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PHP in 2022

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Re: PHP in 2022

#161

Post by christophilus »

cies wrote: post #61
christophilus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write JavaScript via Typescript, and you now have one of the best and most popular languages there is (including sum types). There are still a lot of warts, but it’s actually a really nice language IMO.

Have you seen ReScript and/or ReasonML? They are much nicer IHMO, but, yes, not as popular.

I've played with them quite a bit from the first time they were mentioned on HN. I really like OCaml. But the tooling and ergonomics are heavily in TypeScript's favor at this point, and at least for me, that makes a bit difference in day-to-day work. Anyway, my favorite of that variety of languages is PureScript. It's almost perfect.

Re: PHP in 2022

#162

Post by mschuster91 »

egeozcan wrote: post #71
mschuster91 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it just me or PHP's evolution is a bit "too little, too late" for an almost 30-years old language? No. While PHP won't be the language of choice for academia or some new hipster startup that wants to woo junior engineers with the promise of "we're using the latest cool shit", the trio of PHP, Java and .NET with their associated ecosystems has managed the fine balance of evolution speed between uprooting everythi…

A typical Java project has way more complexity (and confusion and sadness and pain) than your typical node.js project in the enterprise world. I have stomach cramps thinking about the stuff my eyes have seen. .NET is not innocent either. For PHP, just look at the Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress codebases to see how many ways there are to include files. For a current example, see the hate Laravel receives on how it does…

> A typical Java project has way more complexity (and confusion and sadness and pain) than your typical node.js project in the enterprise world.

Personally, in my career I've seen and worked with projects in SAP, Java (Tomcat), .NET, PHP and various JS-based projects - of all these, the JS projects had the most variety of bullshit (although SAP still gets the cake for "stuff I'll never willingly work with again" simply because how mind-boggling the entire environment is).

At least it's easy enough to get a bunch of Java developers to agree on what package manager and build tool they will be using - it will mostly be Maven and that's it.

For a nodejs project, you will first have to decide on the framework to choose, then on the build tool because not every framework works with every build tool, then you will lose a lot of time until Webpack finally does what you want, and in a year half the libraries you use will be unsupported.

Re: PHP in 2022

#163

Post by ehnto »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #149
mojuba wrote: post #9

Is it just me or PHP's evolution is a bit "too little, too late" for an almost 30-years old language? PHP is not a likable language but it's probably not going away any time soon. Its concept of "one endpoint is one script" is one of its biggest killer features that no other language has been able to deploy in such an accessible manner. Well, Perl and old-style CGI aside, of course. That, and also the fact that it ma…

PHP is either a flawed scripting language for some or a "poor man's java" for others. I had to learn JEE(JSP,JSF,CDi,JPA) for some project lately, so now I understand a bit more why Doctrine, Synfony and co are the way they are, coming from Go, Ruby, Python and JS... Well I prefer just writing some JEE stuff rather than using a PHP framework in that case, because I realized the Java cargo culting was just insane in t…

> PHP has that whole "templating stuff" though.

That might be underestimating the feature, it was very much the core proposition of the language and likely why it's so well suited for web applications.

Re: PHP in 2022

#164

Post by throw_m239339 »

ehnto wrote: post #163
throw_m239339 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is either a flawed scripting language for some or a "poor man's java" for others. I had to learn JEE(JSP,JSF,CDi,JPA) for some project lately, so now I understand a bit more why Doctrine, Synfony and co are the way they are, coming from Go, Ruby, Python and JS... Well I prefer just writing some JEE stuff rather than using a PHP framework in that case, because I realized the Java cargo culting was just insane in t…

> PHP has that whole "templating stuff" though. That might be underestimating the feature, it was very much the core proposition of the language and likely why it's so well suited for web applications.

Yes, that's exactly why I'm pointing it out. Neither Python or Ruby have(or had) that.

Re: PHP in 2022

#165

Post by cute_boi »

azangru wrote: post #141
mojuba wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A language that uses archaic syntax with dollar vars, semicolons, is pretty verbose itself may die before it evolves into something sensible. Not that I believe PHP will die any time soon, but just replying to your "slow is good".

> A language that uses archaic syntax with dollar vars, semicolons, is pretty verbose itself may die Careful there :-) Modern javascript has semicolons and is introducing pretty horrendous syntax for private variables (an octothorpe) and possibly for the pipe operator (percent sign, was it?) and for tuples and records, yet is showing no signs of dying.

I have never written JS with semicolons after 2015 idk why you are saying Modern JS has semicolons? I simply didn't get it. Am I missing something.

