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PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

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Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#81

Post by aetherspawn »

cutler wrote: post #64
nkozyra wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Paradoxically, PHP's stateless architecture is also what makes it dog-slow with large frameworks such as Laravel. Now you have to load the whole framework with every request.

Sort of, but you don't need to parse it. Anyone using PHP in serious prod uses something like memcached/opcache to skip parsing, which speeds up TTFB typically by about 200x.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#82

Post by owenversteeg »

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…

Not just the early 2000s - up until maybe 2010 or so (probably a bit later) PHP was the clear leader for anyone who wanted to get something done. There was Rails and ASP.net and Java (I don’t remember anything else that was super popular) but PHP was a million times faster to develop in. Anything you wanted was explained in depth in the first Google result. You want auth? A chat server? File management? You could get anything you dreamed of. The most amazing part was how it was so simple and actually worked. Nowadays you look something up, the first few examples are often videos, unnecessarily detailed blog posts, who knows. Then things don’t even work, because one of your dependencies is out of date, or something needs to be restarted, or your linting failed, or who knows what. PHP barely ages - from 1999 or 2010 or 2020, it looks similar and works fine. By comparison I can instantly tell what 4-year timespan any Javascript was written in, because ten trends and frameworks have come and gone and left their mark.

A simpler language for a simpler time.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#83

Post by aeontech »

geitir wrote: post #74
aeontech wrote: post #52

I feel certain that an entire generation of careers started from Rasmus Lerdorf's little hobby project. Despite the fact that things like Perl Mason, Tcl web apps, and your bog standard CGI scripts already existed, nothing compared to PHP's wild grab bag of a standard library, and above all, the documentation with user-contributed notes and examples (not to mention that there was nothing similar/free in Windows-land)…

It def started mine. The biggest for me was the excellent documentation and comments as you said. The comments were like an early version of stackoverflow

Yes! I don't think people who started in the modern age can even relate to how amazing this was, to have a documentation site with a built-in user comment system collecting errata, tips, pointers and snippets (even as erroneous as they sometimes were)...

This was before the embarrassment of riches that we have now...

- before proliferation of open source examples on GitHub,

- before StackOverflow,

- before jsfiddles,

- before snippets on gist or pastebin

- before very common web forums (many of which were eventually written in PHP in fact)...

- before fantastic search results of google...

Best you could hope for when you got stuck? Someone's personal web page, or usenet and mailing lists...

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#84

Post by issa »

ficklepickle wrote: post #59
oscargrouch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you are lacking some context. Back in the day, you could: * Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as the only free version * Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL Server * Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty expensive. When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you could do wit…

Some poor lost souls are still using ColdFusion. Pity me.

Ha. I am currently consulting on a project that is moving from ColdFusion to PHP.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#85

Post by osrec »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #76
Seattle3503 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m still not certain even today, if anything exists that is faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP. With PHP you can just start typing in your file and produce output. Even with lightweight frameworks like Flask there is boilerplate.

This ignores the monstrous complexity of setting up PHP (and php-fpm) on a host machine. I prefer fully contained targeted binaries these days.

PHP has to be one of the easiest set ups. Even more so nowadays if you're just grabbing a docker image...

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#86

Post by 29athrowaway »

owenversteeg wrote: post #82
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…

Not just the early 2000s - up until maybe 2010 or so (probably a bit later) PHP was the clear leader for anyone who wanted to get something done. There was Rails and ASP.net and Java (I don’t remember anything else that was super popular) but PHP was a million times faster to develop in. Anything you wanted was explained in depth in the first Google result. You want auth? A chat server? File management? You could get…

If you need to cook an egg, you can serve 1 request per second with PHP and use your CPU as heat source.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#87

Post by kalleboo »

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…

> Facebook has made more money with questionable PHP code than any site built with elegant pearl webscripts that I know of.

Wasn't Amazon originally written in Perl?

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#88

Post by jeltz »

nkozyra wrote: post #41
542458 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It outperformed them in benchmarks but not in practice due to having to reload all libraries on every request.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#89

Post by rhacker »

tyingq wrote: post #66

Another fun piece of PHP history: The old leaked source code for Facebook's index.php and search.php circa 2007: https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406

    // Holy shit, is this the cleanest fucking frontend file you've ever seen?!
    ubersearch($_GET, $embedded = false, $template = true);
lol

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#90

Post by [deleted] »

aeontech wrote: post #83
geitir wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It def started mine. The biggest for me was the excellent documentation and comments as you said. The comments were like an early version of stackoverflow

Yes! I don't think people who started in the modern age can even relate to how amazing this was, to have a documentation site with a built-in user comment system collecting errata, tips, pointers and snippets (even as erroneous as they sometimes were)... This was before the embarrassment of riches that we have now... - before proliferation of open source examples on GitHub, - before StackOverflow, - before jsfiddles,…

[deleted]
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