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PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

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Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#41

Post by nkozyra »

542458 wrote: post #18
osrec wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP deliberately has a low barrier to entry, and as a result there is a lot of poor quality code out there, written by beginners. People like to use this fact to suggest that the entire language is bad, which it most certainly is not. I've seen lots great, well structured and performant PHP code - the quality depends on the programmer, as it does for any other language.

As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved. The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed web security for years. Unicode wasn’t in PHP for a long time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at best. Etc. The language i…

> Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge.

The rest of what you say I agree with, but the language was never a performance bottleneck over other scripting languages.

It certainly scaled better than ruby or perl or python apps with the same logic.

The fact that each request was fundamentally stateless and ephemeral helped this if you needed to distribute your app and made development faster as well.

Back to V5 it outperformed its competition in benchmarks

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#42

Post by bouncycastle »

alberth wrote: post #11

It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…

It was just a massive toolbox that had everything - session, templates, large bundles of familiar libraries, Apache module.

By far, the most useful tool in the box was probably MySQL. Before then, you had to work with flat files.

Oh, and "magic quotes" was a bad idea ;-)

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#43

Post by ZephyrBlu »

542458 wrote: post #18
osrec wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP deliberately has a low barrier to entry, and as a result there is a lot of poor quality code out there, written by beginners. People like to use this fact to suggest that the entire language is bad, which it most certainly is not. I've seen lots great, well structured and performant PHP code - the quality depends on the programmer, as it does for any other language.

As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved. The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed web security for years. Unicode wasn’t in PHP for a long time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at best. Etc. The language i…

You should watch this video: https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg

It's a talk by the creator of PHP about how PHP grew to what it is today. The entire thing is really interesting.

There is actually a reason for things like 'inconsistent' argument ordering. They're ordered based on the C API, rather than being consistent in user land ;).

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#44

Post by JakeStone »

PHP was a godsend, saving me from Perl. I switched to the Dark Side and prefer C# these days, but I still keep an eye on it just because there was some fun stuff I built with it.

Looking at that archived page brings back memories. Since I'd started with PHP/FI and I think I went on until 4.x, I'm pretty sure I saw that announcement when it actually came out.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#45

Post by cronix »

iammiles wrote: post #31
101008 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. I started with PHP when I was only 12 or 13 years old. Adding some logic inside your .html files (mostly includes, that were like magic back then[1]), renaming to .php and upload them to the server using FTP was so simple. A few years later, when I had to set up a lot of things to run Django I was surprised at how hard it was. PHP was simple to use, and to understand its logic, because it was embeded into…

This is the same story for me. Moving from PHP to Python was really difficult conceptually for me. For years fiddling with Apache configs and uploading files via FTP was web development. I sometimes find myself thinking about teenagers getting started nowadays and the accessibility of development, but I suppose there are a lot more resources now than the early 2000s for some enterprising kids to get started.

Yes, but at the same time, web development was a much simpler process back then to get into and actually start to learn. No virtual machines to have to learn, or npm, or git, or... just code in php/html in notepad and maybe some raw basic javascript until js frameworks started becoming a thing and upload it via ftp. I mean, you didn't even have css to worry about...you just threw everything into a table! (lol!) There were only a few standard screen resolutions you had to worry about, and only desktops/laptops that were always oriented in the same position (landscape). I'm not saying it wasn't crude, but it was a lot faster to go from knowing 0 to building a dynamic web page with a real visitor counter vs everything extra you have to consider using modern devices and tooling.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#46

Post by edgyquant »

nly wrote: post #12
alberth wrote: post #11

It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…

I'm currently working on a Django project and have to restart uwsgi after each git pull. It's a pain

Can you not setup hot reloading? I work with flask but it’s as simple as

    FLASK_ENV=development python run.py
To get hot reloading working under flask, and it’s a lot less complex than django.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#47

Post by bsharitt »

iammiles wrote: post #31
101008 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. I started with PHP when I was only 12 or 13 years old. Adding some logic inside your .html files (mostly includes, that were like magic back then[1]), renaming to .php and upload them to the server using FTP was so simple. A few years later, when I had to set up a lot of things to run Django I was surprised at how hard it was. PHP was simple to use, and to understand its logic, because it was embeded into…

This is the same story for me. Moving from PHP to Python was really difficult conceptually for me. For years fiddling with Apache configs and uploading files via FTP was web development. I sometimes find myself thinking about teenagers getting started nowadays and the accessibility of development, but I suppose there are a lot more resources now than the early 2000s for some enterprising kids to get started.

