don't know Ruby, maybe it's just me, but would be interesting to know examples of not slow Ruby apps.

It's rarely application code itself that leads to something being slow(though bad code can, of course, be slow).

It's usually database calls, external API's etc..

For example, JIRA is as slow as a dehydrated donkey because its database schemas are exceptionally awful.

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