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A look at modern PHP

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Re: A look at modern PHP

#31

Post by piokoch »

echelon wrote: post #15

For web backend, being able to ship a single binary, such as what Rust and Go can provide, is really nice. I don't see PHP as a more compelling solution than either of those languages. Scripting and command line automation is executed better by Python and Ruby, which excel for writing Unix scripts and tools. I do not see what the use case for PHP is in 2020. PHP has one of the most abhorrent language syntax designs t…

Think of a simple landing page with a form to save data from a form and send out an email with confirmation.

In PHP you just need to add to your HTML page a few lines of PHP code and copy it using scp to any share server hosting that costs 4 dollars a year.

No "automation", no "cloud", no REST APIs, no WSGI/Gunicorn, etc. just plain Apache with mod_php enabled, which is available everywhere. I don't think anything can beat PHP productivity for such simple usecases.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#32

Post by cbg0 »

Svip wrote: post #14

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Adopting as other newer languages like Go and Rust seems to be moving beyond those features. A catch up into a world that's on its way out, if one will feel so blunt. PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But…

> Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today?

You could replace "Wordpress" and "PHP" with whatever you want, depending at which point in history this comment is made.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#33

Post by jinzo »

tommica wrote: post #10

I've worked with PHP since 5.4, and to me the language has not been the obstacle, it has been my own skill-level that has held me back, and still is - I lack very much the core architectural skills in getting forward as a developer, among many other things. I've seen some codebases using an even older version, and I think I can understand where people are coming from with their angst towards the language - but I thin…

I got back into web development in the last year or so. Previously I did mostly Python/Django and then 5 years of something unrelated to dev. Now I'm working in a fairly typical PHP/Wordpress mixed joint, and now I understand why PHP has the bad rep - because it allows/tolerates/even encourages bad practices (and beyond the usual "shoot yourself in the leg" we can see in other popular/common languages). And I guess that is one of the reasons why a lot of libraries/plugins/php code out there is simply bad. For example: Seeing heavy mixing of PHP code and HTML output in 2020 is a horrible sight for me (and it's waaay to common in what I saw).

Of course you can write good code in modern PHP, but you can write really bad stuff too - more (at least imho) than in other popular languages. And then the whole ecosystem "drags you down" and gives PHP a bad rep -> but I don't think it's totally undeserved.

On a similar note, this actually compelled me to try Rust/something similar instead of just going straight back to Python (which I still love tbh).

Re: A look at modern PHP

#34

Post by open-source-ux »

Whether you like or hate PHP, it has achieved something that no other language has done - made it easy to host a dynamic website or app on the server. Other languages may claim to be 'web-friendly' (e.g. Python, Ruby) but when it comes to ease of deployment, they are anything but 'web-friendly' or easy.

This is what programmer and blogger Jeff Atwood - who isn't a fan of PHP - has written about PHP:

"If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option"

He wrote that in 2012. It's 2020 and I can't think of any other language that has caught up with PHP's ease of deployment. If you want to get your customers to self-install your software as painlessly as possible, what other language can match or exceed the ease of deployment of PHP?

Re: A look at modern PHP

#35

Post by Tomte »

Svip wrote: post #14

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Adopting as other newer languages like Go and Rust seems to be moving beyond those features. A catch up into a world that's on its way out, if one will feel so blunt. PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But…

> There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages.

There is nothing wrong with that. Java also follows that philosophy.

> Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today?

According to Matt Mullenweg: no, but does it matter?

People do start new PHP projects, and people use old, but still maintained PHP projects.

If you're looking for shiny new things, look elsewhere. But you don't have to take away the working, well-known "old" away from others.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#36

Post by pm90 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #28
echelon wrote: post #15

For web backend, being able to ship a single binary, such as what Rust and Go can provide, is really nice. I don't see PHP as a more compelling solution than either of those languages. Scripting and command line automation is executed better by Python and Ruby, which excel for writing Unix scripts and tools. I do not see what the use case for PHP is in 2020. PHP has one of the most abhorrent language syntax designs t…

At the same time, being able to install new or change existing software just by uploading some files to a cheap webhost is not to be dismissed as easily.

Most webhosts provide some kind of support for containers don’t they? Perhaps I’m completely missing the point here? I’ll readily admit that Im young enough to have used docker to deploy apps nearly everywhere I worked. Is php useful for ultra low cost websites? Is it low maintenance? Is that the appeal? Genuine question.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#37

Post by simion314 »

Svip wrote: post #14

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Adopting as other newer languages like Go and Rust seems to be moving beyond those features. A catch up into a world that's on its way out, if one will feel so blunt. PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But…

Most of the time you do not chose a language or ecosystem because it has some cool syntax or some new feature. As an example if you need to do X you look at what solves X the best, if I can do X by installing say ffmpeg and write a bash script I will do that and not cry that bash does not have some cool feature.

I think languages like PHP, Java, C++ appeal for people that solve hard problem where the fact that you have a giant ecosystem of existing libraries and a large number of existing developers compensates the fact that the language is not "cool" or is missing some feature that you probably don't need anyway or workaround it with a library.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#38

Post by frenchman99 »

Svip wrote: post #14

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Adopting as other newer languages like Go and Rust seems to be moving beyond those features. A catch up into a world that's on its way out, if one will feel so blunt. PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But…

I remember reading about Ghost.org team members saying that if they had chosen PHP instead of Node.js when they got started, they'd be much further along in their roadmap [0].

PHP has a reliable ecosystem of 3rd libraries with LTS releases. I am not aware of something like Symfony [1] for Rust or Go.

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/007-john-onolan-of-ghos...

[1] https://symfony.com/

Re: A look at modern PHP

#39

Post by jinzo »

Svip wrote: post #14

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Adopting as other newer languages like Go and Rust seems to be moving beyond those features. A catch up into a world that's on its way out, if one will feel so blunt. PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But…

> PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage. And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications.

And if you are doing something moderately complex/serious/modern you probably need/want composer anyway - because uploading all of the million files via FTP is cumberstone (let's not even get into the versioning/modern deployment practices). Then you are at shell already and not that far away from other language deployments.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#40

Post by cageface »

PHP, Python and Ruby all feel to me like last-generation languages. IMO we should be building new frameworks on modern languages that support concurrency & static typing. The most promising new stack I've seen is Kotlin's KTOR framework. Thanks to the expressiveness of Kotlin it's not really any more verbose than something like PHP or Ruby but it's far more powerful and robust.
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