PHP in 2023 • Hacker News Board

Re: PHP in 2023

#71

Post by GeneralTspoon » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:26 PM UTC

> I used to work way back in the day on PHP too,

This is your issue - PHP Modern PHP (with a framework like Laravel or Symfony) is probably one of the most productive ways to build web applications.

> It's not beautifully well thought-out the way Python is.

This is definitely an interesting take... Python hasn't even solved package management yet. And the 2.7 => 3 migration is probably the most famous example of making a mess of an ecosystem with backwards incompatible changes. In contrast PHP has Composer and 5.3 code is pretty much compatible with 8.0 (although ideally all code from the 5.3 era should be burned at the stake).

> and people who don't know any better keep championing it. I think people do eventually catch up with what's going on though as soon as they personally experience writing anything remotely serious (5-10,000+ LOC) that isn't a simplistic web-app.

You've basically just said that PHP devs are too inexperienced to be able to scale a codebase past 10k LOC? Pretty much every serious web dev using Symfony/Laravel would disagree with you.

Re: PHP in 2023

#72

Post by shashashasha___ » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:27 PM UTC

we should show this comment to facebook that uses hack (php originated lang) in millions of files to run their little website and infrastructure.

php isn't bad. just got a bad rep. many langs got quirks. some more than others. but php has more web production success story and usage than most.

Re: PHP in 2023

#73

Post by dubcanada » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:28 PM UTC

It doesn't matter what happens, anytime something good PHP is mentioned the thread always turns into a fight. Why can't we just stop gate keeping programming languages and let people enjoy them. PHP gets tore apart all year long, and 1 nice article comes out and everyone jumps on it like it's preaching Delphi or VBA.

PHP has continued to done wonders for me, I continue to write huge apps in it, I continue to love it. I've used every other language you wrote, and continue to this day to write in PHP. Not because I'm not able to grasp how good another language is. But because it works. If I need something I go to packagist and search, it's always there. If I need to deploy something, there is tons of ways, and even basic ones. I don't need no fancy deployment setup, but I can have a fancy deployment setup if I want.

But people are more then welcome to hate it, and every time a positive post comes out about PHP I will continue to post my statement and then carry on building stuff. As there is ALWAYS a negative comment.

Re: PHP in 2023

#74

Post by Ducki » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:29 PM UTC

Why "locked into"? When choosing JavaScript, you're locked into JavaScript (and Ecma International), when choosing Kotlin, you're locked into Kotlin (and Jetbrains). You're always "locked into" the language and its ecosystem, no matter what you choose. I don't find that to be a real argument.

Re: PHP in 2023

#75

Post by sibit » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:31 PM UTC

Personally I'd reach for PHP because I think Eloquent is a great ORM. I've built applications with Eloquent, Doctrine, Entity Framework, and Prisma and although I'd prefer to write my own SQL queries when working with a team that has little to no SQL knowledge Eloquent has been one of the best ORMs I've used.

Re: PHP in 2023

#76

Post by zeptonix » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:32 PM UTC

Everyone's at a different step in their journey. But I do agree if you're building stuff then exactly, who cares? End of the day it's definitely about what's built, not how.

Re: PHP in 2023

#77

Post by commitpizza » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:33 PM UTC

Compared to moat languages, if you have no visitors, php takes up 0 system resources from your system to just sit there and wait.

So you could have hundreds of small sites on the same machine for an extremely low resource cost. That is something it brings to the table and its very beneficial for hosting solutions where there are a lot of small webaites sharing on the same resource.

Re: PHP in 2023

#78

Post by acomjean » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:34 PM UTC

The language is valuable and a good choice because it’s easy to read and your codebase Be(when used with a framework) are very maintainable. We have Java Perl and python and php has been the easiest to get people working on existing code.

The documentation is also excellent.

Re: PHP in 2023

#79

Post by spoiler » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:34 PM UTC

I think that PHP isn't that bad for some use cases. What I really disliked about PHP as a developer was how much control the host has over tweaking the runtime; this can be"problematic" in some shared hosting setups.

However, I'm also a bit of a hypocrite here because I worked for a hosting company, and also loved that feature.

So, I think in the context of something like a container (or vps/dedicated) it can work well.

I think PHP gets a lot of hate because it used to be a nightmare. I know friends who still use it, and they claim it's a day and night experience from the olden days. It probably wouldn't be my first choice for a project, but I probably wouldn't groan either, if I had to reach for it now

Re: PHP in 2023

#80

Post by dubcanada » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:36 PM UTC

HN does a lot of stuff well, but there is a ton of gate keeping here and PHP is one part of it. It does not deserve the hate it gets, it's popular to hate PHP here. It's actually less popular to like PHP. So articles like the above always get torn up.

It's rather sad to see, we should be encouraging people to build however they want. Point students in the direction of best practices and discuss ways to improve. Rather than talk about how much we hate the fact that PHP continues to be in the top 10 and pretty much the entire web is built with it.

But people do love to hate.