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PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

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Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#111

Post by latexr »

boringuser2 wrote: post #63
miohtama wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you may pick, most developers do not. You are not the most developers, as you are special and probably much more talented. They pick JS because they know the language best and are more productive in it than in Laravel. There is nothing Laravel can do about it - being best is not going to change the direction, because the limiting factor is the knowledge of programming languages of most of developers.

With GPT, I don't really find that I am more "productive" in one scripting language or another given that it has the ability to perfectly translate between them on the fly.

If you think the current crop of AI does the translation “perfectly”, you’re going to have a bad time. Or maybe not you, but your customers, client, or the poor chap that replaces you is going to have something blow up in their faces.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#112

Post by DonHopkins »

pjmlp wrote: post #99
DonHopkins wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the PHP equivalent of writing your front end and back end in the same language so you can share libraries and data and not have to switch gears between two different languages each time you look up or down the stack? There is a HUGE advantage to using the same language in the browser and on the server, and PHP isn't ever going to displace JavaScript in the browser. So JavaScript it is. That ship sailed a LONG…

As long time Java, .NET and C++ developer, this is oversold, beyond some form validation there is hardly any value sharing code. And in what concerns validation, it can be automated on most frameworks, which has to be done on server side anyway due to security concerns.

toyg makes a good point about sharing developers, but also sharing code is important, especially for efficient server side rendering, with view code that runs on both the server and the browser.

The point is it takes fewer people (or even the same person) to write less code (instead of writing everything twice, then trying to keep them in sync forever).

There's a fascinating deep discussion about SveltKit and other frameworks here:

Reacting To Web Hot Takes from Rich Harris - SVELTE STUFF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGuUY7dZhWs

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#113

Post by pjmlp »

toyg wrote: post #108
pjmlp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long time Java, .NET and C++ developer, this is oversold, beyond some form validation there is hardly any value sharing code. And in what concerns validation, it can be automated on most frameworks, which has to be done on server side anyway due to security concerns.

The value is really not in sharing code, but rather sharing developers . Instead of having to assemble and keep happy a diverse group of specialized professionals, you can just hire and fire a bunch of cheap JS folks, who are easily replaceable.

Offshoring already takes care of the cheap developers part.

When people get what is peanuts in local currency of the owner company, whatever they are using doesn't matter and most sweet shops are experts in everything.

I can also tell that at the level I work on, salaries are the same regardless of FE, BE, DevOps, ...., specially because no one has a single role.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#114

Post by pjmlp »

DonHopkins wrote: post #112
pjmlp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long time Java, .NET and C++ developer, this is oversold, beyond some form validation there is hardly any value sharing code. And in what concerns validation, it can be automated on most frameworks, which has to be done on server side anyway due to security concerns.

toyg makes a good point about sharing developers, but also sharing code is important, especially for efficient server side rendering, with view code that runs on both the server and the browser. The point is it takes fewer people (or even the same person) to write less code (instead of writing everything twice, then trying to keep them in sync forever). There's a fascinating deep discussion about SveltKit and other f…

Java and .NET have been doing efficient server side rendering for several decades now.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#115

Post by sourcecodeplz »

jhoelzel wrote: post #110
pankajdoharey wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no structure, OO was an after thought, meta-programming an after thought., unit testing, testing utilities and frameworks an afterthought, their best Web-framework Laravel is a clone of Rails, No original good ideas in the PHP Community and thats the problem. The reason is PHP is a poor clone of Perl.

Jup jup. "PHP is used by 77.5% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know." https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php

That's because of Wordpress, but still.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#116

Post by ThatPlayer »

ihatepython wrote: post #91
DonHopkins wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the PHP equivalent of writing your front end and back end in the same language so you can share libraries and data and not have to switch gears between two different languages each time you look up or down the stack? There is a HUGE advantage to using the same language in the browser and on the server, and PHP isn't ever going to displace JavaScript in the browser. So JavaScript it is. That ship sailed a LONG…

> What is the PHP equivalent of writing your front end and back end in the same language so you can share libraries and data and not have to switch gears between two different languages each time you look up or down the stack? You can simply compile your PHP code to wasm with emscripten, and then run it in the browser. Pretty straightforward. No more switching gears.

I believe you'll need to compile the PHP runtime itself with emscripten, since LLVM won't take PHP code, but PHP compiled to wasm will!

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#117

Post by jahsome »

oaiey wrote: post #56
jahsome wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# is pretty good, but Visual Studio dependence is a crutch.

There is no Visual Studio dependency. The VS Code / editor experience is on par with most other languages and Rider is surely more than capable JetBrains based alternative

I meant developer dependence, not language dependence.

I recognize visual studio isn't required, but in the wild, the vast majority of C# devs I work with never leave VS.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#118

Post by 9dev »

ihatepython wrote: post #92
9dev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what’s your alternative? Python with its god-awful package management situation? Node with its „here’s a bazillion libraries for the same thing, good luck figuring out how to combine them“? Ruby with its 90ies-grade performance?

My dream is to be able to write everything in CSS. That would be my language of choice.

I'm pretty sure it's Turing-complete in at least five different ways now, so go ahead proudly and don't let anyone talk you down!

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#119

Post by ksec »

edsrzf wrote: post #50

The world that PHP grew up in has changed. The language and community have matured, and in the process PHP has lost most of its competitive advantage: low barrier to entry. It used to be: * Moving from static HTML to dynamic server code was a matter of changing file extension and adding PHP tags. * Many shared hosting services supported PHP. * Deploying was a matter of copying files to the server. Projects that start…

I actually want a more refined version, with better ( or different ) syntax of old PHP.

And I really like you touch on low barrier to entry. Right now, in my likely controversial opinion, modern Web Dev is a huge pile of excess complexity.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#120

Post by 9dev »

mekster wrote: post #77
9dev wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Modern php code uses Frameworks, Package mangers, opcode caching, and application servers. How do these change the way you can deploy PHP files by simply uploading them? For frameworks, all you do is run a single command to install. If you mean JS package managers, that's agnostic to what language you use. Opcode caching doesn't require anything special from deployment point of view and I don't see a need for app s…

It changes deployment because you need to flush the opcache after deploying new code, for example; you need to install composer packages, restart the app server (if you use one), etc. I mean obviously you still upload files, but there are more steps involved in a proper deployment.

Once you start getting into zero-downtime deployments, you'll quickly see the need for both application servers like Swoole or RoadRunner, as well as strategies that don't leave requests in the air with half the code from the old version and the other half with the new one.

Let HackerNews hobby programmers snark all they want, those are very real problems with very real solutions.

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