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PHP 8

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Re: PHP 8

#141

Post by mgkimsal »

Kluny wrote: post #106
muglug wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a long report on Wordpress and PHP 8 and it's not pretty This is an awkward side-effect of WordPress core team largely neglecting PHP code quality issues for the last decade or so. With good reason – improving such a large codebase is a massive, mostly-thankless task.

I worked at WordPress for half a year, and I'm no expert, but the code reviews there were more intense than any I've ever experienced. Every line of code gets reviewed before it gets committed, and if the commit is longer than 20 lines or so, it undergoes an additional scheduled review as well as pre-commit review. They also have pretty good code sniffers that ought to catch errors like OP mentioned. The reason they'…

> The reason they're concerned, I think, is because they try to protect users who have plugins that came from their plugin repository, where the same code quality rules don't apply.

Then start making the quality rules apply. Or produce code quality ratings for plugins and display them for people to make decisions on.

Making sure that WP can keep working with lower-quality plugins in the name of 'compatibility' just ensures that WP is, at best, a mixed-bag.

Re: PHP 8

#142

Post by ufmace »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #27
nolok wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the list of things that worry them makes it clear that it's not so much php is breaking bc than it is wordpress lack of cleaning and linting for so long catching up to them. I mean seriously the first thing they list as a worry is that arithmetic operators will now throw an error when one (and only one) of their operand is an array or resource (eg array + array support remains, it's really int + array or stri…

> This is literally a case that makes no sense in the code ever, Speaking as someone that hates PHP but still appreciates that it has its uses: You’re speaking from one perspective. There are others. That operation is perfectly valid and well-defined in Matlab where it increments all members of the matrix/vector by the scalar.

This is actually a perfect example of why I don't like these magical overloads for what looks like basic mathematical operations.

It's perfectly obvious to everyone what adding 2 numbers does. It works the same in basically any computer language. What happens when you add a number to an array though? There is no universal obvious rule, it depends on whatever was convenient for whoever initially wrote that overload. You just have to remember what it does in this language. Maybe it appends it to the array, maybe it does the operation on the first or last entry of the array, maybe it does it to everything in the array, or does something else entirely. Does it modify the array in place, or create another copy with the change? Woe betide anyone who forgets what it does there or gets it mixed up with another language. Better IMO to at least have functions with clear names for doing these sorts of things.

Re: PHP 8

#143

Post by neurostimulant »

baby wrote: post #83
combatentropy wrote: post #70

I got spoiled by PHP as my first language. It was so easy to get going. I was surprised to learn that other languages didn't work the same way, when integrating into a web server. Also it has always been rock solid. A bug in my code brought down only that request for that user, totally did not affect or even slow down responses to other users. People have attacked its syntax forever. I avoided the worst of it by lear…

> I was surprised to learn that other languages didn't work the same way, when integrating into a web server Oh boy... I'm still not sure how you deploy a non-PHP webserver to be honest... every language seems to be doing something different, with php you just needed to drag & drop your files in the "public" folder.

It's pretty simple really. With php, your php sites consist of some php files that will be run by a webserver (apache, php-fpm, etc). When the webserver receive a http request, it will executes a php file that matched the request url, pass it the request body as input and send back the output as request response. On other languages, your app is typically deployed as the webserver itself, handling request directly (or indirectly with a reverse proxy in front of it) without executing any external process or terminating after each request.

The php model is simpler and easy to reason with, but many use cases in modern web development is not possible in this setup and requires you to write your app as a long-running webserver process (e.g. websocket model).

Re: PHP 8

#144

Post by mdaniel »

wackget wrote: post #134

Where's the best place to suggest a new feature or improvement for PHP? I've always wanted to see `foreach` get a built-in iterator/counter so you don't have to create and use a counter variable manually. Current way: $i=0; foreach ($array as $key => $value) { echo "Loop $i of " . count($array); $i++; } Possible new way: foreach ($array as $key => $value, $i) { echo "Loop $i of " . count($array); }

For that code snippet specifically, you're actually better off pre-declaring the vars since the loop repeatedly calls `count($array)` but hopefully(!) its size doesn't change over time.

Is there such a function in php like "enumerate" in python, that yields a tuple of (counter, item) for each item in the first argument to enumerate? That is to say: is it possible to do what you're asking with composition rather than a language change?

Re: PHP 8

#145

Post by rcarmo »

I can't believe nobody has pointed out (yet) that PHP is the quintessential lambda :)

That said, it's been many (many, many!) years since I moved away from it, but I'm intrigued by the state of the JIT and the current coding style (last time I checked, around 6.x, it was growing to be verbose and full of backslash-adorned-namespacing).

