Please do nothing. Just let it die as it should have had already.
PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
81–90 of 166 posts
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#82Mother Mary came to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
I like that PHP is not popular and looked down upon by the masses. There is so much less drama in the communities, there isn't a new resume driven framework made every other week, no one is try to spike extensions with malware, no real build system, so much less bullshit. Its like everyone one who uses PHP is to busy making stuff to be stirring drama online while the PHP core has been steadily getting better for the past few years.
It’s super cozy and honestly I don’t want it to get popular again so it can remain drama free and cozy.
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're probably a joy to work with, huh? You've got be more flexible than this, come on.
We have an embarrassment of floss riches today. No need to support a poor design.
That's exactly Jeff Atwood's point, which I quoted above (and will repeat here):
"From my perspective, the point of all these "PHP is broken" rants is not just to complain, but to help educate and potentially warn off new coders starting new codebases. Some fine, even historic work has been done in PHP despite the madness, unquestionably. But now we need to work together to fix what is broken. The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious." -Jeff Atwood
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/
Leaning hard into the IDE (or ChatGPT these days) because your language design is flawed is a hella/totally stereotypical "West Coast" thing to do, as described in "Evolution of Lisp", "Worse is Better", and "History of T", and exemplified by Interlisp and Warren Teitelman's "pervasive philosophy of user interface design" and implementation of "DWIM".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM
https://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/DWIM.HTML
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6492j904
If your language isn't terribly designed, then your IDE doesn't have to be such a complex non-deterministic Rube Goldberg machine, papering over the languages flaws, haphazardly guessing about your intent, "yelling at you" all the time about potential foot-guns and misunderstandings.
As you might guess, I'm firmly in the "East Coast" MacLisp / Emacs camp, because that's what I learned to program in the 80's. I can't stand most IDEs (except for the original Lisp Machines, and Emacs of course), especially when they keep popping up hyperactive completion menus that steal the keyboard input focus and spew paragraphs of unexpected boilerplate diarrhea into my buffer whenever I dare to type ahead quickly and hit return.
But my point is that you can have and should demand the best of both coasts, unless you start off with a Shitty West Coast Programming Language or a Shitty East Coast IDE.
(Of course those philosophies are no longer bound to the geographical coasts they're named after, that's just how those papers describe their origin.)
Jeff Atwood's point an my point is that we should demand both well designed programming languages AND well designed IDEs, not make excuses for and paper over the flaws of shitty ones.
There are historic existence proofs, like Lisp Machines and Smalltalk, and we should be able to do much better now, instead of getting stuck in the past with Lisp or PHP.
I mentioned the East/West Coast dichotomy in the discussion about the conversation between Guido, James, Anders and Larry:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568860
>DonHopkins on April 4, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: A Conversation with Language Creators: Guido, Jame...
>Anders Hejlsberg also made the point that types are documentation. Programming language design is user interface design because programmers are programming language users.
>"East Coast" MacLisp tended to solve problems at a linguistic level that you could hack with text editors like Emacs, while "West Cost" Interlisp-D tended to solve the same problems with tooling like WYSIWYG DWIM IDEs.
>But if you start with a well designed linguistically sound language (Perl, PHP and C++ need not apply), then your IDE doesn't need to waste so much of its energy and complexity and coherence on papering over problems and making up for the deficiencies of the programming language design. (Like debugging mish-mashes of C++ templates and macros in header files!)
More discussion of West Coast -vs- East Coast language design:
Evolution of Lisp:
https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/331/papers/Evolution-of...
Worse is Better:
https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
History of T:
http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html?viewfullsite=1
The Interlisp Programming Environment
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~andre/ics228s2006/teitelmanmasinter....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966328
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966399
>gruseom on June 30, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Interlisp Programming Environment (1981) [pdf]
>Interlisp was the so-called "west coast" Lisp that emphasized an interactive programming environment and in retrospect looks more like a hybrid between Smalltalk and Lisp than modern Lisp implementations. It was developed at PARC for a while. I don't know if there was cross-pollination between Interlisp and Smalltalk or if the similarity was a zeitgeist thing.
>This article talks about the design values of the system and communicates the flavour of what a Smalltalkish Lisp would have been like.
>As someone who's only read about this, I'd be interested in hearing from people who actually used it.
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#84Please do nothing. Just let it die as it should have had already.
Give me one good reason why PHP should die. Hard mode don’t regurgitate the cargo cultish dogmas.
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#85Its appeal is becoming more selective.
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#86PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…
Php got complicated. So it’s value is decreasing.
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the JS equivalent of "place an index.php file in a folder to deploy"? What's the JS FOSS equivalent of ProcessWire as a CMF + CMS? What's the JS equivalent to e.g. DreamHost and other drag + drop hosts? (Legitimately curious, and I'm mainly inquiring after equivalents-for...better-thans would definitely be interesting)
People always seem to come up with the argument that you can drop an index.php in a folder and be done with it. Only nobody uses php that way since decades. Modern php code uses Frameworks, Package mangers, opcode caching, and application servers. It’s just that other languages don’t carry all the cruft php has in its heritage…
What I like about PHP is that it's not just batteries-included, it's "Entire Batteries Plus Store Included". The standard library is huge, documented, and also features 15 years of accumulated notes and discussion right on php.net.
The tendency to have a npm package for everything is overwhelming because you end up with choice paralysis and risk on picking "Oh, you picked CSV-to-array library #823, it's the buggy/insecure/unmaintained one."
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the JS equivalent of "place an index.php file in a folder to deploy"? What's the JS FOSS equivalent of ProcessWire as a CMF + CMS? What's the JS equivalent to e.g. DreamHost and other drag + drop hosts? (Legitimately curious, and I'm mainly inquiring after equivalents-for...better-thans would definitely be interesting)
People always seem to come up with the argument that you can drop an index.php in a folder and be done with it. Only nobody uses php that way since decades. Modern php code uses Frameworks, Package mangers, opcode caching, and application servers. It’s just that other languages don’t carry all the cruft php has in its heritage…
> Only nobody uses php that way since decades.
… in your echo chamber. I know first hand of multiple very large corps doing that (one of them being a bank and this is their payment api) and very many smaller shops. Sure, we recommend against it, but saying it’s decades ago like that is nonsense; many people do this because it’s convenient.
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#89Mother Mary came to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
I like that PHP is not popular and looked down upon by the masses. There is so much less drama in the communities, there isn't a new resume driven framework made every other week, no one is try to spike extensions with malware, no real build system, so much less bullshit. Its like everyone one who uses PHP is to busy making stuff to be stirring drama online while the PHP core has been steadily getting better for the…
> There is so much less drama in the communities
I'd hate to see the other communities then! I think of PHP communities as full of drama, whether that's fads and dogmatism (which usually changes every 3-5 years) or people lacking interpersonal skills and unable to keep conversations civil.
Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
#90PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…
What's the JS equivalent of "place an index.php file in a folder to deploy"? What's the JS FOSS equivalent of ProcessWire as a CMF + CMS? What's the JS equivalent to e.g. DreamHost and other drag + drop hosts? (Legitimately curious, and I'm mainly inquiring after equivalents-for...better-thans would definitely be interesting)
I would stick with Laravel or something like that if I were you. The rest is good for your resume, but if you don’t need that, I would forgo the misery that is js/ts dev.