An Internet of PHP • Hacker News Board

Re: An Internet of PHP

#121

Post by b112 » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:00 AM UTC

nolok wrote: post #97

matthiaswh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is akin to, I don't know, the Subway (fast food restaurant chain) of programming languages? You don't hear too much about it. You almost never notice it unless you're actually looking for it, unlike McDonald's with its ostentatious golden arches. It's popularity is waning. But it's still everywhere. [0] There are a hundred other sandwich chains that have tried to do it better but none have managed the ubiquity of…

> It's popularity is waning. I don't think that applies though. If anything, laravel is pushing PHP into another "golden age" not seen since code igniter 2, with again a framework that does things not quite how they should be under the hood, but definitely how people need them to be to be fast and efficient, except this time backed up by a proper package management system, a much better and stronger language and an e…

There will be no golden age for anything using node.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#122

Post by voidwtf » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:06 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #119

As an ex-PHP developer (almost 10 years now), I do not miss it. As a language, it is a scripting language with an okay interpreter. But as an eco-system, it is a hot mess. It has both the worst software developers (and I was one of them) as well as the worst clients (and the cheapest, regardless of geography). It is not a surprise that PHP is running the web. That's because WordPress made sites/e-commerce accessible…

This just reminds me of what originally got me into PHP as a teenager. Creating a site for our gaming community in PHP-Nuke was all too easy. Extending it with plugins, and eventually writing my own plugins to show live data from our game server.

Now I look back on PHP3/PHP4 with disgust. Globals, function names, massive pieces of code right in the middle of HTML, shell_exec.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#123

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:06 AM UTC

1023bytes wrote: post #87

anonymous344 wrote: post #36

php runs securely in 5minutes in any web server 3-10$/month. Every other tech, it's complicated servers or complicated billing, not to mention depencies and build tools. thats why php

Well it's not exactly secure by default. I was deploying an app to a new server and some bot grabbed my .env file before I finished the Apache config. Ultimately it's my own stupidity, but you don't have to worry about that with most other languages

[deleted]

Re: An Internet of PHP

#124

Post by popcalc » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:08 AM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #33

nunodonato wrote: post #22

"PHP is dead" is dead. The amount of people praising PHP these days is quite high and increasing. Of course I may also be in a bubble (of php devs), but I have seen a constant increase from JS-people starting to look (and in some cases, convert to) php. Also, many new youtube videos highlighting the new stuff in the language, how modern it is, etc. Honestly, anyone that blindly criticizes or dismisses php these days,…

It’s like meeting someone in 2023 who hates Micro$oft WinBLOWZ. Have they been stuck in stasis for 20 years? What other values from the 9/11 era do they hang on to?

This might have been among the worst examples you could have used, considering current affairs.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#125

Post by popcalc » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:09 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #64

ahoka wrote: post #54

The internet is full of spam sites made with Wordpress. This means nothing for PHP as a language.

The internet is not just wordpress sites...

But it overwhelmingly is.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#126

Post by gemstones » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:10 AM UTC

voidwtf wrote: post #117

This is great, and I'm glad for the PHP developers out there. But if I go job hunting, it's not PHP skills that offer the highest earning potential. At least not that I've encountered. How much revenue generation occurs on PHP? I'll cede the argument about the e-commerce platforms and CRMs, but I'm just not convinced that PHP is where a budding developer should be focusing their efforts. You enter the business/corpor…

Right on the money. There’s a reason PHP shows so high on this list, and e-commerce is always mentioned. Analyses only have access to public sites, and PHP’s niche of blogs and e-commerce have lots of publicly crawl-able pages.

The majority of sites may well be in something else, and the majority of things that people will pay you to code may be behind a login page.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#127

Post by sublinear » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:13 AM UTC

jalapenos wrote: post #19

iLoveOncall wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ability to interleave code and HTML was also tacky and never taken seriously And yet people would take a bullet for React and the JSX templates.

Funny how "server side rendering" became a hot new thing too. I was so confused when I heard that, "like... a HTML file?". Keep going at this rate and we'll be using frames again.

> "like... a HTML file?"

Serving a static HTML file is not server-side rendering.

It's much dumber than that. The people advocating for SSR want the server to respond with HTML generated based on whatever is in the request.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#128

Post by fjfuvucucuc » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:15 AM UTC

blowski wrote: post #107

oaiey wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they are humble. They know their state, the flaws in their language and the long problematic history they have. They cherish their languages but are not fanatics.

PHP has its fair share of snobbery as well. Non-framework devs look down on Symfony, who in turn look down on Laravel devs, and everybody looks down on WordPress devs.

I started out as a symfony snob. Got sick of writing java in PHP so I picked up laravel. Got sick of having to modify my code every time Taylor huffed some new shit so I started building things using WordPress.

It's so refreshing knowing that my websites auto update themselves and I never have to update them unless there is a legitimate reason to do so.

Backwards compatibility is the ONLY thing I care about in a framework. Life's too short to babysit some frameworks ideas of how my code should work ten years after building the damn thing.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#129

Post by parminya » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:15 AM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #12

gleenn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad rap comes from the inconsistency of the early APIs. The ability to interleave code and HTML was also tacky and never taken seriously but I think touted highly by some as a killer feature. The language is very unplanned, go look at an equality chart for PHP, it makes JavaScript blush as well.

> The ability to interleave code and HTML was also tacky and never taken seriously And yet people would take a bullet for React and the JSX templates.

JSX and PHP are actually seriously different. When you break out of PHP, you're just outputting text to standard output. When you're using JSX syntax, you're constructing Javascript objects that can be manipulated using standard javascript techniques. Anyone who believes they're comparable seriously doesn't understand the task that is before them.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#130

Post by zmxz » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 11:16 AM UTC

voidwtf wrote: post #117

This is great, and I'm glad for the PHP developers out there. But if I go job hunting, it's not PHP skills that offer the highest earning potential. At least not that I've encountered. How much revenue generation occurs on PHP? I'll cede the argument about the e-commerce platforms and CRMs, but I'm just not convinced that PHP is where a budding developer should be focusing their efforts. You enter the business/corpor…

I was job hunting this year, I'm a long-time PHP developer (since '99).

It wasn't the language, it's everything around it. It's knowing frontend and how it works, it's knowing about cloud/operating systems, databases, 3rd party integration, IAM, SSO and the list goes on.

These skills are applicable everywhere, next to any language. Compensation I was offered revolved around the ability to be non-invasive towards younger teammates and to provide education with emphasis on critical thinking. During the years I've done this job, I learned other languages as well and I can safely claim that initial language one learns has huge impact but it's learning additional skills that makes up for a valuable employee.

In the end, knowing C# but not knowing PHP bears little insight into whether you're capable of listening about a requirement and coming up with a solution that satisfies the need, code it in such a way code can safely die one day and make in such a way that additional people in the team can jump in and manage it.

I also found a lot of job offers and opportunities. My previous engagement was insurtech/fintech, there's quite a bit of PHP used there (and it works well).

Wordpress, Magento, Facebook - these aren't the only places where PHP is/was used, the world we don't hear or read about is larger than the blogo-investo-googlesphere we're used to reading about.