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I Like PHP

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Re: I Like PHP

#131

Post by kenjackson »

skrebbel wrote: post #37
freshhawk wrote: post #30

There's a regular stream of "defending PHP" posts but they all seem to miss the point. No one bashes PHP because it can't do these things, or that it isn't easy. People bash PHP because there are objectively better languages and platforms out there and objectively bad decisions made by those guiding the PHP language. If you want to defend PHP in any meaningful way then you can't just list things that can be done easi…

> If you want to defend PHP in any meaningful way then you can't just list things that can be done easily in almost every semi-modern web ecosystem Did you ever read Python's documentation? Or Ruby's? Or Java's? Show me one popular web programming language which has a full page, up to date, with examples and user comments and version incompatibility info, per function . Of course, it's just one point and I otherwise…

Everyone is mentioning Python, but also check C# and .NET Fx and ASP.NET MVC.

For example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w4hkze5k.aspx

or

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.member...

You get the syntax (including VB, C++, and F# where availalbe), remarks, examples, version information, platforms, comments, and related content.

Re: I Like PHP

#132

Post by evilduck »

j_col wrote: post #118
thorwawy99 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in .net you can run your site off source files, and the server will compile as needed

In production, or just your dev environment?

You technically can compile ASP pages on the fly in production but it's bad practice, just like making changes directly to production is bad practice. The whole blog post is pretty much a great write up of how not to manage a website.

Re: I Like PHP

#133

Post by btilly »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #109
slindsey wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please provide me a resource to learn how to fully separate the code from the markup? I learned web development on ColdFusion then switched to PHP. I certainly understand separation of content from design (HTML to CSS) but I honestly have no idea how to do web development without mixing markup (HTML) with the actual programming. I've done a little C and Java web stuff where my code printed HTML output - ugly.…

Of course it is impossible to do dynamic web pages without mixing code and markup, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's just that in PHP it is possible to one single file that is both code and markup combined, whereas other languages require a separate logic file that sends data to templates.

That is NOT a result of the language. It is trivial in any language to combine both code and markup. However people using other languages generally work to avoid that.

That said, there is a long-standing tension between keeping logic out of templates, and giving templates more flexibility. Different frameworks take different positions on how to draw the line. PHP can be seen as an extreme position towards giving templates as much power as possible.

Re: I Like PHP

#134

Post by maqr »

mtogo wrote: post #113
eropple wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately true. I'm a PHP programmer (currently writing a book, A Highly Negative Book About PHP , that I've been billing as "like Essential Java but tells you what not to do") and, I like to think, a fairly good one; reading this article made me cringe because this guy is emblematic of most of the problems in the PHP community. He: -accepts uncritically gobs of code dredged up via Google -considers somet…

I'm convinced that this post is satire and the author has trolled us all. In fact, i reject any other explaination. Sticks fingers in ears . Lalalalala, it's satire, nobody is this incompetent. Lalalalala, can't hear you.

> PHP is exactly like C. Either you like both or you don’t like either, there is no claim you can make about PHP that can’t be made about C as well, and vice versa.

This is absolutely satire. I don't think anyone can troll much harder than "PHP is exactly like C".

Re: I Like PHP

#135

Post by bad_user »

ceejayoz wrote: post #70
twism wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third party documentation doesn't count in this discussion.

It does when one of the big criticisms of PHP is that it rolls everything into core that'd normally be third-party.

Considering how PHP doesn't have anything like Twisted (and this is just one example out of many) ; no, it doesn't count.

Also, I never used a popular Python library for which I haven't found good resources.

My favorite Python library, called NLTK, which has no equivalent in PHP or Ruby or any other platform for that matter, comes with a freaking book that's available for free.

Re: I Like PHP

#136

Post by spiffxp »

psaintla wrote: post #121
tomelders wrote: post #3

From the comments: "PHP is great for its purpose. Quick scripts that generate web content. It’s even OK for small applications. But just like C, PHP is lousy for the medium to large. Any software project with a duration in months or greater that is entirely in PHP is going to be painful." Like Facebook? Or Wordpress? Or Digg? PHP aint perfect, but it's demonstrably suitable for medium to large projects.

Do yourself a favor. Never ever use wordpress as an example of a quality PHP application. Please look at the source code, the open source wordpress is a monstrous hack that has no clear architecture, has a terrible system of hooks that plugin authors regularly abuse and doesn't scale unless you write your own hack of plugin to override the db handler so you can do things like r/w splitting or sharding.

