The MicroPHP Manifesto

Ha! Couldn't agree more with you!

At my current job we're working with our own framework. I think it has two main downsides for my employers: 1) Employees are difficult to replace - they invested a lot of time in me, to teach me their stack. 2) New employees are difficult to introduce - fresh developers keep asking questions, disrupting the workflow.

For me it's a mixed situation. In short term I know I'm safe - why should they sack me? But in the long run I'll end up with untransferable skillset.

"if you're using PHP, you probably can't eliminate your dependencies" - since when is a dependency a bad thing? you are REUSING the code in a library because, presumably, you need to. Removing that reusable code means you probably have to write it yourself.

"super clean and not need a bunch of other libraries" - "clean" doesn't mean you don't use other people's code. It just means you made a decision to not reuse their code, which means THEY DON'T FIT YOUR PURPOSE, so you HAVE TO WRITE YOUR OWN thing.

"a really good time to be using something other than PHP" - this is just dumb. why switch languages? what does that have to do with the fact that you chose not to reuse other people's code? you sir have no clue what you're talking about.

"I'm honestly not bagging on PHP here" - bullshit, you're trolling.

"I really do think it has its place [...] But just as there's a place and a time for PHP, there is a place and a time for other languages, too" - So what, PHP is too old for you, son? And what "other languages" might you mean? Keep thinking your is automatically better than PHP. Get off my lawn. And take your arguments with you. Oh wait, you didn't bring any arguments.

"When you have no dependencies on legacy PHP libraries" - legacy? Are you implying that all PHP code is legacy now, because, somehow, PHP is too old for you, son? Or are you implying that the only way to have library dependencies in PHP is to rely on legacy libraries, because, somehow, new libraries aren't being released? Your statement makes no sense.

"the opportunity to go lean and clean" - try some x86 ASM with no dependencies. By your logic, that'll be lean and clean.

"and do what you want -- that's the project to not use PHP" - you must be high, or mentally retarded, or just a bad coder. Who said you can't write code in PHP that does not rely on other libraries? Why would you switch languages? Who said people don't rely on other libraries in whatever your favorite language is?

To sum up, go die in a fire.

This post bothers me a lot, because it misrepresents a very large movement in American music while at the same time decrying the value of community-developed frameworks. Black Flag is a great band, but their "fast and simple" approach to playing music ran into a lot of the same problems that tech startups find when they, too, decide to take a "fast and simple" approach to web development -- those being high employee turnover, extremely low profitability, and a lot of in-fighting.

Black Flag made a lot of junk because they couldn't get the band to cooperate. They had to keep re-doing the same songs over and over because their lead singer kept changing. Talk about a good analogy for unnecessary rewrites! At one point, when the artistic direction and ego situation became especially dire, one side of an album was all spoken word, and the other side was all instrumental. In the end, they just ended up becoming another "metal" band with albums like "Slip it In" towards the end of their discography. Black Flag is a great band, but this post completely misrepresents what they did and what it means, if anything for software development. If it's the story of anything, it's the story of an entrepreneur who kept paying for all the corners he cut.

Rush wanted to write complex albums that dealt with a lot of layered meaning. There was a lot more planning and attention paid to what got laid onto their tracks. In exchange for their hard work, attention to detail, and planning, they were well compensated. They played arenas and sold a ton of albums. Black Flag played VFW halls, and I'll be damned if most of their fans these days didn't just torrent their discography and be done with it. What would you want for your business? There will be no hipsters to fondly nostalgize your unsuccessful web application.

I'm a hundred percent with the author on this—most PHP frameworks and libraries are a ridiculous mess. My requirement for using third-party libraries are that they do a single thing, that they do it well, and that they have little or no dependencies. There's no good reason why most third-party code can't be a single class / file.

Our third-party library stack for the (very complex) chartboost.com architecture is made up of simple, modular parts: Paraglide as micro-MVC (one class, and a handful of folder for the base structure), MongoModel (one class, as MongoDB ORM), etc. Most of our third-party libraries are very simple and manageable, the way all PHP should be.

As for code verbosity: everything is auto-loaded on the fly when needed. Our code has practically no `require` statements. We just follow a simple conventions of where to place files and how to name classes, and everything works smoothly and painlessly.

Most importantly in this setup, none of the libraries depend on the framework of choice or on anything architectural. The framework doesn't even require being run in a web environment. This lets us do powerful and flexible things like use Facebook's `phpsh` library to open up a shell that will have our entire environment available and loaded on the fly. We can also switch between dev, production or local environments on the fly.