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I Like PHP

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Re: I Like PHP

#161

Post by eropple »

chc wrote: post #114
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…

From your description, it sounds like Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts" to me.

As it happens, the introduction says, verbatim, "It's like PHP: The Good Parts, but that already exists and is terrible."

So, yeah. ;-) Still a ways off, though.

Re: I Like PHP

#162

Post by FuzzyDunlop »

wildmXranat wrote: post #137
eropple wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The doc's fairly incomplete and requires you to actually browse through all the separate libraries that comprise the standard distro to even understand what you can use and where. It being OOP-tastic and brimming with interfaces and namespacing is great, but it is far from friendly to Symfony newbies.

Feels like you have to know Symfony 1 to understand what 2 is trying to do really. I wouldn't recommend it as a good intro to MVC.

Re: I Like PHP

#163

Post by eropple »

rickmb wrote: post #124

PHP's one great strength is that it can be effectively used in a very wide range of applications. But doing that well requires using the language in ways suited to that purpose. The problem with people "defending" PHP is that they often only use PHP for a very specific purpose, and describe PHP from that perspective. Hacking quick and dirty procedural scripts, writing something like WordPress plugins or developing "e…

Agreed. The big problem with PHP, as I see it, is that you have to be already very very good with PHP to write a safe, well-performing application in it. The steps you may take along the way to get there may be very scary, especially if it involves other people paying you to do it.

Re: I Like PHP

#164

Post by drdaeman »

cedricbeust wrote: post #90
yid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which leads me to think that the poster is confusing "mainstream" with "GoDaddy".

I'm not. I'm using a fairly "non-noob" ISP (ssh access, crontab, etc...) and they still don't give me access to much more than PHP. I can install Java but I can't even run it as a CGI because of the HTTP request memory constraints they impose. This is pretty standard, I don't blame them for doing this, and I would go with a VPS if actually needed all this. Same for Ruby on Rails, obviously.

That's because clients rarely ask for it.

I work for an ISP and in about three years nobody had asked us about anything¹ more complicated than a simple PHP hosting with FTP access. (We don't really advertise hosting solutions, though, as this is not our main business.)

If you want your ISP to support something like Java or Rails — ask them today. They probably won't offer it now (or - who knows - they may surprise you!), but unless they're a type of company where individual client feedback gets lost, they'll note your request.

___

¹) Except for a colocated hosting, to be precise. But that's completely another case.

Re: I Like PHP

#165

Post by jrockway »

otterley wrote: post #50
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python's got excellent documentation, both official and third party.

Python itself does, but the third party modules (which do most of the heavy lifting) generally don't. See: Twisted.

Perl is a good example where most third-party modules have good documentation. Or at least a SYNOPSIS you can poke, some DESCRIPTION of what the module does, and a few hundred lines of code in the t/ directory that test all the features of the modules.

The one thing I miss in Python is the inability to click "view source" in my web browser to see how a core Python library is implemented. PHP also has this problem. (Code is the best documentation. Learn to read it.)

Re: I Like PHP

#166

Post by charlesju »

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.

That's like saying because the Pyramids were built in stone, we should build all our skyscrapers in stone. I bet that if Facebook, Wordpress or Digg were built in Ruby on Rails or some other modern language, they would be exponentially faster and easier to develop and maintain.

Re: I Like PHP

#167

Post by jrockway »

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…

What's so hard about OO? Instead of string_length($string), you write $string->length. The semantics are the same. If you pass something other than a string to string_length, the results are undefined. If you call length on an object that doesn't do the length method, then you get an error.

The attraction of PHP is that it never tells you that you're writing code that doesn't work. The result is a lot of code that doesn't work. This is bad, not good.

Re: I Like PHP

#168

Post by jrockway »

acabal wrote: post #69

I like PHP because it's got a C-like syntax, which is a personal preference of mine. I also like it because it exposes the nuts-and-bolts of web development without any fuss, unlike, say, ASP.NET (though last I touched that was 3 years ago so doubtless things have changed since), and that it has a basic templating system built in, and that it's easy to install and deploy to. It definitely is deeply flawed for many re…

Uh, Perl?

I wouldn't write this kind of Perl, but Perl is not going to get in your way. "use CGI; print html(body(p("OH HAI")))".

When you realize that this sucks and you can't maintain it, you'll be able to gradually improve your code. First, you can run your CGI from Plack instead of Apache. Then, you can start using features from a Plack-based framework, like URL mapping. Next, you can move your "print this HTML" into template classes. Then, you can convert these to using TT (or similar), and your app code won't notice. You can start writing unit tests. You can gradually migrate your raw DBI calls to DBIx::Class by using $schema->dbh_do.

You won't have to do it all at once and you won't have to break any code when you do. Perl will grow as you do. Or, you can stick to CGI forever. It doesn't care :)

It's a great language for starting small and building up "complexity" as you learn more about programming.

Re: I Like PHP

#169

Post by jrockway »

masklinn wrote: post #79
dillon wrote: post #2

You say if you make one assumption about C, you have to say the same about PHP. Well, PHP is academic, C is not. C is fast, PHP is not. I would only have agreed with your post if it were PHP and C++. C++ is academic and it's not slow but it is slower. You also say that you either like both PHP and C, or you like neither. Well what about Lua, Python... or any other embed-able language? Most Python programmers would sa…

> PHP is academic Uh... could you explain how you arrived to this assertion? Because as far as I can see, PHP definitely is not academic. The bloody thing started as a hodge-podge collection of Perl scripts, and to this day it still does not have anything even remotely close to a formal grammar. A language in which `foo()[1];` is a syntax error even though `$a = foo(); $a[1];` is valid code most definitely is not aca…

Actually, it's parsed with a rather simple yacc grammar. The reason why foo()[1] doesn't work is because it's a bad programming language, not because it doesn't have a grammar. It has one and it says not to parse that :)

Re: I Like PHP

#170

Post by btilly »

geon wrote: post #155
btilly wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 temp…

> That is NOT a result of the language. Considering PHP is more-or-less designed to be a templating language, I'd say it is. Partly. On the other hand, PHP is a pretty good templating language. People should just learn to separate business logic from presentation logic.

It is possible to write clean, well-factored code in PHP. Just as it is in other languages.

That wasn't how the language was originally intended to be written, and that is not how hordes of people use it. But it can be done. Really.

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