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A look at modern PHP

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Re: A look at modern PHP

#301

Post by q3k »

spdionis wrote: post #186
cletus wrote: post #168

It saddens me to see some of the (largely baseless and otherwise largely historical) hate for PHP. I use Hack in my day job, which has at this point diverged from PHP, and I like it for the most part. The thing that PHP does right that so few languages do is having a stateless core in the webserver. This is an incredibly efficient approach to serving HTTP traffic. Consider the startup cost issues with Java, or Rails'…

> The thing that PHP does right that so few languages do is having a stateless core in the webserver. I never understood why the HN crowd always ignored this massive benefit of PHP, in a world where it's becoming clearer everyday that keeping things stateless across the stack provides many benefits towards managing complex systems.

Because this is not always a benefit. Want to cache something in between requests? You have to use memcached/redis. Want to have some background or periodic processing? Set up cronjobs, and/or use an external job queue system.

Sure, if you're writing a simple CRUD app with and RDBMS backend it can be just fine. But when you're dealing with more complex work just being able to start a goroutine or use an in-memory cache structure is so much nicer than having to deal with external systems.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#302

Post by techopoly »

fredsted wrote: post #145

I wonder if most developers that trash on PHP for trivial issues like seen in this thread haven't been using it for many years, or had a bad experience (e.g. maintaining a legacy app). Some developers live in a kind of technical vacuum where, I guess they assume, the technical features of their programming language are what makes the difference in the value of the business they're building. In reality, the difference…

I wonder how many developers hate PHP because one is just supposed to hate PHP.

I'm sure there are many with well-thought-out reasoning though, like seen in this thread.

It's useful to keep an open mind about things though. I'm probably more a PHP fan, but I can't say that I'm a huge fan of its programming style. It's much more enjoyable to me to churn out applications in .NET or in Ruby, but it's hard to argue with the speed at which I can develop in PHP or with the level of support online for doing so.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#303

Post by aganame »

ludamad wrote: post #255
asdkjh345fd wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people simply have reasonable standards. I tried for years to hire a PHP dev. I never found a single one. I found tons of people who had PHP on their resume, and not a single one of them was anything close to competent. PHP only makes hiring easy if you don't care about the quality of work that gets done. I can hire a million PHP monkeys, but everyone who has the right combination of intelligence and conscientio…

You can hire "good programmers" and ask them to write PHP - Facebook does

Many employers use php because it allows keeping salaries down, though. So your advice would not work for those.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#304

Post by tzs »

watermelon0 wrote: post #178
s1k3s wrote: post #112

The amount of misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements in this thread is mindblowing for the quality that I've been used to see on HN. Here are some facts: - Symfony was the backend framework with the most contributors in 2019 [1] (yes, out of any backend framework written in any language) - PHP has more active contributors than it ever had [2] - Laravel is one of the most used frameworks in the world…

Where to begin? - No proper connection pooling with circuit breakers. - No proper multithreading (that works in web environment) or parallelism in general. - Almost everything blocks (even `new PDO('mysql:...')` can block for whatever the execution time limit is, if there is an issue with connection or MySQL server). - Most libraries are implemented in C instead of in PHP, whereas with other languages people try to a…

> There is no way to easily share memory between processes

What about https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.shmop.php ?

Re: A look at modern PHP

#305

Post by aganame »

jackofalltrades wrote: post #135
s1k3s wrote: post #112

The amount of misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements in this thread is mindblowing for the quality that I've been used to see on HN. Here are some facts: - Symfony was the backend framework with the most contributors in 2019 [1] (yes, out of any backend framework written in any language) - PHP has more active contributors than it ever had [2] - Laravel is one of the most used frameworks in the world…

I can't really understand the hate towards php in general, never was able to understand it. I started programming in PHP and then moved to c# and now mostly JS, but never really understood the motivations behind people bashing on PHP. Like, some of my friends that today mostly program in React/Nextjs praise the framework as something amazing and the SSR as something really innovative, and - honestly - it resembles PH…

Because it's fairly popular (#6ish or something) as a language, it is more probable that people are forced to use it at the threat of unemployment.

Nobody is forced to write Haskell or Rust, you have to actively look for such positions.

Then again, this doesn't explain why the number #1 language (Python) is so liked...

Re: A look at modern PHP

#306

Post by Spivak »

kangoo1707 wrote: post #274
ainiriand wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define proper please.

No native support for concurrency operators, no real event loop implementation, lack built-in support for non-blocking IO... I do Elixir regularly and Actor Model is not something PHP developers know

Is this just a long way of saying it doesn’t have “async” because threads are a perfectly fine concurrency primitive that you can build event loops on top of.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#307

Post by mywittyname »

tzs wrote: post #304
watermelon0 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where to begin? - No proper connection pooling with circuit breakers. - No proper multithreading (that works in web environment) or parallelism in general. - Almost everything blocks (even `new PDO('mysql:...')` can block for whatever the execution time limit is, if there is an issue with connection or MySQL server). - Most libraries are implemented in C instead of in PHP, whereas with other languages people try to a…

> There is no way to easily share memory between processes What about https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.shmop.php ?

Yeah, that comment stuck out to me as I've used shared memory segments in PHP before and these functions work just fine.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#308

Post by macinjosh »

ragnese wrote: post #262
fredsted wrote: post #145

I wonder if most developers that trash on PHP for trivial issues like seen in this thread haven't been using it for many years, or had a bad experience (e.g. maintaining a legacy app). Some developers live in a kind of technical vacuum where, I guess they assume, the technical features of their programming language are what makes the difference in the value of the business they're building. In reality, the difference…

I'm a PHP "hater", so take this for what it's worth. You are very close to implying that the language doesn't matter if you can hire developers and there are a lot of good packages in the ecosystem. Having worked on several PHP projects (Most being version 7.0+ and zero of them being older than 5.3), the languages is STILL full of gotchas, and it's a huge drag on productivity. I assert that this DOES matter. Even bas…

> if you try to use a string as a key, but it is a string of digits. It will automagically(sic) convert your string to an int and totally F-up your dictionary

I've been a PHP programmer for over 15 years and I cannot think of a single time this has been an actual problem. It sounds like you were embarrassed by a bug in your code and have just decided to blame it on the tools.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#309

Post by johnchristopher »

s1k3s wrote: post #112

The amount of misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements in this thread is mindblowing for the quality that I've been used to see on HN. Here are some facts: - Symfony was the backend framework with the most contributors in 2019 [1] (yes, out of any backend framework written in any language) - PHP has more active contributors than it ever had [2] - Laravel is one of the most used frameworks in the world…

Do you have some recommendations for books about laravel and lumen ? (I hate laracasts, I rather read than play/pause/type/play/type, etc.).

Re: A look at modern PHP

#310

Post by rgbrenner »

s1k3s wrote: post #112

The amount of misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements in this thread is mindblowing for the quality that I've been used to see on HN. Here are some facts: - Symfony was the backend framework with the most contributors in 2019 [1] (yes, out of any backend framework written in any language) - PHP has more active contributors than it ever had [2] - Laravel is one of the most used frameworks in the world…

Go and Rust were designed for other things... why wouldn't you compare it to the big language that was actually designed to compete in the same space as PHP? NodeJS.

Front end devs are already programming in JS, so there's less adoption cost than PHP. I can't think of a single reason to use PHP over Node (I know both, and have delivered projects in both).

The comparison to .Net and Spring makes me think you might be a bit behind the curve. Have you tried Node?

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