Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

web.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 176 posts

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#131

Post by indymike »

goatlover wrote: post #104
habibur wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why the rapid application development tools of the middle 1990s became extinct RAD tools were focused on Desktop application development and web suddenly took over everything.

Yes, but the web was noticeably inferior as an application platform until html5, jQuery, Node and modern JS frameworks were being leveraged. But the web didn't require expensive licensing, and everyone by the late 90s had a web browser.

> web was noticeably inferior as an application platform

Nope. The web was both cross platform and insanely easy to use at the same time. It also cost an order of magnitude less because developers didn't have to implement an entire ui, printing and a bunch of code to make little things like the clipboard and resize window actually work. The web was vastly superior to the 1998 4gl scene and it was crystal clear in 98 that it was the future. So sure you could make a order entry crud app with your favorite 4gl and your order entry team could use it. With the web, I could make an order entry system and the whole world could use it...

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#132

Post by ancarda »

cutler wrote: post #61
anon776 wrote: post #40

PHP 7.x and Laravel really gave the language its big boy pants. Really fun to develop in and looks nothing like the PHP 3.x and 5.x grime.

Sadly along with Laravel and Symfony came PSR culture where idiomatic PHP, with its fanfold docblock comments and double-spaced lines of code means you're lucky if you can see a dozen lines of code on a typical screen. I don't call that productive at all.

Double spaced lines of code? What do you mean?

FWIW, I no longer use DocBlocks because PHP's own type system is usually expressive enough.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#133

Post by ancarda »

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…

> The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid

This is quite hard to fix, as it would break almost everything. So you'd end up with a Python 3 situation. However, as of PHP 8, it's less of an issue. If you can't remember the order for arguments, you can use named arguments https://3v4l.org/cY1PB> like so:

    strpos(needle: "foo", haystack: "foobar")
> It throws errors written in Hebrew

If you're referring to T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM, this is no longer true as of PHP 8: https://3v4l.org/2T8qQ -- the error is just this:

    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected token "::", expecting end of file
Internally, the token is still called T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM, but you can also refer to it by T_DOUBLE_COLON: https://www.php.net/manual/en/tokens.php> and I suspect eventually they'll phase out the Hebrew spelling.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#134

Post by 8fGTBjZxBcHq »

noir_lord wrote: post #128
cardanome wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PHP was the clear leader for anyone who wanted to get something done. Isn't that still the case? At least here in Europe the word Backend Developer is basically synonymous with PHP Developer. Every other language for backend development is pretty niche. Sure there is Java (and C#) for the enterprise but that was already there back then. Ruby had a good run but modern PHP with frameworks like Laravel could reclaim m…

> At least here in Europe the word Backend Developer is basically synonymous with PHP Developer. Pretty much, I've seen PHP powering traditional companies with revenue in the hundreds of millions (approach billions).

Yeah my "niche" right now is consulting for companies that are high revenue but built out their platforms during lean times where they were focused on growth over stability, reliability, or security. "Legacy code" I guess though it's a little more varied than that might imply.

Basically the only two technologies I touch these days are rails and php. I'm not filtering out other tech stacks, these two are just absolutely dominant for this type of company.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#135

Post by FriedrichN »

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.

I have set up PHP on Apache (both php-fpm and mod_php) and Nginx countless times on different Linux distros and never ran into problems. It might have to do with the fact that I have so much experience with web servers but it takes me only a few minutes to set it up on any Ubuntu/Debian based system (download time of the packages excluded).

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#136

Post by cies »

ancarda wrote: post #132
cutler wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly along with Laravel and Symfony came PSR culture where idiomatic PHP, with its fanfold docblock comments and double-spaced lines of code means you're lucky if you can see a dozen lines of code on a typical screen. I don't call that productive at all.

Double spaced lines of code? What do you mean? FWIW, I no longer use DocBlocks because PHP's own type system is usually expressive enough.

> PHP's own type system is usually expressive enough.

I'd say it's one of the worst type systems. Expressive enough not to need docblocks, ok. Expressive as a type system: hell no.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#137

Post by noir_lord »

taneq wrote: post #75
superasn wrote: post #54

PHP is proof how little the core web technologies change over the years, even though so many new technologies have come after it. Looking at this page I beleive I can still make a pretty decent website backend using vanilla php (including authentication) and a nice front end using plain old html and javascript from so many years ago.

PHP has changed quite a lot over the years, though. Not so much the core language (although it has) but the ecosystem has matured a lot.

The language changed a hell of a lot between 3 and 5 and between 5 and 8.

It has improved markedly and while it still has it's warts modern PHP8 code is very different.

However the ecosystem has absolutely matured alongside it as well, Symfony and Laravel are excellent general purpose frameworks, composer is an excellent package manager etc.

It's what I write for my day job and while it'll never be my favourite language, it's a pleasant enough productive language and it pays the bills.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#139

Post by forgotpwd16 »

innocenat wrote: post #91
dimitrios1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

`apt install apache2 php libapache2-mod-php` will perfectly set up Apache with PHP all Debian-based distros. What's complex about that? And if you really need php-fpm (which you should, anyway), at least in Ubuntu (never set up on other distro), the boilerplate nginx config is there.

How bad will be running the built-in web server on public network?

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#140

Post by 8fGTBjZxBcHq »

rhacker wrote: post #89
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

A good bit of my work is in php codebases from that era and uh... yeah kinda.

Generally at that time (and for a few years after) you still see a huge influence from C programming constraints in php.

Lot of extremely terse abbreviated variables and explicit looping. And for some fucking reason the pervasive believe that variable names need to be at most either 3 or 6 characters long. (Yes I know the reason it's still bad)

So yeah painful as it is to admit that is well above average expressiveness and readability for php of its era.

Post reply on HN