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25 Years of PHP

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Re: 25 Years of PHP

#361

Post by cutler »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #188
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…

While and its equivalents for ejs, asp, or jsp are useful and a defining characteristic of PHP, it is implemented carelessly and prone to injection attacks. Using an SGML processing instruction for integrating scripting into markup languages is only a means of last resort when SGML has much better, type-safe expansion and processing features. "Modern" PHP leaves embedded PHP more or less behind in favour of Java-like…

How is PHP becoming like JS?

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#362

Post by cutler »

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.

I'd be interestd to see how much faster Laravel is compared with Rails and also how they compare in memory usage. Last time I looked on Techempower I was surprised to find Laravel performing more slowly than Rails in some of the examples.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#363

Post by cutler »

bouncycastle wrote: post #42
joelbluminator wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the "modern" features of php? It looks like it's trying to shed it's dynamic nature and add types (with annotations etc). Also frameworks like Symfony / Laravel look more and more like java web frameworks to me. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad but there's nothing modern about types. Also, might make more sense to choose java if you need types.

The biggest advantages of PHP over Java are build and deploy times, so coding a php app is much more rapid. You can test your app right away, even after a single line change and get immediate feedback on the screen, which I think is important in web dev because a lot of it is visual. The other advantage is the run-time. Java has a slow startup time and when you redeploy then you need to stop/start your entire app. Wi…

For one step beyond edit/save/refresh try repl development in Clojure where you get the benefits of the JVM without the startup penalty. After the initial boot, that is.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#364

Post by Minor49er »

atgreen wrote: post #108

I first met Rasmus during my pre-internet BBS days in Toronto, and reached out to him shortly after moving to the Bay Area in '95 when he told me about his pet "Personal Home Page" project. What an amazing trajectory!

Very cool. How did you cross paths?

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#365

Post by cutler »

watermelon0 wrote: post #190
dgb23 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, might make more sense to choose java if you need types. Java is not a replacement for "PHP with types". There is currently nothing you can deploy as easily as a PHP web app. The operational overhead is very low because cheap, robust hosting providers have decades of experience with the most typical LAMP style stack. I would also disagree in terms of language features. Gradual typing through type hints (and ot…

You couldn't be more wrong about the ease of deployment. PHP is one of the hardest things to deploy. You need at least a web server and a process manager. Most popular choices are nginx + PHP-FPM or Apache + libapache2-mod-php. You also need to learn how to properly configure both of them, since both have like a million options, and default installation doesn't work in a lot of cases (e.g. uploading of files larger t…

Seconded. I was left scratching my head for a long time trying to work out why php-fpm, when reloaded via systemctl on CentOS 7, was not setting-up /var/run/php-fpm.sock with the correct ownership. I eventually had to write a shell script to resolve the issue. The version of php-fpm in question, by the way, was a more up-to-date version than the CentOS 7 default. Anyway, that's just one example of how mdoern PHP deployments differ from the over-hyped static deploys of yesteryear where you just FTP a bunch of .php files into your DocumentRoot.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#366

Post by cutler »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #50
joelbluminator wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the "modern" features of php? It looks like it's trying to shed it's dynamic nature and add types (with annotations etc). Also frameworks like Symfony / Laravel look more and more like java web frameworks to me. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad but there's nothing modern about types. Also, might make more sense to choose java if you need types.

Whatever the language there is always a group of people slowly turning it into Java. It seems almost impossible to say no to new features.

Dart is another example. Not exactly Java but certainly built in its likeness. What is it with aping Java's verbosity which, to many, is an embarrassment?

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#367

Post by cutler »

karatestomp wrote: post #184
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.

A lot of PHP work is digging around in Wordpress themes & plugins with a bunch of other (third-party) themes and plugins installed, some of them paid which can add another layer of annoyance to testing and deployment and such. Hosting's usually some managed thing rather than anything under your direct control, and usually quirky or limited in some way or another. It's a pretty miserable ecosystem to work in. PHP itse…

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse there's Magento.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#368

Post by cutler »

ben509 wrote: post #34
geerlingguy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Composer 2 is coming, and so far it’s shaping up to be vastly improved. Also, many people are still using that ‘fractal of bad design’ article from years ago to bash on PHP, even though a number of the assertions are no longer applicable.

The point of calling a "fractal" and talking about the "design" is that while you can only look at the surface in an article of reasonable length, it points toward strutural and systemic failings within the language itself. The problem is that PHP is built on bad foundations and while many of the superficial problems can be mitigated, the underlying foundations can't be fixed without breaking changes. (Or, as Python…

All languages? Ruby doesn't seem to have suffered this fate. Still as elegant and full-featured as ever. Clojure just goes from strength to strength.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#369

Post by Daishiman »

holoduke wrote: post #338
ragnese wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you building arrays with mixed key types? It happens on accident. All keys are converted to ints if they can be. So if you read a file that is called "123", it'll suddenly become an int key whereas all the rest will be strings. That's absolutely insane. > Why do you want type hints? The same reason anybody does. It is a contract and it makes your code more well-documented, more robust, and more correct. The…

all your arguments can be true or false. depending on the use case and the position you look from, a language can be defined good or bad. there is no objective answer. from a commercial point of view php is for example one of the best languages ever. from a technical perspective maybe not so much. please accept different realities. don't get stuck in your own.

No, PHP is a successful language, not a good language.

It's quite obvious here that we're talking about technical merit.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#370

Post by cutler »

DonHopkins wrote: post #308
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

I strongly agree Smarty is beyond terrible (and I've used it and read the source code, so I know its problems first hand) and the fact that it even exists is indicitive of deep flaws in PHP, but I don't believe Rasmus has ever realized that he did anything wrong. He just doesn't care. "We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told yo…

Why is the use of Blade(Laravel) or Twig(Symfony) any more acceptable than Smarty?
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