PHP 8: Before and After • Hacker News Board

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#301

Post by Frondo » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

codeulike wrote: post #141

codegeek wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"he answered that 100-200 request per second is more than enough for most use cases" Exactly this. If you already know PHP and can produce results (mostly CRUD apps) and it doesn't need millions of rps, why do we need to use another language because they are so much better ? So much better at what ? It is like saying "I have a hammer, so everything looks like a nail to me". Not every web app has to be written in Lua/…

Reminds me of "PHP Hammer" I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there. You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes. You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Sti…

I don't want to get into an "all languages are the same / all languages have quirks" kind of thing, but the idea that PHP is weird, different, and in a sense inscrutable, and this has an impact on its use and performance, just doesn't bear out.

Yes, it has quirks -- so does C, so does C#, so does JS, so does lua, so does tcl, so does every assembly language I've ever worked with.

So what? Are those preventing people from writing good code? Are those preventing people from shipping? Could it be improved? Has it already been improved? No, no, yes, and yes.

The biggest reason PHP's gotten so much scrutiny, to where people write these kinds of posts, is its ubiquity. When JS moved from being that simple, silly language built into the browser into a widely used one, we started seeing slide deck gags about the inscrutability of its comparison operators, yet JS seldom attracts this level of derision.

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#302

Post by megous » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

jhgb wrote: post #195

megous wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It differentiates variables from global constant things (constants, class names, function names, ...) for which the scoping is different. So you can have $strlen = strlen(...);

Off the top of my head, I struggle to come up with situations where you'd need an $ to distinguish class names or function names syntactically. Hell, in Lisp I can do (let ((length (length seq-1 ))) ... (length seq-2 ) ... ) just fine and it still works as expected, so no special characters necessary either. Plus, to have different scoping rules was considered a good idea? Weird scoping issues were why I gave up on R…

TBH, I don't know lisp and I have no clue what you just wrote. Someone new to PHP can just be told $something is how variables look like. And they will recognize variables forever from then on. What's a variable in that lisp code, or in any general lisp code? I have no clue at first glance.

I didn't say it's necessary for the parser, but it's useful for the learner/user.

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#303

Post by erik_seaberg » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

TheHemric wrote: post #112

I don't really understand why in 2020 there's still this kind of blind hatred against this language. It often comes from horrible bad memories from previous versions or old frameworks. Objectively, compared to other languages i've been working with it is more than OK. Despite it's lack of "style" it is easy to understand, host, tests, diagnose and it is powerfull for web applications. I've been working on a SaaS API…

  "foo" == TRUE
  "foo" == 0
  TRUE != 0

  NULL == 0
  NULL  -1

You have to test the simplest expressions because you can't trust the language to do what you wrote.

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#304

Post by ragnese » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

francislavoie wrote: post #293

ragnese wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not being fair to the argument #3. PHP is becoming a less good Java. That's the problem. It's like Java, except it doesn't have generics, doesn't have real data structures (List, HashMap, Deque), no threads or async, no method/function reference or typed function parameters, etc. So the whole "It's trying to be Java" is more like "What does it offer that's better than Java? Because Java has stuff that is bette…

> it doesn't have generics It doesn't need them IMO. It brings no benefit to the language, really. They would need to be type checked at runtime, which can become quite expensive. Static analysis is a better option for an interpreted language. Read this answer from Nikita (one of the top PHP contributors) https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/j65968/ama_with_the_ph... > doesn't have real data structures Untrue. See h…

> It doesn't need them IMO. It brings no benefit to the language, really. They would need to be type checked at runtime, which can become quite expensive. Static analysis is a better option for an interpreted language. Read this answer from Nikita (one of the top PHP contributors) https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/j65968/ama_with_the_ph...

Right. You need to use something like Psalm if you want the benefits of generics, which is basically a tacked on type system. Having static checking is absolutely beneficial. I'd be willing to bet good money that you don't write PHP without typehints and/or Psalm/PHPstan.

> Untrue. See https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.spl.php It's usefulness is limited though, because it's rare that you need those types of data structures for web applications.

You're totally right. I was thinking that you still needed to explicitly enable SPL, but that hasn't been true for a long time, IIRC. So, fair enough. I was wrong here.

> Untrue. All kinds of projects like Swoole (gives you a runtime similar to Go) and ReactPHP (runtime similar to Node) and https://github.com/krakjoe/parallel for lower level concurrency. There's also pthreads https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pthreads.php But again most of these aren't necessary for most apps because of PHP's request-response model. Useful for one-off services though.

pthreads was never worth much. It never worked on web servers and is now deprecated. Parallel is a PECL extension, which may or may not be considered part of PHP, IMO. I believe it also doesn't use threads unless you use pthreads (which you should/can not). So it's just multiple processes- not threads or async. I don't know much about Swoole, etc, but those are frameworks- not PHP itself. Also, I believe Swoole is process based, not thread or (true) async. I could be mistaken. So, again, AFAIK, PHP does not have threads or async.

> Completely untrue. https://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.arguments.php#functi...

That's not what I meant. My wording was poor. I meant specifically `callable`. You can't typehint the inputs and outputs of `callable` parameters. So passing around lambdas, etc, is not robust/safe.

> You do those like this: [Example::class, 'someFunction']

Yeah... an array of two strings. Again, I should've been more clear. I know that's how you refer to functions in PHP. But it's not the same as actually getting to write Example::someFunction and knowing that the inputs/outputs line up with whatever you're doing. If you're lucky, your PHPStorm or whatever can tell where you're trying to refer to a function and maybe point to it for you, but otherwise, it just thinks you're passing some strings around, because you are.

