I'd like PHP more were it not for the army of amateur programmers hacking wordpress.
How does that impact the code you can write?
I still love PHP and JavaScript
41–50 of 402 posts
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#42Your definition of "legacy code" seems to be the exact opposite of what it is generally understood by the term (in the Michael Feathers sense).
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#43This really speaks to my heart. I learned programming as a young kid when my uncle taught my pascal. But I just couldn't see the point of console programs and never really got into it. Eventually I picked up late 90s HTML (hello geocities!) and php was a natural next step. I still remember going to the library to borrow the book PHP and MySQL web development. It was so empowering. I could make any kind of application…
Surprised you didn't try actionscript for building UIs
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#44PHP has so many hidden benefits: - it's stateless by design (much easier to scale) - it was "serverless" before Serverless - surprisingly performant - no "unknown unknowns". it's so tried-and-true, there's no surprises - deployment is so simple, just drop a file on a web server. No middleware needed. - No long compile times because there is no compiling needed. EDIT: why the downvotes? If you don't agree, just reply…
> EDIT: why the downvotes?
The anti-PHP cult is strong here on HN. List 5 benefits of React and watch your upvotes skyrocket.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
huh? Node is a JavaScript runtime. Its the "base thing". Its "JavaScript", at least in the sense that we are talking about here. So saying "Node isn't included", doesn't really make sense. When you install Node, you also get NPM, which is essentially what I said in the previous comment.
> When you install Node, you also get NPM, which is essentially what I said in the previous comment. The other person said that JS also doesn't include a package manager. It sounds like you wanted to take issue with the colloquial use of NPM rather than their point about package managers not being included. > I also don’t believe a bundled package manager is necessary — NPM isn’t bundled with JavaScript, and it seems…
No, what they said was:
> NPM isn’t bundled with JavaScript
which, if you install Node, NPM is included
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#46> I love legacy codebases. > A legacy codebase means that the product is performing well. It means that I can often make immediate and impactful improvements. Wow. This person must have worked on very different legacy codebases than me. Legacy Javascript code, to me, is something that I do not want to touch with a 10 foot pole, because every little piece of it can be intertwined with and used by many other hidden pla…
> From a practicality perspective, I get that the best programming language is the one you can use to build your product, but I tend to long for languages like C# or even Go when I'm trying to deliver a product on a team with 10+ people. Static typing really helps when you're interfacing with someone elses code, and Typescript only aids this point.
This. Languages like Java and C# are great for teams and codebases starting to scale out. Hence their popularity in enterprise.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#47PHP has so many hidden benefits: - it's stateless by design (much easier to scale) - it was "serverless" before Serverless - surprisingly performant - no "unknown unknowns". it's so tried-and-true, there's no surprises - deployment is so simple, just drop a file on a web server. No middleware needed. - No long compile times because there is no compiling needed. EDIT: why the downvotes? If you don't agree, just reply…
> EDIT: why the downvotes? The anti-PHP cult is strong here on HN. List 5 benefits of React and watch your upvotes skyrocket.
What cult? PHP is technically, objectively inferior to almost every other web technology (which is impressive, actually, given how terrible most web technology actually is) in almost every use case one can think of. That doesn't mean it's bad or that nobody should ever use it, or that it isn't a superior solution in some cases. But in basically any non-trivial use case, it's a poor choice.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When you install Node, you also get NPM, which is essentially what I said in the previous comment. The other person said that JS also doesn't include a package manager. It sounds like you wanted to take issue with the colloquial use of NPM rather than their point about package managers not being included. > I also don’t believe a bundled package manager is necessary — NPM isn’t bundled with JavaScript, and it seems…
No, what they said was: > NPM isn’t bundled with JavaScript which, if you install Node, NPM is included
Node isn't included with JavaScript. No package managers are included with JavaScript.
You're splitting hairs about Node/NPM which is completely irrelevant to their point about JavaScript not having package managers built in.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#492 years in, but same. Made especially beginner friendly with modern tooling [autocomplete, hover:documentation, Copilot]. Any advice/recommendations/resources for people in that weird transitory stage between ‘getting it’ but not quite Senior Enterprise Software Architect?
I think I learned it through a couple of venues. I am still thinking this one out, and definitely plan to write a post about it.
1. designing "big" enterprise software from scratch, on paper, and then building a toy implementation.
I would say 95% of the actual work that goes into a big enterprise codebase are error handling, logging, changing requirements, covering the 80000 different user cases, while the architecture itself (a message bus, a pub sub pattern, a cache) can actually be written out in a few hundred lines of code.
This toy implementation can then be used to run multiple experiments: what happens if the message bus gets choked out? what happens if messages get reordered? how do you change a message schema?
These are rare and intense efforts in real life, but you can cosplay them with a few docker containers.
2. reading big existing enterprise codebases.
This is a skill that is not often taught, and people starting to read big codebases from "main.go" are usually doomed to fail, as they will hit the "big wall of enterprise indirection". Instead, try to get the codebase to compile, skim all the files at random until you think you recognize something, set a breakpoint in your debugger and run some part of the test suite or the real thing if you are adventurous. Then, try to mess with it some.
Once you found your marks, try to understand where all the big blobby nebulous enterprise nonsense comes from, and why it is there. Often, it helps to look at the source control history to see when it was introduced, and if design documents relevant to the change can be found.
I try to "read" a big unfamiliar codebase every couple of months. It could be kubernetes, or nginx, or webpack, or typescript, or react. You learn a lot about real world production code.
The amount and quality of opensource projects out there is nothing short of incredible these days. When I was coming of age in the early 2000s, it was linux, GNU, apache and a few other autotools driven monstrosities, with a CVS repository and a crusty mailing list.
3. learn to write RFCs
I started practicing writing relatively late (in fact, my blog just got started a few weeks ago), but learning to communicate clearly about design is vital. I have always done a tremendous amount of whiteboarding, and do most of my development on paper with boxes and arrows. I think this also develops a sense of "architecture" vs "code".
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#50> I love legacy codebases. > A legacy codebase means that the product is performing well. It means that I can often make immediate and impactful improvements. Wow. This person must have worked on very different legacy codebases than me. Legacy Javascript code, to me, is something that I do not want to touch with a 10 foot pole, because every little piece of it can be intertwined with and used by many other hidden pla…
> From a practicality perspective, I get that the best programming language is the one you can use to build your product, but I tend to long for languages like C# or even Go when I'm trying to deliver a product on a team with 10+ people. Static typing really helps when you're interfacing with someone elses code, and Typescript only aids this point. This. Languages like Java and C# are great for teams and codebases st…
I think Java and C# are indeed my favorite languages for huge projects with wildly varying developer competence. Python is probably my most hated for that situation.