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25 Years of PHP

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Re: 25 Years of PHP

#171

Post by ragnese »

waheoo wrote: post #161
ragnese wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect. Old PHP was more like C. If you see a modern, best practices, PHP code base today, it reads like Java 7 did in 2011.

Whats old is new again. Laravel et al read like java. Nobody wants that crap anymore. Everyones moving codebases back to more procedural styles with a good dose of functional leanings towards immutable values.

Which is basically impossible to do in PHP. How do you make a deep copy of an input argument to avoid mutating it?

How do you do a map+(filter|reduce)(+array_values) on an array without looping over it THREE times?

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#173

Post by whalesalad »

> They [two startup founders] find PHP/FI 2.0 to be inefficient and lacking features. In 1997 they embark on a complete rewrite of the underlying interpreter.

Wild. Doing something like this today would be considered so tangential and risky.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#174

Post by durpleDrank »

I've been using PHP for most of my web development career (a decade). What are the industry standards for backend web development languages in 2020? I was under the impression PHP was the way to go for back end web development.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#175

Post by simion314 »

wlll wrote: post #163
simion314 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean your proof is I seen PHP code then conclusion is PHP is bad. You are trying to compare PHP with Go, probably Go is better then PHP, but if Go is better that does not mean PHP is bad, just that Go is better (probably not for all use cases). So you have experience with PHP, probably are you thinking at html code mixed with PHP code? yeah that thing is bad but only news use that for large projects. If you do not…

> I mean your proof is I seen PHP code then conclusion is PHP is bad. You're over simplifying my point to make yours. I have seen bad PHP code. I have seen bad Go code. I have seen bad code in many languages. The proportion of bad PHP code however, is higher in PHP, for the reasons I've stated around edge cases and the difficulty in reasoning. > You are trying to compare PHP with Go, probably Go is better then PHP, b…

Link me to those edge cases please, I did not hit that many so I should be prepared. Thanks.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#176

Post by spacedcowboy »

nobleach wrote: post #138
ragnese wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that PHP does have pros as well as cons, I find it disconcerting that I've read MANY assertions here on HN, that PHP detractors just haven't used it very much or are mostly complaining about things like bad standard library function names. I've used PHP in earnest. It and JavaScript are tied for worst programming languages I've used. JavaScript gets more of a "pass" from me because I'm just not a dynami…

Just like I tell people that buy cordless drills at Harbor Freight, "sometimes it IS the tool". Does that mean you can't build fast, meaningful, cool things with it? Of course you can. But, the deeper you get, the more problems you'll have to solve with weird esoteric knowledge. I'll agree with all of your points on horribly inconsistent and broken language features. I get that people that have grown up with the lang…

I mean, who uses mysql_real_escape_string when you have PDO and bindings ?

PHP isn’t perfect. As OP said, no language is, and any competent software engineer uses the parts of the language that work well for them, and just ignores the things that don’t work for them. I don’t believe for a second that the abuse the language has suffered over the years has anything to do with mysql_real_escape_string, it’s more to do with crappy code. You can write crappy code in any language, and it’s more a reflection of the programmer than the programming language IMHO.

Part of PHP’s problem is that it’s so easy to use. Any C programmer can pick up the basics pretty easily, hack together something that scratches an itch, and move on. Later someone will criticize the quick hack and say “you didn’t use mysql_real_escape_string so that code has a SQL vulnerability. Don’t use PHP”. In reality, there are mechanisms for preventing SQL injection and they just weren’t used. Is that a failing of the language ? Partly, perhaps, for providing the unsafe way of doing things, but a lot of blame also lies with the coder.

I’ll admit to a soft spot for PHP - I was putting database-driven websites on the web when that wasn’t much of a thing (back in 1981, if foggy memory recalls true). I wrote the asset management system that was used by Lucasfilm on Star Wars, by Manix on the Matrix, by various post-production houses in Soho, etc. etc. - all in PHP. We had video-streaming from remote locations before RealNetworks were mainstream. All because of PHP.

I also used PHP to write a content management system for the RiskWaters Group - around 100 magazines in the CMS, with forums, mailmerge, access-rights per page or per view-count or per time-period, with back-end admin pages, with macros the editors could use, etc. etc.

