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PHP in 2021

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Re: PHP in 2021

#301

Post by mgkimsal »

sputr wrote: post #162
xd wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They care nothing about elegance and have but a dim conception of larger CS/SE principles." / "I really see no reason to not choose a better tool in this day and age." Every time there is a PHP news update these kind of posts come out. They claim some vague experience in PHP and then go on to list all these other wonderful languages you could be using instead and that insinuate you must be a bit of a shit developer…

Even worse, your parent comment blatantly tries to shame people who focus on the product instead of the tool . Because yeah, I'm using a programming language to CREATE something ... not to, you know ... use a programming language. Moreover, it's also obvious from these kinds of posts that their authors have never thought about the business context at all, otherwise they would have realized that hiring PHP devs is har…

Just spoke with someone who has a (very good) php dev on staff, and has someone else on staff with some node experience, and is partnering with someone else who does rails. They decided on a new project being done in rails because the rails guy said "it's easier to hire rails devs than PHP devs".

That is so far off my experience, and I don't mean "php=wordpress therefore you can find loads of devs". I mean that finding good people who can hit the ground running and not be a net drag on a project - in any tech - is, imo, very hard these days, and has been for probably the last 2-3 years at least. Basing mostly on regional network and chatter in user groups, but it definitely seems to have gotten worse recently.

"easier to hire good devs in X" doesn't seem like the best metric decide on (but maybe it is?)

Re: PHP in 2021

#302

Post by staticelf »

arcturus17 wrote: post #269
staticelf wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because everyone is writing SPAs with node and thus only needs an api like express for the backend stuff.

Even for writing APIs a monolithic web framework can be useful. We're building a Django + React web app, and Django brings many things to the table, for example the admin panel, an opinionated structure, and many other goodies. Much better dev experience than just Express for a small team, IMO.

True but there is alternatives like NestJS for example. So there is some stuff a bit like Django for node as well but I'll admit that they are less common.

I don't know why, maybe it's the culture of node/npm that you just pick stuff from a basket instead of getting handed a big finished thing whatever you like it or not.

Re: PHP in 2021

#303

Post by przemo_li »

jalfresi wrote: post #92
theshrike79 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My question is: why would anyone want to start something new with PHP in 2021? Same reason as any, familiarity. Not all people, even in software, enjoy learning new stuff. PHP might be the only language they ever learned and it has paid their bills for over a decade. No point in learning anything new unless it's absolutely required. As long as major pieces of software are written in PHP, those people will have a st…

- shared nothing architecture - single threaded code execution context - copy files deploy I was a PHP developer for over 15 years and those three concepts do more to lower the barrier to entry than any other language I’ve come across, and are constantly underestimated in their power to enable developers to concentrate on the business logic of their program.

copy files deploy

That one is not great, unlike first two points. For one, larger bespoke programms need CI (and would benefit from CD). There is linting/type checking/testing to be done.

Secondly, "copy files deploy" is cheating. Somebody else did the job (hoster) and we are claiming that it is somehow benefit of PHP itself. Well? Did hoster do nothing? Really nothing at all? Nope. On top of that. Performant set up for PHP nowadays do not look that much differently then say, setup for Python.

Two first points are very good. Shared nothing architecture preclude existence of subtle bugs. While multi-threading in mutable, imperative code is the definition of subtle bugs. Those two keep PHP relevant and even on top of it's game (in certain domains).

Re: PHP in 2021

#304

Post by przemo_li »

porker wrote: post #141
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My question is: why would anyone want to start something new with PHP in 2021? Is there anything that it does better than any other language/ecosystem? Well, on Twitter the other day, I asked, only partly tongue-in-cheek: > Even in 2021, any new server-side web app with even a vain hope of being installed by people who are tech savvy but not modern web nerds should probably still be written in PHP. True or false? T…

> I appreciate Laravel and Symfony, but PHP in 2021 has traded the feeling of being a cargo cult version of Perl for the feeling of being a cargo cult version of Java. As a Symfony dev I agree. And the process to convert PHP into a Java-esqe Kotlin-esque language is continuing. Why not use a different language if you like it rather than change PHP? > If I do write a new project in PHP, it's probably not going to be w…

> As a Symfony dev I agree. And the process to convert PHP into a Java-esqe Kotlin-esque language is continuing. Why not use a different language if you like it rather than change PHP?

The audacity of PHP 5.3 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 5.4 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 5.5 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 5.6 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 7.0 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 7.1 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 7.2 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 7.3 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 7.4 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 8.0 developers. How dared they! The audacity of PHP 8.1 developers. How dared they!

/s

(sorry, couldn't help. this particular argument is sooooo silly...)

