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I Like PHP

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Re: I Like PHP

#191

Post by SergeyHack »

slindsey wrote: post #68
chc wrote: post #23

"I don’t even bother writing tests for most of the PHP I write (obviously, I would be a bit more thorough if this code were destined to be used in a more mission critical web site). Not writing tests is not the only software taboo that I break when I write PHP: I happily mix up presentation and logic all the time. That’s just how PHP is supposed to work" And this is why everybody else hates PHP. It tempts you to writ…

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.…

See Enlive from the Clojure world. This is the detailed explanation of why Enlive rocks - https://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial

Re: I Like PHP

#192

Post by alanh »

pale_rider wrote: post #190
alanh wrote: post #174

Keep in mind that perhaps a majority of wordpress.org sites that have been around for a year or more have been hacked in some fashion at some point, and that the reason is because PHP encourages the kind of terrible code and unsafe-by-default environments that make this possible. Edit For example, I am thinking of how various templating languages, including Jinja2 (for Python) default to auto-escaping strings you're…

WordPress sites get hacked because the owner fails to update the platform or install 3rd party scripts/plugins without any sort of logical research. This can be said about any platform, regardless of the language.

> WordPress sites get hacked because the owner fails to update the platform

Why are the updates even necessary? If you are still on Rails 2.3.8, you aren’t getting hacked just because you didn’t move to Rails 3 yet. But the situation with Wordpress & its ecosystem seems waaay less secure by default.

> This can be said about any platform, regardless of the language.

Not to the same degree, no sir.

Re: I Like PHP

#193

Post by daeken »

ars wrote: post #183
daeken wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An app written in PHP by a 8/10 programmer is going to be better than an app written in (sexy other language) by a 7/10 programmer. Depends entirely on your metric. It's far too easy to introduce subtle bugs, especially security oriented ones, in PHP. If I had a dollar for every XSS, remote file inclusion, CSRF, arbitrary file read, etc vulnerability I found in a "good" PHP app, I'd be a very wealthy man. Some thin…

None of the things you listed have anything to do with PHP, they can happen in any language.

Oh, absolutely! Except that they're more prevalent in PHP applications than anything else. It's simply way, way too easy to do the wrong thing. If you want to introduce XSS into, say, a Rails app, it's significantly more difficult; generally, you have to explicitly throw something back as 'raw'. Sure, some PHP frameworks handle it the same way, but it's rare to see this in the real world.

While testing apps, PHP immediately throws up red flags -- it's simply not likely to be done right. It can be, but it's very rare.

Re: I Like PHP

#194

Post by MartinCron »

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.

Are you saying that Wordpress development isn't painful? Have you ever done any?

Re: I Like PHP

#195

Post by AgentConundrum »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #123
chc wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For the record, "PHP: The Good Parts" is downright fucking awful. Apologies to the author if he reads this, but I'll buy him a beer and restate my opinion.

I've not read any of the "The Good Parts" series, so I can't comment from personal experience, but I've heard that Crockford's book is the only good one in that series. He wrote it, and he wrote it well, and then O'Reilly decided to base a series about it, but didn't get authors who could write those books to the same standard.

Re: I Like PHP

#196

Post by billpg »

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.

Thanks to PHP or in spite of PHP?

Re: I Like PHP

#197

Post by 46Bit »

dchest wrote: post #67
skrebbel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> user comments Ha-ha-ha. You're kidding, right? Check strlen: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strlen.php Comments: 1. Comment about how PHP converts types. "Conclusion: The values are converted to string before check the lenght." 2. Comment from a novice user who posted a solution to the problem of subtracting the number of spaces in string from its length. 3. Comment about someone who thought that there was a…

It may just be a side effect of PHP's problems, but even the wrong comments tend to be extremely useful when you run into something weird when coding. Of course it's always more fun to bash people & programming languages, so maybe I'll just join in: that bloody Ruby API reference lacks any comments from users who might have noticed something that's causing a strange bug in my script.

Re: I Like PHP

#198

Post by NathanKP »

wtetzner wrote: post #157
NathanKP wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why it prints zero is false, and personally I feel that it makes perfect sense. Indeed I approve of it. The fact that strings can be evaluated as numbers is great for accepting input from GET or POST because it means that there is no need to worry about explicitly casting strings to numbers. Of course, input type validation is still important, and if a variable input by the user is supposed to be numeric…

Perl does the same thing with type coercion, and "0" in Perl is false. However, the thing that Perl does that PHP doesn't is have different operators for strings and numbers. Don't get me wrong, I think conflating strings and numbers is a bad idea, but if you're going to conflate strings and numbers, then having separate operators is the right thing to do.

I am not very familiar with Perl. When you say different operators for strings and numbers are you referring to something similar to PHP's === operator for which "1"===true would be a false statement?

Re: I Like PHP

#199

Post by pacemkr »

jarrett wrote: post #173

The biggest problem with PHP isn't anything built into the language itself, but rather the culture of mediocrity/naivety surrounding it. As at least one other commenter has said, there are disciplined and skilled PHP programmers. If only they were the majority! Sadly, for the PHP ecosystem, a few good apples don't unspoil the bunch. Here are a few ways PHP's bad culture manifests itself. 1. Cargo culting The web is f…

I can't disagree with much of what you said. However, you are being too critical of Drupal.

"the chunks of functionality you download are not likely to match your needs perfectly, so you're forced to make due with software that's almost what you want"

Drupal starts you off with 80% of the product functionally complete (!), for free, and leaves you with the spit and polish jar to squeak out the other 20. I find that this 80/20 rule is true for even very complex products. The lazy developer will never do that remaining 20%; this says nothing about Drupal.

You can name a function according to a convention and reach into any part of Drupal, or a contributed module, to pull that specific string that you need. I'll be blasphemous and say that not having to instantiate half a dozen objects just to dive through their properties to achieve the same result -- as you would likely have to in a "proper," purely OO CMS -- is very refreshing. The result is the same and the code is readable.

"Code quality is often abysmal."

True for one out of ten new modules that I encounter; and you are free not to use those modules. The heavy weights: CCK, Views, etc. are excellent.

Re: I Like PHP

#200

Post by henrikschroder »

dchest wrote: post #67
skrebbel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> user comments Ha-ha-ha. You're kidding, right? Check strlen: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strlen.php Comments: 1. Comment about how PHP converts types. "Conclusion: The values are converted to string before check the lenght." 2. Comment from a novice user who posted a solution to the problem of subtracting the number of spaces in string from its length. 3. Comment about someone who thought that there was a…

Thanks, I haven't laughed this much in a long while.
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