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

otsch.codes

121–130 of 166 posts

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

#121
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.

Because it’s Turing-complete, unlike Python?

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drop index.php into a folder is the only way I use PHP now. Back when I was building applications in PHP it was all frameworks. package managers, op code caching, etc. But I no longer do PHP development but for my own personal websites I still use PHP but in that most minimal form.

Exactly, if one is not developing PHP for the enterprise (maybe some non-enterprise simple projects still use opcodes though? lol), it's silly not to leverage index.php for all it's worth :-) So where is the hyper-simple JS equivalent for that class of non-enterprise projects, is what I wonder...the enterprise stuff has always been heavy and loads projects down with maintenance debt.

There are projects between hobby users and Facebook, believe it or not :-)

I actually like using a reliable package manager, a wide ecosystem of good packages, and modern language features. There is nothing "heavy" about modern PHP, unless you want it to.

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

#123
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…

They’re solving problems for people who are stuck using PHP, not trying to find a market niche.

That can work for a while but it doesn’t attract new developers, and it tends to have legacy projects be replaced outright with new ones in better languages.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to remember that, any IDE will yell at you. I don't find it inconvenient to write PHP or JS syntax, it's completely trivial for a professional.

Don't be such an apologist for terrible careless programming language design, expecting professional programmers to tolerate IDE's "yelling at them" about unforced language design flaws and loaded footguns, using terribly designed languages that were mindlessly thrown together by anti-intellectual amateurs like Rasmus Lerdorf, a self proclaimed "not a real programmer", who says he doesn't even like programming, who d…

Evidently Lerdorf wants to be perceived as aloof and 2school4skool. The quotes sound rather performative.

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

#125

Having converted a couple of PHP projects to modern languages and maintained way more than i care to admit: Its not going anywhere. Or at least in europe its not. Symfony et al have matured enough so they are usuable for allmost everything web related and if you dont plan to be the next google homepage, it will carry you VERY far. Is it pretty? No. Is it efficient? No. But you will be able to find 10 coders for the p…

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.

A rails clone without ruby sounds like an improvement.

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

#126
post #119
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.

The web has always been inherently complex, so it is only logical that frameworks for building things on the web have evolved to tackle all the possible complexity. Of course also the introduction of handheld devices and duplex multimedia features has made the web more complex, but mostly we just didn’t care 20 years ago, because we could get away with less. Now, more and more things are exposed to us every day, requiring us to grok it all to be able to make day-to-day decisions.

No wonder so many people turn to magical thinking, cargo cult coding or Uncle Bob -like messiahs.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or they can't detect the other languages.

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

#128
post #87
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…

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/ins…

File reading excluded, CSV to array is like two generator functions and a main, even with rudimentary schema support. No reason to add a dependency at all.

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

#129
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that's easy - just install 10 insecure npm packages that each install another 10 npm packages (some of which are even maintained!) then make sure you remember to bundle it up in a nice, heavy electron wrapper. Then you're all ready to distribute it via some random App Store - just don't forget to charge a monthly subscription while you're at it. /s

I've been doing web development since before the tag was introduced. > just install 10 insecure npm packages that each install another 10 npm packages I still don't understand why companies are fine with this. At my last job, even principal and staff level developers needed every Windows or Mac application install vetted by IT. We had real time system monitoring on all employee workstations that ate up half the RAM a…

Because the working part of an organisation such as the one you describe tries to continually optimize away these restrictions. NPM (et al) is a good way to obfuscate the fact you're pulling unknown code to get shit done and processes haven't caught up yet.

I'm not saying this is good, but the reality with these company-internal restrictions is, that the most productive people find ways around them and are rewarded for it.

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

#130
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…

To be honest apacha/nginx + php with laravel is probably few of the most stable web serves I've build. IMO it's still a lot lighter and easier then Java or C#. But yeah the old script kiddie days were great. And I do thing we should encourage users more to be more wild for small projects and just build something without a framework.
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