A look at modern PHP • Hacker News Board

Re: A look at modern PHP

#371

Post by valand » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

thefounder wrote: post #350

greatwhitenorth wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Majority of the HN commenters argue irrelevant points or are trolls and have never gone deep in any technology to be an expert and comment about it. I've seen absolutely moronic comments here. You should see the comments on 'React' or 'Java'. I'm pretty sure most have never written a "hello world" equivalent in it. It's cool to hate something popular.

Some of commenters are "ex" php develops. For me PHP was painfull but I didn't know that until I moved on to Ruby and now Go. I would never go back to PHP programming(i tried few years ago) just like I would not go back to Windows(except for budget or political reasons). PHP was fun back in the day because you could host it anywhere and truth be told it was an easy scripting language to learn but I don't see many rea…

I have similar experience. Left when it was still 5.* something.

Now I mainly do TypeScript/JavaScript and some Rust on the side.

To me, PHP was more of a limiter rather than painful experience (it was a bit painful though). I couldn't imagine how to even make a chat app.

If not for my moving out of PHP to NodeJS now I wouldn't be a software architect and explore the rest of the fun and challenging part of computing domain.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#372

Post by hnarn » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

thawaway1837 wrote: post #240

hnarn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And last, people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative". I hope everyone understands that a language is fit for a certain type of task. PHP was created for website development, and in that area neither Go or Rust are even close to matching it in terms of maturity. I'm not disagreeing with you, but "website development" is a very broad category. For example, if you definit…

For a more or less static website, what’s probably the best bet, and has been the standard for many years, largely because it allows the non technical restaurant owner to easily update and make changes, is Wordpress. In which case you’re back again in PHP land.

Can you elaborate on why you would recommend Wordpress as the "best bet" for a "more or less static site"? I feel like I'm of the completely opposite opinion, that introducing something as modular and dependent as Wordpress for something "more or less static" is just asking for trouble down the line.

In my mind a "more or less static website" will not require a database, it will not require logic server-side, and it will not require the possibility to add-on plugins for extra functionality.

What's beautiful to me about static websites is that the threat vector is now suddenly nothing but the web server, and when you're serving static web pages that's a pretty small threat vector if you've configured it correctly. As soon as you blur the line between "web site" and "web application" and start including things like databases, forms and API:s you're in a completely different territory and I kind of feel like you should choose that because you really, really need it. Not just as a default.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#373

Post by mtnGoat » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

joelbluminator wrote: post #324

jackofalltrades wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

as a Ruby/Rails guy, I feel the same way. Seems like Rails became the top stack to shit on to feel better about your stack these days. People are just tribal. We need to feel superior to the "other" to feel better about ourselves.

Funny, I remember everyone hating on PHP when they moved to RoR, and now they hate that are and moving on. Its almost as if they just need things to hate so they can rewrite code. its very cyclical IMO.

The elitism of learning a new language and then mocking those that haven't put in the same time and effort to row in the exact same direction, has always amused me. Ive never judged anyone for what tools they use to get their job done, but apparently i am a rare breed in that i am more concerned with the output then the language choice.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#374

Post by nuncanada » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

aceman22 wrote: post #369

Laravel is the best REST api framework in existence for any language. Change my mind.

REST is a waste of time and effort, use GraphQL.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#375

Post by k__ » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

zuppy wrote: post #320

k__ wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used PHP in v4/5 times and had the impression development slowed down until I heard about all the "FB being bullish on PHP" announcements.

php 7.0 has been released 5 years ago, I think it's about time to stop using php5 as an argument for anything related to the present state.

I'm not saying PHP is doing bad today.

I'm saying that back in the days it looked like it will go downhill, but then a big player used it and that saved it.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#376

Post by durbatuluk » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

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…

As someone who freelance php and do on-site go coding on daily basis, modern PHP is amazing (symfony/slim is everything I want).

One simple improvement I would love to see is namespace grouping in standard library. Go has all related functions inside some package. Go pls let me do http.notfound = http.StatusNotFound. But in php even with inteli I need to google some function/const name.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#377

Post by eithed » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #306

kangoo1707 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is async in PHP

Re: A look at modern PHP

#378

Post by nicoburns » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #362

macinjosh wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can literally copy and paste what you said replacing it with any language and end up being correct. This is the best point in this thread, IMHO. I think it also is due to the fact that PHP is a fairly easy language for a non-coder to pick up little-by-little. One can easily start using it for doing simple things, like injecting dynamic data into a web page. From there one can learn to scale up to full web apps. I…

Onramp is gentle... to a point. While I'm a fan of PHP for what it is, there are still plenty of footguns. Probably more than modern statically typed languages.

> Probably more than modern statically typed languages.

True, but most people considering PHP probably aren't considering statically typed languages. They're probably comparing it to JavaScript, Ruby, and Python. PHP holds it's own surprisingly well in that comparison. It certainly has it's fair share of quirks, but so do the others.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#379

Post by CommieBobDole » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

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 think this is probably an example of the larger tendency of people to overrate the importance of whatever it is they directly work with, and its effect on their workflow. Like a carpenter insisting that using a certain brand of hammer has an effect on the habitability of the resulting house.

After years of using a lot of products and seeing which ones succeed and which ones fail, I question whether there's much of a connection between code quality and product success, assuming of course that the code isn't bad enough that it prevents the use of the product.

Heck, I'm not even sure there's a strong correlation between basic product function and success, at least in the enterprise space; I've seen a number of successful products that barely even work. Seems like market positioning and sales are the bigger factor.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#380

Post by jrumbut » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

macinjosh wrote: post #308

ragnese wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My guess is that the numeric indexing thing happens a lot but it's definitely rare for it to cause a visible problem and even rarer to be identified as the cause since it is unexpected.

I've been bitten by it and also stuff like 800=="8E2".

I've never been able to make an adequate defense of PHP, yet also have never seen another language match its success rate of getting useful software into the hands of users. I have wondered whether something about PHP, or something that it lacks, makes PHP projects easier to estimate.

Ease of deployment? Batteries included standard library? Pragmatic community? Surprisingly adequate performance? It never seems like enough to overcome the obvious deficits. I can neither ignore my own experience nor convince anyone that it's actually great.