Re: PHP in 2022

#166

Post by ehnto »

bluetomcat wrote: post #77
mojuba wrote: post #9

Is it just me or PHP's evolution is a bit "too little, too late" for an almost 30-years old language? PHP is not a likable language but it's probably not going away any time soon. Its concept of "one endpoint is one script" is one of its biggest killer features that no other language has been able to deploy in such an accessible manner. Well, Perl and old-style CGI aside, of course. That, and also the fact that it ma…

In its early years up until around 2006, PHP was mostly "HTML on steroids", that is, an HTML preprocessor with lots of goodies like "batteries-included" DB access, form handling, image processing, text processing, all accessed via a single Apache module. You simply rename your .html file to .php, and put some magic between " ". Then came along templating engines like Smarty, and they introduced a new templating langu…

> For some reason, "" was considered much worse than "{$foo}".

A stigma that remains to this day, even though the spec is very clear about those kinds of short tags and the flags that affect them. PHP developers are absolutely terrified that some imaginary environment flag they have control over is going to brick their application, but are happy to bring in an entirely new templating language as a dependency instead. I'm sure Smarty was borne of a need, but I was never sure what it brought to the table except different tags for existing features.

Re: PHP in 2022

#167

Post by vegai_ »

dncornholio wrote: post #81

Hating on PHP almost feels like racism. All the arguments are biased or false. I always get sad after clicking on PHP articles on HN.

> All the arguments are biased or false.

All of them?

Re: PHP in 2022

#168

Post by mschuster91 »

f311a wrote: post #66
mschuster91 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It evolved a lot, but I don't see it outside of simple backends for websites. I'd say that something like MediaWiki, Wordpress or Drupal exceeds the definition of "simple backend". Personally, I even tend to write shell scripts in PHP simply because the language is far more sane than Bash (and god forbid naked old sh) and I don't have to fight whitespace with Python.

Wordpress is a complex project, but its backend does not require any background processing.

It does, even Wordpress has a cronjob - scheduled publishes, UGC postprocessing, IP ban expirations, there's a lot going on behind the scene.

Re: PHP in 2022

#169

Post by phphphphp »

cntainer wrote: post #21

I started my career in PHP ~15 years ago trying to do OOP in PHP 4.x. That was "fun". In the meantime I switched to other stacks but I've been keeping a distant eye on how PHP was evolving and I still am involved with PHP projects to a certain degree, though rarely at code level. I really appreciate the effort put into fixing most of the things I hated about the language, though at times it felt like the language and…

php is my language of choice, I love modern php, but I struggle with the same question. As a language, I think php is great, and for a solo project it is an obvious choice for me because of my proficiency and the quality of the language... but would I start a greenfield project with php? No.

I've worked across a variety of different companies and a consistent theme is the existence of "php developers" in these companies, and the bad quality software they produce. I'm currently working at a company (founded within the last 5 years) and their php codebase is AWFUL (no structure, 1k+ LOC methods, no tests, no ci, no documentation etc.)[1].

The problem is not php, it's that a lot of PHP developers are doing the same thing they did 10 years ago, despite the industry having moved on. As a Software Engineer, I think there's a very valid case for php over Ruby or Python or Node, however as a CTO or a team lead, I'd really, really struggle to justify it, which pains me to say. If you're trying to hire php developers, you'll be hiring a lot of people who haven't changed how they work since the late 2000s. I'd rather hire code school graduates to write Ruby than a php developer with a decade of experience.

[1] People can write bad code anywhere, but pre-historic php is especially terrible. A company with bad golang is an order of magnitude more penetrable than a company with bad php.

Re: PHP in 2022

#170

Post by egeozcan »

mschuster91 wrote: post #162
egeozcan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A typical Java project has way more complexity (and confusion and sadness and pain) than your typical node.js project in the enterprise world. I have stomach cramps thinking about the stuff my eyes have seen. .NET is not innocent either. For PHP, just look at the Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress codebases to see how many ways there are to include files. For a current example, see the hate Laravel receives on how it does…

> A typical Java project has way more complexity (and confusion and sadness and pain) than your typical node.js project in the enterprise world. Personally, in my career I've seen and worked with projects in SAP, Java (Tomcat), .NET, PHP and various JS-based projects - of all these, the JS projects had the most variety of bullshit (although SAP still gets the cake for "stuff I'll never willingly work with again" simp…

Are you sure? There's gradle and others. Also which server? Wildfly, jboss, jetty, glassfish, soemthing else? Which java distribution? Perhaps you want to use vertx, tapestry, undertow instead of good old Spring? Maybe Grails? Which testing framework? Some people love their JSF (yes!), is it still really, like for real supported? Should you use JSP? I mean from configuration to configuration so much changes that I don't touch undockerized Java projects. It's just too much work. In one case one experienced Java dev struggled to get me a working dev env for a week. Even IDE extensions sometimes play a role in the build in Java world. Give me a break.
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