Starting with PHP and Visual Basic got me on the way to making cool stuff really fast, but I think they both made the leap to "real" programing languages later. With web development, I didn't really move on from PHP's "HTML with extra stuff" until I came across Ruby on Rails, and I'm not sure I ever really got past VB for high level GUI desktop stuff, but I was able to get into some lower level C in high school, but I've never really done desktop GUI programming since other than a little bit of Cocoa/Objective-C with earlier version of Mac OS X.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#48

Post by fomine3 »

n0mad01 wrote: post #37
simonw wrote: post #9

"PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor was chosen as the official meaning of the PHP acronym with 53% of the votes." For anyone curious I tallied the votes from the linked page: 57 PHP HTML Preprocessor 29 PHP Hypermedia Preprocessor 98 PHP Hypertext Preprocessor

i guess "Personal Home Page" didnt sound sophisticated enough.

Professional Home Page instead

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#49

Post by Cullinet »

dspillett wrote: post #30
alberth wrote: post #11

It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…

It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP you…

If someone proposed a conspiracy theory for why the rapid application development tools of the middle 1990s became extinct in reaction to plotting by corporate interests in perpetuating the value of consulting services and the high salaries of CS graduates, I would buy the hardback edition immediately. VB, Visual Age, Delhi, Genera on Tru64, RDB and RMS and DEC TM giving you schema less (noSQL to taste) wan -clustered ACID time series transactions programmable in BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN C and DCL on any two of three architectures (VAX, Alpha and Itanium - currently available for running unchanged on x64 VMs) and the OS/2 subsystem bundled (plus the first free beer transaction manager NT provided working with CICS, a feature that I truly believed was capable of giving Microsoft the corporate game by itself) which provided a VBA front end to legacy systems alongside local OS/2 tools running atop the kernel thru W2K.. the day I in place upgraded my overloaded think pad in a hotel room in Köln, and I realised when Slashdot loaded in Netscape 7 that Microsoft couldn't get any respect for anything even as impressive as W2K truly was –

Edit : large part cut for brevity

I really should have composed what I just said, much better than I have done -/so I have cut the bulk from my first too enthusiastic version / I mean to describe how much you can get running with just BASIC language skills and, at least atop of VMS, and buying the right licenses, that answer is "anything almost anything that you can imagine from a power station to a stock exchange ". Stack Overflow and POF running tiny amounts of hardware under Windows Server aren't rare cases of the potential for leveraging commercial tools. If VMS is more palatable than Windows (and certainly I will not compare the two for TCO) and the Intel architecture pricing for RDB holds up I totally believe that SAAS on VMS can be a viable alternative platform capable of making a minor industry of positions for the experienced programming talent for whom ageing has become a invisible barrier to retirement or even employment and if that's possible, then there's right there the environment wherein a generation of younger engineering minds can both take respite from rat race technology change and learn from direct experience to write the reliable systems for replacing what I fear is a current batch of the most fragile infrastructure building in modern history.

edit : incidentally, I think the entry level salaries the FAANG group is paying is a coincidentally perfect match for the price for a consultant from IBM or whoever and I don't think this is a accident by any means, only it didn't seem to work out how the old big firms would have wanted things..

edit, again, mea - my conspiracy being IBM et.al killed the good development tools in hope for being able to bill for consultation only they didn't count on the ability for big tech competitors to dismantle entirely other industries to feed paying salaries at the level of consulting rates and monopolizing the talent in that way.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#50

Post by GongOfFour »

542458 wrote: post #18
osrec wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP deliberately has a low barrier to entry, and as a result there is a lot of poor quality code out there, written by beginners. People like to use this fact to suggest that the entire language is bad, which it most certainly is not. I've seen lots great, well structured and performant PHP code - the quality depends on the programmer, as it does for any other language.

As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved. The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed web security for years. Unicode wasn’t in PHP for a long time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at best. Etc. The language i…

I started my career as a PHP dev in 2003 (mysql/smarty/adodb ftw) and I became a Rails dev around 06. Since then I have, for various reasons, switched back and forth between PHP and Ruby. The interesting thing that I've noticed in that time is that Ruby is, for the most part, the same language (and ecosystem!!) it was 15+ years ago and that is a good thing. PHP has tried hard to not be the language and ecosystem that it was 15-20 years ago and because of that it feels pulled in a lot of different directions. You encounter code that mixes 15/20 year old functions with more enterprisey OO conventions that came out of the post PHP5 era. It can feel weird to switch to that from a language like Ruby that more or less has had coherent approach since 2003.

I'm sure it's nostalgia but I think the PHP 4 -> 5 transition was the best era of PHP. Codebases at that time mixed OO and C-ish function based programming in pragmatic and easy to understand ways. That weird shitshow of objects, functions that accept pass by reference or pass by value, request scoped global state, etc was fun and anarchic and, for whatever reason, totally made sense to a self-taught programmer like me at the time.

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