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#305

Post by ptx » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #200

codeulike wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of "PHP Hammer" I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there. You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes. You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Sti…

I think a better analogy would be that the PHP carpenters have standard old tools that people have used forever, and they work just fine. Normal hammer with wooden handles, normal planes, etc etc. But there are modern carpenters that have hammers that are 100% metal and never break and actually improve your hammering power. The new electric hand planes work a lot faster, though you do have to be more careful because…

Your analogy makes is sound as if the problem with PHP is that it's old or lacking features, whereas the point of the original analogy is that it's poorly designed. (Python is older than PHP, so it's not a question of being modern or not.)

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#306

Post by francislavoie » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

ragnese wrote: post #304

francislavoie wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't have generics It doesn't need them IMO. It brings no benefit to the language, really. They would need to be type checked at runtime, which can become quite expensive. Static analysis is a better option for an interpreted language. Read this answer from Nikita (one of the top PHP contributors) https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/j65968/ama_with_the_ph... > doesn't have real data structures Untrue. See h…

> It doesn't need them IMO. It brings no benefit to the language, really. They would need to be type checked at runtime, which can become quite expensive. Static analysis is a better option for an interpreted language. Read this answer from Nikita (one of the top PHP contributors) https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/j65968/ama_with_the_ph ... Right. You need to use something like Psalm if you want the benefits of g…

> I'd be willing to bet good money that you don't write PHP without typehints and/or Psalm/PHPstan.

Yeah, think of it like Typescript. Same idea.

> Also, I believe Swoole is process based, not thread or (true) async.

It's a coroutine model, like Go. Very fast. But I don't use it because it's primarily a chinese community, lots of the docs are in broken english. But it's an impressive thing anyways.

IMO, you don't need threading in PHP, there's not really that many situations where it would help during a request-response flow. People generally delegate slow tasks to job queues, which often use https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.pcntl-fork.php to fork off workers. Works great.

> That's not what I meant. My wording was poor. I meant specifically `callable`. You can't typehint the inputs and outputs of `callable` parameters. So passing around lambdas, etc, is not robust/safe.

You can though. `fn(SomeClass $foo) => $foo->doThing()`

> and knowing that the inputs/outputs line up with whatever you're doing

Fair enough, but you can use reflection to look at the callable if you care enough. It rarely matters.

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#307

Post by spiderfarmer » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #121

awestroke wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developers care.

We can agree to disagree. Plenty of great developers work with PHP.

Using PHP is a great way to keep snobby developers at bay.

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#308

Post by SergeAx » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #291

SergeAx wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP has (almost) complete strong typing system and all the bells and whistles of OOP needed to implement said systems using proper patterns and methodologies and make it modular and testable enough to be robust and supportable for a long time.

Python has literally all of those things, and has been strongly (but dynamically) type from the very beginning. PHP is still weakly typed today. This code doesn't raise a warning or anything: $ php --version PHP 7.3.11 (cli) (built: Jun 5 2020 23:50:40) ( NTS ) Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group Zend Engine v3.3.11, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies $ php -r 'echo "123" + 45;' 168 Contrast with Python: Pyt…

These examples are not about strong typing, but about type juggling. Strong typing is this:

  declare(strict_types=1);

  use \Domain\SomeItem;
  use \Domain\SomeItemId;
  use \Domain\SomeItemSpec;

  abstract class SomeItemRepo {
    public function GetOneByID(SomeItemId $id): SomeItem;
    /*
     * Still hacky
     *
     * @param []SomeItemSpec $specs
     *
     * @return []SomeItem
     */
    public function GetManyBySpecs(array $specs): array; 
  }

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#309

Post by oblio » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

mhd wrote: post #208

oblio wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can actually commodify programmers quite well and both old-school enterprises and the SV juggernaut need their harvest. At first we had guilds and craftsmen. We could only produce a few things, their quality was quite low and the products were expensive. This was one of the reasons quality of life was quite bad, actually. Then we created the assembly line, standardized parts, mass production. Life sucked for th…

That's a whole bunch of items in one place. I don't disagree, to get better cooperation and efficiency in a group, languages and tooling have to adapt. That's part of my point, if what you're doing is the same, the languages will look the same. But I quite disagree with the "it made our lives better" point, and would say that the efficiency, even with all the standardized language outlook, tooling and methodology is…

We wouldn't have mass produced washing machines without... Mass production :-)

The part about our life being better is non negotiable, you haven't had to hand wash clothes if you're saying otherwise.

And that's just one example, refrigeration, mass mobility... Life is incomparably better and saying otherwise is just ignoring reality, in my book ;-)

Re: PHP 8: Before and After

#310

Post by kstrauser » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

SergeAx wrote: post #308

kstrauser wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python has literally all of those things, and has been strongly (but dynamically) type from the very beginning. PHP is still weakly typed today. This code doesn't raise a warning or anything: $ php --version PHP 7.3.11 (cli) (built: Jun 5 2020 23:50:40) ( NTS ) Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group Zend Engine v3.3.11, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies $ php -r 'echo "123" + 45;' 168 Contrast with Python: Pyt…

These examples are not about strong typing, but about type juggling. Strong typing is this: declare(strict_types=1); use \Domain\SomeItem; use \Domain\SomeItemId; use \Domain\SomeItemSpec; abstract class SomeItemRepo { public function GetOneByID(SomeItemId $id): SomeItem; /* * Still hacky * * @param []SomeItemSpec $specs * * @return []SomeItem */ public function GetManyBySpecs(array $specs): array; }

That's an example of strong typing specific to PHP, then, and not used in the rest of computer science. What you're describing there is usually known as static typing, which Python also supports.