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…
PHP was the Visual Basic 6 for web. People without proper training and theoretical knowledge just went and did stuff.
An Internet of PHP
171–180 of 333 posts
Re: An Internet of PHP
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fram…
I used to be Symfony snob too but tried Laravel and I definitely see its strengths.
Laravel was not the right choice with our homegrown, non-framework app, with an existing schema.
Re: An Internet of PHP
#173Earlier 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 but I think touted highly by some as a killer feature. And yet people seem to keep inventing variations of this as "templating" languages.
Re: An Internet of PHP
#174For those of you who are proponents of other web ecosystems, I’m curious what benefits you enjoy? What framework or language do you use and what makes it great? I use PHP everyday but we definitely have a lot to learn from others.
PHP had a lot of breaking changes in the last version. Changes which got pushed through despite being quite controversial. I fear that this trend will continue.
Python had breaking changes in version 3, but at least those made the language better. PHP's recent changes were unnecessary and counterproductive.
Re: An Internet of PHP
#175Ironically enough, if people actually tried PHP, many would be amazed, especially at the quality frameworks. Productivity is very high in something like Laravel, and compared to JavaScript frameworks PHP frameworks are much more feature complete and well though out. I'm a big fan of trying out different stacks, and I think a lot of people would love Laravel if they tried it. Give it a shot using PHPStorm and Laravel…
Is that a fork of IntelliJ or did they just usurp the “IDEA” branding from JetBrains?
A framework-centric IDE seems silly. Like mini cupcakes.
Re: An Internet of PHP
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
So it wasn't the language, it was you? But it was the language?
Re: An Internet of PHP
#177As 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…
PHP was the Visual Basic 6 for web. People without proper training and theoretical knowledge just went and did stuff.
Re: An Internet of PHP
#178"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?
Well, that's like asking me if I wanted a recreational root-canal, so I answered "no".
Boot into the OS, and the task-menu-bar-thing is spinning with X-box ads and all sorts of other crap.
I dispensed with that shit immediately, and gained a nice little extra disk-space for my /home dir.
Re: An Internet of PHP
#179Unfortunately, the current maintainers of PHP have not learned from the success of it. And are driving PHP into the direction of having the rigid structure that Java has. It is so successful because people who build new things are different from people who are paid to maintain old things. That is why WordPress, Wikipedia and countless other successful internet projects have been created using PHP and not using Java.…
I’ve been able to keep several large business-critical projects up-to-date for years, even up to PHP 8.3, with little to no breaking changes encountered.
PHP 8 didn’t really break adding properties to objects dynamically, it just deprecated one bad-practice way of doing so. I remember worrying about this before upgrading, across my entire project with 40+ Composer direct dependencies, there were zero instances of this deprecated approach being used.
With other breaking changes there’s plenty of notice given (years, even). You can control where and how deprecation notices are logged, there really shouldn’t be any surprises at upgrade time.
“Old PHP” made it easy to write buggy or unpredictable code. Modern PHP feels more like writing TypeScript vs JS, there’s real safety and a much better developer experience now. PHP is having a resurgence for good reason, yes, it’s (marginally) harder to keep up with, but with proper tooling (PhpStorm, phpstan, etc.) the DX is leaps and bounds ahead of where it used to be.
I thoroughly enjoy writing modern PHP. I don’t have to worry about the language doing unpredictable dynamic type casting unless I want it to explicitly. The flexibility of old PHP is still there, but it’s much harder to shoot yourself in the foot accidentally.
Re: An Internet of PHP
#180Unfortunately, the current maintainers of PHP have not learned from the success of it. And are driving PHP into the direction of having the rigid structure that Java has. It is so successful because people who build new things are different from people who are paid to maintain old things. That is why WordPress, Wikipedia and countless other successful internet projects have been created using PHP and not using Java.…