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I still love PHP and JavaScript

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Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#81

Post by timack »

tiffanyh wrote: post #4

PHP 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…

Not sure about "no surprises" - just saw this on Twitter yesterday: https://twitter.com/LupinityLabs/status/1554217944179249153

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#82

Post by paulryanrogers »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #39
candiodari wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the serverless aspect. I still think nothing has the deployment story that PHP applications have. Just upload some source and your website is up.

Do PHP applications really require no system packages for any use-cases?

What do you mean by system packages? There are PHP packages now and Composer. Though core and its bundled extensions are quite rich. So 3P packages aren't strictly necessary.

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#83

Post by phailhaus »

SicSemperUranus wrote: post #68
WaffleIronMaker wrote: post #13

> 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…

> never found a legacy JS codebase that has a robust test suite, so any refactoring I do can be hard to test and verify. Wouldn't you just... make a test suite?

If there is no pre-existing test suite, it is extremely difficult to know what is the right expected behavior that should be tested, and what is incidental to the implementation.

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#84

Post by CTmystery »

larve wrote: post #36
WaffleIronMaker wrote: post #13

> 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…

Author here, thank you for reading the article and taking the time to comment. Every legacy codebase I have worked with was actually a successful business. That probably plays a big role in why I enjoy working with them. The job is not easy, and in one case (800kLOC of PHP without a single function), I had to rewrite everything from scratch. Legacy JS with its strata upon strata of framework du jour and jquery and po…

You have to be the most sensible programmer I've run into here. If I could plus one a single section of your post it would be the "Good software is none of which depends on the language". Had me nodding excitedly in agreement, subduing the urge to shout YES at my screen.

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#85

Post by larve »

xupybd wrote: post #61

Defining good software is hard. Every definition seems to miss something. Including the definition in this article. It misses that Good Software is cheap to maintain and can easily have features added. This goal is hard to meet and there are lots of ways to get there. You can get there with PHP and JavaScript but both languages allow developers to create a mess. Don't get me wrong all languages allow developers to cr…

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I indeed haven't fully articulated what is driving me to write this piece (besides a desire to give PHP a bit of love as it is so harshly criticized for reasons I don't entirely understand).

I find "problematic PHP" much easier to untangle than say, "problematic node.js" or "problematic python". Because PHP is often older codebases that have survived the test of time, this is actually a big feature of the language.

The world and web development has much progressed since PHP3/4/5, and pretty much all of that progress can be leveraged with PHP as well. If I were to green field a new project, get to pick every developer on my team and a budget to match, I would probably not chose PHP.

But, if the problem were "we want to try out an ecommerce SEO idea and don't want to sell our soul to shopify if it is successful", wordpress/woocommerce + a few janky plugins and templates + a custom plugin with 1k LOC is totally something I would consider. And I absolutely loathe wordpress database legacy sludge.

If I have a team of experienced PHP and wordpress developers, a set of internal plugins that can be repurposed, and I can pay a freelancer to build custom react CMS components, using PHP and even wordpress for a new project is a no brainer.

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#86

Post by angst_ridden »

I'm on a team that maintains two projects with over 500k PHP LOC apiece. They're built using a decent framework (Yii 1.x). One of them has a module that's about 25kLOC of AngularJS.

They've each been running over a decade, and while there are some frustrations, it's not so bad. The biggest issue is lack of compatibility to migrate to later versions of the frameworks involved.

They perform adequately for their purposes. These are business applications that are not designed to scale to huge audiences, although one does aggregate ludicrous amounts of sensor data. Both codebases interact with a lot of external systems via APIs and/or batched data transfers. When it comes time to integrate with a new/different backend system, it's not difficult.

Could it all be implemented more elegantly in some other language? Sure. But in long-lived business tools, there's always an evolutionary process going on, and your pristine design from year two won't be useful with the changes they want in year seven. The ability to make fast changes is important.

Lastly, none of this would be possible without functional and unit tests. Those are probably more important than the languages used. They're a pain in the ass to maintain as the business uses and functionality evolves, but it allows the refactors that keep the codebases sane.

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#87

Post by jrm4 »

paxys wrote: post #33
tiffanyh wrote: post #4

PHP 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…

> - no "unknown unknowns". it's so tried-and-true, there's no surprises This part is laughable. People who have been programming PHP for 20 years (several of them at my company) still routinely discover hidden bugs, quirks or general behavior that is totally unintuitive and nowhere found in the documentation.

But genuine question -- what other languages are as simultaneously as useful AND predictable?

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#88

Post by nyanpasu64 »

timack wrote: post #81
tiffanyh wrote: post #4

PHP 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…

Not sure about "no surprises" - just saw this on Twitter yesterday: https://twitter.com/LupinityLabs/status/1554217944179249153

Apparently exact minimal float-to-string conversion is more recent than I thought, and many languages used to print more (Python?) or less (PHP) decimal digits than necessary to uniquely identify the bit pattern. Python correctly prints 46000.80 + 553.04 as 46553.840000000004, but I don't know if it ever prints more digits than needed. One recent algorithm for printing floats exactly is https://github.com/ulfjack/ryu, though I'm unaware what's the state-of-the-art (https://github.com/jk-jeon/dragonbox claims to be a benchmark and the best algorithm).

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#89

Post by larve »

datalopers wrote: post #76
piperswe wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention JS - I would be interested in seeing any benchmarks where the PHP interpreter beats V8.

These are web frameworks specifically but a good broad suite of examples: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&l=z... An amazingly fast specialized JS runtime solution [1][2] does indeed have the #1 spot on the most recent rounds, but full PHP frameworks hold spots #2 - 29 and then it's a mixture of PHP and JS all the way to #58 before we see the first other language (python, uvicorn) emerge. [1]…

You can also do some pretty "fun" things with PHP leveraging the opcache. I wrote what in my own personal biased benchmark was the fastest mustache template renderer by transpiling mustache to php files and then "compiling" them with apc [1]. Kind of a poor man's staging / partial evaluation optimizer.

This is still running https://goldeneaglecoin.com/ whose framework (and HTML/CSS) is pretty much untouched since 2011. It is running on an ec2 t2.medium instance and is one of the fastest e-commerce sites i know.

[1] https://github.com/wesen/proust

Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript

#90

Post by forgotmypw17 »

Many comments about static typing in here. I agree that it is a great and helpful feature, and it's also not the only feature.

For many other reasons, my languages of choice are mostly PHP, Perl, and JavaScript. And I have experienced the types of bugs that static typing (and also immutability) can help with.

What I have found extremely helpful is to write as if variables are immutable, not allowing myself to change them. And to do sanity checks in the beginning of every function which expects a certain type of value.

Perl's taint and strict are of great help, but I haven't thought of an easy way to port them to JS and PHP. So whenever I can, I do the heavy lifting in Perl, and then use PHP and JS as glue.

The main reasons I have chosen these three languages is their ubiquity and their committment to backwards compatibility. With all three, I can carefully write something reasonable 20 years ago and have it still run today. Sadly, I recently came across a GNU/Linux distribution without Perl, but it is rare. PHP is widely available anywhere with a web server, Perl is ubiquitous in modern (post-2000) *nix, and JavaScript can still be written in ways which work in Netscape 3.x and up.

I think if you want to write software which continues working without too much fuss, it's helpful to exploit the Lindy Effect to your advantage.

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