25 Years of PHP • Hacker News Board

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#341

Post by lowercased » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #193

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ColdFusion, Java Server Pages, and other languages copied this syntax. I don’t see it anymore except with php. Does anyone know of any other languages still in use that have this?

As the other comments say, it's not what the syntax is but the way it managed to get itself integrated into the webserver, originally via Apache mod_php. (mod_perl and even mod_tcl existed but were nowhere near as popular)

I believe mod_perl had the 'benefit' of persistent/shared state, which meant multiple users might conflict with each other (via shared memory, IIRC), and the mod_php - while it kept an interpreter bundled in each apache process - didn't leave anything around after a request.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#342

Post by savethefuture » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #328

savethefuture wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you getting out of this? He worked on php and look how far it came, what have you done? Your own website was written in php which you took down due to a security vulnerability in a framework... now is it php fault that someone wrote vulnerable code? "Temporarily offline due to Drupal security vulnerability."

When did I blame php for Drupalgeddon? My web site says "Drupal security vulnerability", not "PHP security vulnerability", so I don't know where you're getting that from. Back to the point: We're discussing mysql_real_escape_string. What's your excuse for it even existing in the first place, instead of simply fixing the security hole in the original mysql not-so-real escape string function? Melania Trump's "I REALLY…

I asked what you did. Then asked if drupals security was phps fault.

Are you seriously this butthurt about a function name, look up where the name came from originally. I also wonder what magical perfect language you use, dont tell me its php...

Not sure where you're going with the rest of this comment so I wont entertain that part. whew...

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#343

Post by brian_herman__ » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

"PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals." -Jon Ribbens. Programmer.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#344

Post by omnimus » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

PHP is still dominant in CMS space. If you are writing webapps use something else. But if you are working on content then PHP CMS ecosystem is just way ahead of everything else. You almost can't afford to go around it. And I dont mean Wordpress. Modern CMSes like Craft, Kirby, Twill or even things like Bolt, Processwire or Grav... they are pretty great mature platforms for custom content websites and basic CRUD.

Hell with Wordpress (which i hate) and some plugins you get your own self hosted website builder ala Squarespace. PrestaShop and OpenCart are solid ecommerce solutions.

It's too dirty and DIY but it gets job done for most small to medium size businesses.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#345

Post by chipotle_coyote » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 10:21 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #241

spacedcowboy wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. My bad. I started trying to figure out when it was by when I was at college, how long I did the PhD for, how long I was in the first job, how long into the second job I started using it and I screwed up the maths along the way. It was in 1996, not 1981... No excuses, that's just bad.

You also said you wrote the asset management system that was used by Lucasfilm on Star Wars, which was released in 1977. Are you sure you don't mean one of the later J. J. Abrams films, and not the film whose title was actually "Star Wars"? Mistakes about dates and context aside, I still can't believe you're actually trying to make excuses for mysql_real_escape_string. It has the word "real" in it. I mean, come on, w…

> I mean, come on, who would ever name a function "real", and why?

While that's a great question, the answer is "not the people who wrote PHP":

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-real-escape-st...

PHP has its issues (boy howdy), but sometimes those issues are being propagated from other places.

Also, I'm gonna (very gently) push back on "evangelizing it then not fixing it," at least with respect to this particular boy howdy issue. PHP may have been late to get on board with bindings and basic DB abstraction, but they've had PDO since 2004. There are a lot of things like this in PHP -- big problems with its original conception/implementation that have been tackled in later iterations of the language, but that people seemingly won't forgive either because they're offended the sins were committed in the first place or because PHP preserves the stupid ways to do things for years and years in the name of backward compatibility.

(I mean, I don't want to overstate anything here. PHP basically started out as a cargo cult version of Perl, and the PHP community collectively decided a few years ago that the proper thing to do to move the language forward was to turn it into a cargo cult version of Java which seems, well, debatable.)

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#346

Post by nkozyra » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

ragnese wrote: post #272

nkozyra wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well let's be clear ... "bad" is a little more subjective than "faults," which can at least be qualified. By some measure, every language has warts. PHP in 2008 had a ton of them. PHP in 2020 has fewer of them. Which is a lot like JS.

But if PHP in 2020 still has a TON of warts and other languages (even ones with large ecosystems) have WAY FEWER warts, does it matter if PHP has improved since 2008?

Again, I stopped messing with PHP at 5.7 and have watched 7+ grow. My daily language is Go, which I like a lot. Had or have runs with python, asp!, Perl, c#, node, delphi and used rust and Java for personal projects.

I can find warts in all of them. At one point I'd have put PHP right above JavaScript and ASP down at the bottom. Now? I don't see it. Legacy issues are still there, like inconsistent standard library function names, but otherwise I don't see it - as a whole - as any more 'warty' than most of those.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#347

Post by hugozap » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

I believe PHP will still be relevant and a lot of the fancy frontend frameworks out there won't be around anymore. Some kind of lindy effect in place.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#348

Post by KerryJones » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

hugozap wrote: post #347

I believe PHP will still be relevant and a lot of the fancy frontend frameworks out there won't be around anymore. Some kind of lindy effect in place.

I first heard about the Lindy Effect from Nicholas Taleb -- for those who don't know it:

The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#349

Post by Zelphyr » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

wiradikusuma wrote: post #3

"Smarty released. The best-known templating engine for PHP. Rasmus realized that he had done something wrong when people started writing template engines for his template engine in his template engine" :D

When the guy who created Smarty (his name escapes me) and announced it on the core PHP developers mailing list, the other developers practically begged him not to release it and told him outright how redundant it was. He did it anyway. PHP may deserve some hate but we shouldn't blame PHP for Smarty existing.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#350

Post by niyazpk » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

I haven't looked at PHP in ages. Now that I hear that the latest version are much better, does anyone have links to good quality PHP code that I can take a look at?