Re: PHP in 2021

#305

Post by fomine3 »

slver wrote: post #119
ashton314 wrote: post #66

Before you call me a troll, know that I worked with PHP for two+ years maintaining both legacy codebases and writing new code with Laravel. My question is: why would anyone want to start something new with PHP in 2021? Is there anything that it does better than any other language/ecosystem? I feel like the community is full of (but not exclusively composed of—there are some gems like Caleb Porzio who write good stuff…

I'd love to debate the use of PHP vs. Ruby and Elixir, but your arguments basically are: - The community is full of people who just care about hacking something together. - Ruby/Elixir are fantastic, developer friendly, and have solid foundations. The first happens with every popular scripting platform. Is JS community full of PhDs? The second is highly subjective. Ruby is problematic, because it's supported by one f…

> Even when Visual Basic .NET evolved to be basically no different than C#, the meme of hating it lived on

VB.NET is worst language on VB family, because it's totally degraded weird version of C#. I don't say VB6/VBS/VBA is cool, but it had some advantages compared to other languages.

Re: PHP in 2021

#306

Post by trog »

nickjj wrote: post #232
trog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does docker make it easier or harder though? I was testing out Apache Superset the other day and it recommends using Docker to do so. I am not strong in Docker - I prefer to run things from scratch so I know exactly what is going on under the hood - but thought I'd give it a go. I had so many problems getting it going. Part of it was the Superset instructions were slightly obsolete, but mostly it was this same proble…

> Does docker make it easier or harder though? I happen to do web development and run a Docker course and I will confidently say it's a lot easier based on support questions and overall feedback that I've gotten over the years. Because the alternative involves a ton of manual steps that every individual needs to take, for example with Python (and this applies to most languages / ecosystems with tiny changes): - Which…

Late reply, sorry, forgot I wrote this.

All points taken! I just get frustrated because I figure if the developer is taking care of building a Dockerfile or whatever it is with all of that stuff sorted out for me, providing at least those build instructions as part of the README is enough for weird users like me.

Then I can spin up my own VPS/VM with the dependencies myself, which removes the entire black box nature of it.

I get that most people don't want to do that and indeed embrace the black box, but I've never worked anywhere where I could spin up a random application in Docker in any sort of Production or even near-Production capacity and say with a straight face I'd done due diligence in what was going on under the hood. (Maybe people don't use it for this ever though.)

I would probably be more on board if I'd ever had a single Docker experience that was just "install docker and run something" and it worked, but every single time I have run into problems.

Realised I forgot to include my references in my previous post. Again, appreciate these problems are probably old hat for regular users, but for people coming in cold they're just pains in the ass.

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48957195/how-to-fix-dock...

2. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24319662/from-inside-of-...

Re: PHP in 2021

#307

Post by jfrunyon »

kijin wrote: post #256
jfrunyon wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how literally anything which is "executable" works. You just point the interpreter (kernel, ld-linux, php, python, ...) at a file, and it runs the file.

Exactly, and PHP brings this simple intuitive behavior to the web. You just point your browser at a .php file, and the server runs the file for you.

Sure, once you've set up the web server, and PHP itself, and installed (usually through a not-easily-wget'able link) the program you want, and configured it, and set up its permissions properly...

Re: PHP in 2021

#308

Post by georgesC »

ashton314 wrote: post #66

Before you call me a troll, know that I worked with PHP for two+ years maintaining both legacy codebases and writing new code with Laravel. My question is: why would anyone want to start something new with PHP in 2021? Is there anything that it does better than any other language/ecosystem? I feel like the community is full of (but not exclusively composed of—there are some gems like Caleb Porzio who write good stuff…

Because producing tools with php is VERY fast, and it runs almost as fast as a scripting language could. It's simple, and efficient. One of the language that requires the least amount of code to produce a given result. Plus the longevity of the project.

The question is why would anyone NOT want to use php in 2021 for non desktop developments?

I also prefer pure php, with no frameworks. I think it's best to build your own tool that suits you.

Re: PHP in 2021

#309

Post by croissant23 »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #214
sam_goody wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laravel docs are virtually non existent. The code comments are meh. Their upgrades are frequent but are not backwards compatible. Many times after an upgrade we spent hours finding something that broke and was not documented in the upgrade guide. Their code quality leaves much to be desired, and it very significantly will slow down every part of the site. It is hard to call this a "extremely high quality framework" o…

Also, can you kindly tell me how to upgrade from Rails 2.8 to 6.*? I once scrapped a project trying to upgrade from 2.8 to 3.2..I see MANY open source rails apps that never upgrade because it's too damn hard they just keep building for an older version.

Have you heard of https://railslts.com/? They provide security patches for old Rails versions
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