It's been 10 years since "PHP: a fractal of bad design" [1] was written. It's remarkable how the language evolved, and how many of the issues mentioned have been fixed and improved over the last ten years. 1. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
PHP in 2023
141–150 of 285 posts
Re: PHP in 2023
#142I don't use it professionally, but it's such a breeze coming back to it whenever I work on my own stuff.
And the ecosystem (especially Laravel) is light-years ahead of ANY competition in ANY language in terms of ease of use while still having all the necessary features.
It's the only language for which I always read the release notes because it's so exciting to see it become even better as the years go.
Re: PHP in 2023
#143Re: PHP in 2023
#144I used to work way back in the day on PHP too, but even though I'm sure this will be downvoted, it's really sad people still take it seriously as a language in 2023. There's nothing remotely elegant about it. It's not expressive or programmatically succinct in the way Ruby is. It's not beautifully well thought-out the way Python is. It's not fast and modern in the way Rust is. It's not elegant or composable or client…
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.
Appeal to authority isn't a valid strategy.
Facebook used PHP because they wanted to build something really quickly and afterwards it became too costly to switch, as it always does, so they built an entire engineering department to work around PHP issues.
Your average PHP dev team can't do that.
Plus, what are you comparing it to? Reasonable people don't compare it to Vlang, they compare it to Python, Ruby, Java, C#/.NET, Javascript/Typescript, Golang, and PHP ranks at best averagely against those regarding language, standard library and ecosystem consistency.
Re: PHP in 2023
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the point? You can use types in the vast majority of places in PHP and it works well, so I don't really see the point of that instead of contributing to the native typing system.
Javascript already set the precedent. If you don't like the way a language works, it's preferable to have a proxy language that does work the way you want that compiles to it, rather than accept the language for what it is and learn to work with it.
The comparison just isn't relevant.
Re: PHP in 2023
#146Now the small PHP community keeps trying to justify their language choice with articles like these and comments like the ones on this submission. They claim it's a no brainer to use Laravel for new apps, because it has a big ecosystem and good ergonomics, and pretend that this description somehow does not apply to hundreds of other frameworks. They claim that the article A Fractal of Bad Design (which was really cathartic to me when it came out) is out of date, but when I look, all the old footguns are still there, all the problems with the standard library are still there and stdout still writes directly to the browser. The foundations are rotten.
Go ahead and use it, I don't care, but stop trying to convince me to use it.
And now the downvotes begin. PHP devs hate dissent it seems.
Re: PHP in 2023
#147just kidding, I am getting paid multiple times the salary of PHP devs by shipping JS blobs to Lambda functions that render HTML and have DB calls in between them. Totally different from how PHP works, last but not least because I can have a fancy AWS certification for configuring things instead of FTPing a .htaccess file!
sarcasm aside, I really think with cutting edge serverless we are ending up where PHP has been like forever, just with _much_ better tooling and processes compared with FTP-deployments.
Re: PHP in 2023
#148I started my career with PHP. Created my own apps, created client websites etc. Full of footguns, but I didn't know any better. Once I learned more languages, I never used PHP again. I actually started to feel like I'd been fooled into using PHP. Now the small PHP community keeps trying to justify their language choice with articles like these and comments like the ones on this submission. They claim it's a no braine…
Re: PHP in 2023
#149I started my career with PHP. Created my own apps, created client websites etc. Full of footguns, but I didn't know any better. Once I learned more languages, I never used PHP again. I actually started to feel like I'd been fooled into using PHP. Now the small PHP community keeps trying to justify their language choice with articles like these and comments like the ones on this submission. They claim it's a no braine…
Small PHP community, now I've heard everything.
Re: PHP in 2023
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to offer an alternate opinion for anyone reading -- check out Next.js
How so? Nextjs only offers ssr and routing. Nothing else. Not even close to the full stack functionality you find in a default laravel or rails project.