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A look at modern PHP

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Re: A look at modern PHP

#411

Post by goatlover »

FranOntanaya wrote: post #313
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…

Well, Rust is playing catch up with the "change code and run" speed of PHP.

Do the two overalp in their niches at all? You'd write a web server in Rust. But is there much effort put into Rust web frameworks?

It's just a weird comparison. PHP is competitive with JS, Python, Ruby and even Java. But Rust? That's C/C++/D territory. And Go is somewhere in between.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#412

Post by The_rationalist »

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…

It's great to see a sane person on HN. What would be the strength and weaknesses of spring boot vs synfony vs laravel? Please let's not talk about the languages (kotlin, php) but more about the frameworks

Re: A look at modern PHP

#413

Post by thaumaturgy »

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.

It's a real-life problem. I just recently stepped in it while working on some software that interfaces with imap. A couple of folders were named "2018" and "2019" and common array*() operations kept blowing up with those keys.

I ended up building out a whole new array class to work around it. The notes at the top of my class file pretty well describe the problem: https://github.com/robsheldon/asinius-core/blob/master/src/A...

There are native-php workarounds and if you're very very careful you can probably maybe encounter this and code around it without triggering any of the strange behaviors, but it's a minefield.

I'm not new to PHP, either. I think by chance people just usually don't encounter the circumstances for this particular bad behavior, but when it happens, it's really bad. Array keys shouldn't be getting implicitly typecasted.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#414

Post by ragnese »

dubcanada wrote: post #295
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…

What are "string keys"?

PHP arrays can be indexed by ints or strings (at the same time).

Re: A look at modern PHP

#415

Post by cweagans »

kstrauser wrote: post #339
spdionis wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Most of the interesting things I’ve worked on would fall down if you couldn’t cache some stuff across requests, like database connections. If every request requires a new TCP connection, even if to something lightweight and fast like a local pgbouncer instance, requests are going to be a lot slower (and the time spent context switching from userspace to kernelspace and back a lot higher) than if you could reuse one f…

You can do that in PHP. The PHP database library has a persistent mode that you can use. See the last paragraph of example 3 + example 4 here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php

Re: A look at modern PHP

#416

Post by mnm1 »

piotrkubisa wrote: post #252
tudorw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symfony is an outstanding framework and a real pleasure to build with.

The really nice thing of Symfony framework is database schema mapping and migrations, which have compatibility with numerous database systems and provides abstraction layer [0], that among many options of interfaces have quite handy YAML-formatted schema mapping [1]. Nothing extraordinary these days but it is really stable and simple to use. [0]: https://symfony.com/doc/current/doctrine.html [1]: https://www.doctrine…

Do you ever profile doctrine? I found its overhead to be 10x the actual time of my average query. Most of the time is spent hydrating. I wonder how people can put up with such a level of performance reduction and still claim they are using decent tools.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#417

Post by loic-sharma »

evilduck wrote: post #348
unexaminedlife wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done plenty of PHP programming (including modern) in the past. I'm excited about recent developments. Not sure about the productivity claim. I once wrote from scratch (frameworks excluded) backend and frontend (version 1) of a multi-tenant, cloud-based video-sharing platform with PHP as the backend (aws cloud) in a matter of weeks. I once wrote, from scratch (frameworks excluded), an entire backend (and front-en…

Can you attribute that specifically to PHP making that possible? Why couldn't an equivalently capable peer use Python to do the same?

PHP has excellent development experience. After updating your code, you can just reload the page. That's it. It's seamless. This is something that I sorely miss now that I'm a .NET developer.

Also, the PHP ecosystem is friendly to beginners. Compare these authentication docs for a PHP project vs a .NET project:

Laravel (PHP): https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/authentication ASP.NET Core (.NET): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authen...

Re: A look at modern PHP

#418

Post by sfkdjf9j3j »

mekster wrote: post #148
creshal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why does a language need to be constantly revolutionary if it solves what it sets out to solve well? That's a very big If in PHP's case.

What is the problem of admitting PHP solves the problem of quickly deploying web sites?

Am I the only one scratching their head at this argument in 2020? 15 years ago when shared hosting was more common I would buy it, but I just don't find myself wasting time on figuring deployments out in other languages/frameworks. By far the biggest time sink in that area is setting up continuous integration and monitoring/alerting systems, and those problems are exactly the same regardless of language.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#419

Post by Supermancho »

ragnese wrote: post #405
Apofis wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a jr dev misstep... you're not really bringing up any key points.

It takes 5 seconds on Google to find a myriad complaints about weird, unexpected, and downright incorrect things that PHP does. That wasn't the point of my reply. The point was that language choice CAN affect productivity. And having a bunch of gotchas is something that will negatively affect productivity. I simply gave the first example that popped into my head that actually tripped me up.

Unit tests would have caught this, if you wrote them.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#420

Post by munk-a »

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.

I agree that the issue mentioned above isn't that bad - as a long time PHP developer (and PHP admirer) one gotcha that still really annoys me is persistence of key refs outside of foreach loops and I present this eval[1] as a wonderful example of why you should really prefer array_map for mutating array values or be very pedantic about unsetting variables when you leave a foreach using ref loop.

1. https://3v4l.org/99pMn

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