Used properly and judiciously, PHP is a powerful tool. It comes with a few areas that ought to be marked ‘here be dragons’, but frankly so do most languages.

These days, I mostly use PHP for shell-scripting (it comes installed as standard on my Mac), nothing so grandiose as the halcyon days of yore, but I still have PHP to thank for getting the job I’ve had for the last 15 years, in R&D at Apple (“these are the guys that Lucas was talking about”, said the VP who bought my small company).

I’ll finish with a line from a song “Baby, life’s what you make it, celebrate it”. That applies to PHP as well.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#177

Post by zelphirkalt »

waheoo wrote: post #157
ragnese wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that PHP does have pros as well as cons, I find it disconcerting that I've read MANY assertions here on HN, that PHP detractors just haven't used it very much or are mostly complaining about things like bad standard library function names. I've used PHP in earnest. It and JavaScript are tied for worst programming languages I've used. JavaScript gets more of a "pass" from me because I'm just not a dynami…

I dont agree with you at all. Why are you building arrays with mixed key types? Why do you want type hints? Why do you need generics in a dynamically typed language? Php has pthreads. They just arent needed that often. Async is being worked on You didnt mention it but immutable types are also being worked on. Everything people complain about php over tends to actually make its way into the language eventually. I dont…

I am reminded of 2 things while reading your comment:

1. The meme where someone sits in a burning house or room and says "It's fine.".

2. "Sweet lemons". That is the sort of psychological "strategy" that is often applied and that seems to be used here: Things are bad, so lets talk them good. It all sounds like "Oh come on, it's not so bad!", but that is not the point. The point is, that compared with more developed languages, things are objectively worse with PHP and no one should have to deal with its issues.

There are issues in programming languages, which cannot be fixed, except for making far fetching design changes to the language itself, unless you include the required tools inside the language, for modifying the language itself. Those are called macros usually, and I am not talking about C preprocessor macros.

To fix a lot of the issues PHP would have to change to a degree, where it is no longer PHP and it does not include the required tools for changing the language itself. It requires a commitee, which is apparently unwillig to fix the language, or is so slow at it, that we still have PHP in its current form after "25 years of PHP".

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#178

Post by shirshak55 »

Ayesh wrote: post #74
jonny383 wrote: post #6

PHP is damn fast now, no joke. And with all of the modern features it's actually not so bad to work in. I'm becoming increasingly puzzled every time I see PHP hate now, especially when I read tired comments like "just use rails". Laravel is arguably as good or even better than rails at this point, and PHP 7+ is definitely light years faster and lighter. One thing that still sucks is package management / composer.

> One thing that still sucks is package management / composer What about Composer? Sure is in par with Slack when it comes to memory usage, bit it's functional and feature rich. v2 has partial offline support, faster downloads, etc. ( https://php.watch/articles/composer-2 ). Composer IMHO is one of the best dependency managers for any language out there. Disclaimer: the link above is a for a site I maintain.

composer is so slow tbh. It takes ages to download package and well requires me to setup swap even when i have 4 gb ram in server.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#179

Post by brlewis »

elric wrote: post #32

I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it. Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd gr…

> PHP has taken a lot of flack over the years. Mostly from people who never really worked with it

Detractors of PHP were pretty quiet when this first hit the front page. I think things might have stayed quiet without this first salvo being fired.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#180

Post by CM30 »

elric wrote: post #32

I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it. Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd gr…

> The only ceremony you need to write executable code is the This is a hugely underrated benefit of PHP overall, and arguably the one reason better designed languages won't replace it for web development purposes. You don't need a command line or SSH access or server management knowledge or many resources/A VPS or dedicated server or well, pretty much anything.

It's also why about 99% of fancier, more up to date alternatives to software like WordPress or Media Wiki or [various forum scripts here] don't catch on too. The older software can be installed/maintained by people who aren't very technical, whereas many attempted replacements require you to be a developer/server admin to understand the install process.

Anyone who truly wants to replace/be rid of PHP should come up with a language that works in much the same way.

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