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PHP in 2019

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Re: PHP in 2019

#271

Post by deckard1 »

out_of_protocol wrote: post #133
pornel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (PHP devs memorize the common functions.. Nope (c) Me, after 5 years on trying to but still falling back to googling every 20 minutes despite years and years of using the language. ... And just writing code without looking into docs much after a week with ruby

I'm quite shocked that a common complaint of any language is function syntax. Maybe it's been awhile since I've used PHP, but is it really worse than any other language? The problem with PHP is that, at least years ago, it had no equivalent of C's man pages. In C, you're constantly doing "man memchr" or what have you. Perl has "perldoc -f sort".

Don't get me started on Ruby, though. Wading through a tower of classes to figure out where and how some method is defined, only to much later find out it was actually created by define_method or method_missing is absolute torture. And yeah, I know the REPL can provide this info to you. The point is: source code should be obvious in how it functions. Not obscure things through cleverness.

Re: PHP in 2019

#272

Post by jonatron »

taytus wrote: post #254
joemaller1 wrote: post #245

I've been using PHP semi-regularly since the late 90s. It's been empowering and infuriating. The ecosystem is radically better than it used to be. Composer and the Packagist registry are as mature and dependable as npm, PyPI or RubyGems. (despite hours lost to my own namespace screwups). I'm also happy to see the Prettier-PHP project automating and enforcing code-style standards. For whatever reason, I often feel clu…

Infuriating? I'm not here to defend php but even when I do agree that inconsistencies are not nice, nothing stop you of creating your own wrapper for these functions. Infuriating? really?

Back when I wrote PHP, the solution was to use an editor which shows you functions arguments after you type the open bracket.

Re: PHP in 2019

#273

Post by reallydude »

foobarandgrill wrote: post #171
StevePerkins wrote: post #104

On one hand, I do see that HN (and probably Reddit) live in a bubble. Where most of the darling languages and tools have very low use in the real-world. And where most of the languages and tooling that actually run the real-world go un-discussed, or simply dismissed, because they're boring and don't appeal to students and entry-level devs working on side projects. I realize that the perspective most rookies get from…

What's wrong with Laravel or Symfony?

Laravel and Symphony, in particular, have the terrible code smell of elongated toolchains, that are specific to the frameworks.

> php artisan serve # laravel

> symphony server:start # symphony

Same poor thinking that NodeJS introduced, albeit less offensively integrated.

If you need additional toolchains, you're not using PHP per se, but another meta-language. There's literally no good reason to do this other than to remove the concept of tradeoffs for a "we know better" or "don't worry about it". These frameworks have never added anything that I couldn't do simpler and faster, nor have they provided me with constructive guidance in the design or maintenance of a project.

Re: PHP in 2019

#274

Post by ndarwincorn »

StevePerkins wrote: post #104

On one hand, I do see that HN (and probably Reddit) live in a bubble. Where most of the darling languages and tools have very low use in the real-world. And where most of the languages and tooling that actually run the real-world go un-discussed, or simply dismissed, because they're boring and don't appeal to students and entry-level devs working on side projects. I realize that the perspective most rookies get from…

You make a sweeping statement about a bubble and then demonstrate the edge of yours:

> The business world runs on Java, and .NET to a lesser extent.

Flip those.

> I just don't see any recruiter activity around PHP at all.

This is probably true. My own anecdote: I'm at a primarily-PHP SaaS provider in a major tech hub, and for the couple hires we've made in the last year all of our applicants with extensive PHP experience said we were the only PHP shop they'd talked to, many of them over a year into their job search.

Re: PHP in 2019

#275

Post by cbdumas »

StevePerkins wrote: post #104

On one hand, I do see that HN (and probably Reddit) live in a bubble. Where most of the darling languages and tools have very low use in the real-world. And where most of the languages and tooling that actually run the real-world go un-discussed, or simply dismissed, because they're boring and don't appeal to students and entry-level devs working on side projects. I realize that the perspective most rookies get from…

Often when there is a post about PHP I read over these treads sort of subtly trying to figure out how a language with such a large user base has remained basically invisible to me. And I don't think I live in the HN bubble, though I do use a lot of Python, in my consulting work I've also done plenty of work with .NET, JVM to a lesser extent and other "boring" tech.

But PHP has literally never come up, even as a suggestion or as a tool that is a small part of the company stack or whatever. It feels like I'm looking into a strange parallel universe of software development reading through these threads. PHP devs, where are you?

Re: PHP in 2019

#276

Post by juangacovas »

gwbas1c wrote: post #257
mattferderer wrote: post #205

I think the easiest thing to forget is what made PHP popular was how easy it was to get started writing software that worked good enough. The barrier to entry was incredibly low. It caused a lot of bad code & gave PHP a bad reputation but a lot of good was also made from it. PHP made a lot of careers for developers as they were able to fake it until they made it while learning how to code & providing significant valu…

The thing that I like about PHP is that I can mix HTML, code, and database queries into a single file. This is incredibly useful when learning basic web development, even though it doesn't scale for more complicated applications. It's also incredibly useful when trying to bang out a simple experiment.

And many of us took the jump and refused to do things that way. You're wrong, PHP scales and you CAN do separation of concerns and have pretty, maintanable code, using a framework or not: just a matter of knowing what you are doing

Re: PHP in 2019

#277

Post by strictfp »

gwbas1c wrote: post #257
mattferderer wrote: post #205

I think the easiest thing to forget is what made PHP popular was how easy it was to get started writing software that worked good enough. The barrier to entry was incredibly low. It caused a lot of bad code & gave PHP a bad reputation but a lot of good was also made from it. PHP made a lot of careers for developers as they were able to fake it until they made it while learning how to code & providing significant valu…

The thing that I like about PHP is that I can mix HTML, code, and database queries into a single file. This is incredibly useful when learning basic web development, even though it doesn't scale for more complicated applications. It's also incredibly useful when trying to bang out a simple experiment.

It also allows you to utilize and extend the full http protocol, something which most "serious" frameworks hinder.

Re: PHP in 2019

#279

Post by oo0shiny »

cbdumas wrote: post #275
StevePerkins wrote: post #104

On one hand, I do see that HN (and probably Reddit) live in a bubble. Where most of the darling languages and tools have very low use in the real-world. And where most of the languages and tooling that actually run the real-world go un-discussed, or simply dismissed, because they're boring and don't appeal to students and entry-level devs working on side projects. I realize that the perspective most rookies get from…

Often when there is a post about PHP I read over these treads sort of subtly trying to figure out how a language with such a large user base has remained basically invisible to me. And I don't think I live in the HN bubble, though I do use a lot of Python, in my consulting work I've also done plenty of work with .NET, JVM to a lesser extent and other "boring" tech. But PHP has literally never come up, even as a sugge…

Right here! Drupal has been moving into the enterprise sector with their latest release (v8, built on Symfony). I get a lot of interest from recruiters based on my Drupal background, especially lately.

Re: PHP in 2019

#280

Post by wvenable »

mikojan wrote: post #270
wvenable wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An auto-completing editor is a big help when using PHP. :)

Switching to a whole nother editor to use php might be annoying to some people

Well really programmers shouldn't be using notepad.exe to write code in any language.
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