Re: PHP 8

#146

Post by tored »

meowster wrote: post #48

How should one start learning with PHP these days? My experience: hacked together a few PHP scripts over the years to notify me of a website change (5 minute cron job). Before that, I was a very good beginner with VB6 back in highschool. There are a couple of ambitious database-driven website projects I would like to create, but I don't know where to start. I like the KISS philosophy, and I think PHP and MySQL would…

My recommendation is to become familiar with the package manager composer

https://getcomposer.org/

Almost all community code today is distributed with composer, anything from libraries to frameworks. Regardless if you write almost everything yourself or use a full featured framework, composer is always good to learn.

And even when you are a follower of KISS there always things that you don't care enough about to write yourself, boring things like logging frameworks (Monolog https://seldaek.github.io/monolog/) or testing frameworks (PHPUnit https://phpunit.de/). And composer can also help you set up class autoloading, a must for modern PHP.

Here you can find packages to download with composer https://packagist.org/

Next I would look into different frameworks, not necessary to use them but to learn about them and from them. The 2 biggest today is Symfony ( (https://symfony.com/) and Laravel (https://laravel.com/). But there are others like Slim (https://www.slimframework.com/), CakePHP (https://cakephp.org/), Zend (https://framework.zend.com/) and many more. Try a few and get the feeling how they do things and if you like them.

For view rendering you can do that with PHP out of the box (just remember to escape output!) or you can use a template engine like the more advanced Twig (https://twig.symfony.com/) or the simpler Mustache (https://github.com/bobthecow/mustache.php). Plates (http://platesphp.com/) uses native PHP templates but helps you create reusable layouts. Some frameworks include a template engine, e.g. Laravel uses Blade https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/blade.

For database queries I recommend reading this excellent article

https://phpdelusions.net/pdo

Many frameworks include their own query builders and sometimes a database layer (ORM).

Some semi famous people within the PHP community just released a PHP 8 book, I have not read it though.

https://front-line-php.com/

They also have free videos about PHP 8

https://spatie.be/videos/front-line-php

Ask for help https://www.reddit.com/r/PHPhelp/

Discussions about PHP https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/

Online PHP shell https://3v4l.org/

Good luck!

Re: PHP 8

#147

Post by throw_m239339 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #42

Finally, after all these years, Named Arguments! https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-named-arguments

i'm not sure it's a good thing readability wise. I would have liked to see struct definitions + adhoc struct definitions and destructuring instead of that.

Some frameworks like Symfony relied too much on shoving unstructured array options as arguments though, so if it helps making API strictier...

Re: PHP 8

#148

Post by ficklepickle »

ForHackernews wrote: post #81
alvis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as many web languages, PHP's heyday has a reason as many toolkits at that time were far less powerful and complicated for even simple things. Perl+CGI + all the server setup for a simple dynamic page? It's just unimaginable to many today's developer. I started off with PHP3 and have a very great and hated time with it till v5. PHP for sure is difficult to maintain and very painful to debug, but it's not my reaso…

> Perl+CGI + all the server setup for a simple dynamic page? It's just unimaginable to many today's developer. TBH, I'm still not aware of any truly simple/easy way to get a dynamic HTML page. Recently, I had to make a dumb utility app to render some dynamic data, and I wound up writing a Golang server with the HTML specified as a Go Template. But making it accessible on the publc internet still required spinning up…

But now you know it. I do all that stuff for all my personal projects, but it is much faster because I already have servers and I have done it a couple dozen times now. I'm getting to know proxypass and caching directives very well. My first time took hours and much futzing. Once it becomes routine, I automate. I wrote my own build server in JS and bash, it handles webhooks, roll-back on fail and notifications. I've been meaning to mess with ansible.

It has even come in handy at work. I'm primarily a front-ender, but a start up I worked for had me continuously deploy my application to my own personal infra so it could be used immediately.

It is an ordeal at first, but nginx is so darn powerful it makes me feel like a wizard. If you want to avoid the arcane incantations, I'm sure Caddy would be a simpler option.

Re: PHP 8

#149

Post by chaz6 »

zexias wrote: post #71
Thaxll wrote: post #39

Does PHP still has that weird flow where each request is its own process? afair PHP never had an http server baked in, I remember nginx with php etc ...

That is not a problem with PHP itself, but the way that Apache/Nginx operates PHP. However, if you want to go full PHP, there is this extension that is pretty amazing (has a built-in server on it and more): https://www.swoole.co.uk/ ps: https://github.com/swoole/swoole-src/issues/1401 some performances benchmark (they compare it even with golang)

Does Swoole have any comparison to roadrunner (https://roadrunner.dev/)?

Re: PHP 8

#150

Post by ptx »

baby wrote: post #86
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #42

Finally, after all these years, Named Arguments! https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-named-arguments

I don't understand why pretty much no language does that these days. I think the argument is that your IDE should do this, and it does in some cases, but still...

Python, Kotlin and C# all support named arguments, and they're pretty popular languages. And also... there's Visual Basic.
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