Any suggestions for PHP applications whose source code can be presented as an example of what TO do instead of what NOT to do?

Re: I Like PHP

#137

Post by wildmXranat »

eropple wrote: post #86
lhnz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a play around with a framework such as Symfony [1]. That's the most natural way of learning a better style of PHP web development. [1] http://www.symfony-project.org/

Any particular reason you're linking to Symfony instead of Symfony2? I find the latter so much easier to read and work with it's not even funny.

I'm not sure about that claim. I've been working with SF for years and tried SF2 during early beta and I don't think it's that clear cut. Then again, I don't care that much so - carry on

Re: I Like PHP

#138

Post by btilly »

PaulHoule wrote: post #36
tomelders wrote: post #3

From the comments: "PHP is great for its purpose. Quick scripts that generate web content. It’s even OK for small applications. But just like C, PHP is lousy for the medium to large. Any software project with a duration in months or greater that is entirely in PHP is going to be painful." Like Facebook? Or Wordpress? Or Digg? PHP aint perfect, but it's demonstrably suitable for medium to large projects.

It's a damning indictment of Java, ASP.NET, Ruby and all other environments that almost all of the apps that "any idiot can install on a web server" are written in PHP. Where's the "Wordpress" of any other programming language?

There is a strong correlation between things whose primary design criterion include "any idiot can install", and "complete crap design".

As examples I hold up PHP, most PHP applications, MySQL, Matt Wright's script archives (a series of security holes masquerading as useful Perl scripts that were popular a decade ago), and so on.

The correlation is hardly absolute. For instance SQLite is both excellently well designed and also designed for easy install. However it holds often enough to strain coincidence.

My suspicion is that part of it is that something that is designed to be trivial to use tends to have a low barrier to entry to get involved with. This leads to getting contributers with more enthusiasm than skill.

Re: I Like PHP

#139

Post by sciurus »

PaulHoule wrote: post #36
tomelders wrote: post #3

From the comments: "PHP is great for its purpose. Quick scripts that generate web content. It’s even OK for small applications. But just like C, PHP is lousy for the medium to large. Any software project with a duration in months or greater that is entirely in PHP is going to be painful." Like Facebook? Or Wordpress? Or Digg? PHP aint perfect, but it's demonstrably suitable for medium to large projects.

It's a damning indictment of Java, ASP.NET, Ruby and all other environments that almost all of the apps that "any idiot can install on a web server" are written in PHP. Where's the "Wordpress" of any other programming language?

Early on, PHP had the advantage of mod_php, which made deploying PHP applications simple and performed well. Because other languages required more complex setup (e.g. fastcgi, servlet containers) shared hosting providers gravitated towards supporting PHP applications. This caused open source projects that used PHP to gain more traction than projects written in, say, Perl. Eventually, hosting providers realized mod_php was not such a good idea. See the following link for an expansion on that http://www.majordojo.com/2007/11/is-mod-php-falling-out-of-f.... I think the shift of shared hosting providers to FastCGI (which makes supporting additional languages less work) as well as the decreased cost of private servers due to virtualization is playing a role in PHP's apparent decline in popularity.

Re: I Like PHP

#140

Post by bad_user »

afiler wrote: post #115
rjknight wrote: post #64

PHP's greatest strength is that it doesn't require OO. Seriously, for most simple web application tasks (and even some complicated ones) OO adds more confusion than it removes, and I say this as someone who certainly sees the value in OO for complex apps. Most web apps are ultimately more like shell scripts or console applications than desktop/mobile applications. It's no coincidence that most of the former are writt…

I don't think you really mean "object orientation" so much as "a byzantine object hierarchy" (stereotypically associated with Java, of course). To me, Ruby's object-oriented string functions are a lot easier to keep track of than PHP's: x.length vs strlen($x) x.gsub('foo', 'bar') vs str_replace('foo', 'bar', $x) x.strip vs trim($x) x.upcase vs strtoupper($x) All four of the PHP functions use a different form: strX, s…

     Python takes a different tactic, and has a 
     non-object-oriented len() method
What do you mean?

In Python len() is just a standard protocol for getting the length of something, but len() itself is calling obj.__len__() if it is defined. You can even override or replace it in an object instance, returning whatever you want.

You can argue that these protocols are a bad idea, or maybe a useless one since Ruby does just fine without such hardcoded conventions, but since it relies on runtime adhoc polymorphism, it is as object oriented as it gets.

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