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PHP: A fractal of bad design

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Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#91

Post by catch23 »

LeafStorm wrote: post #49

I admit, PHP sucks. But there is one thing it has going for it. It's simple to configure and secure a server that your general userbase can run applications on. I work at ITECS, the Engineering IT department at NC State University. ITECS is responsible for maintaining the server infrastructure for dozens upon dozens of university Web sites, most of which have dynamic content. Not to mention the people server, which a…

That's odd, because usually servers get owned from faulty wordpress/joomla instances. I rarely hear of web servers getting rooted via web apps run on python. I'm not really an experienced php dev myself, and when I installed joomla on my vm last year, it was rooted within the hour -- I was notified by a data center admin saying my vm was using an insane amount of bandwidth. I'm sure it was some script scanning for boxes with slightly old versions of joomla. I haven't had the same kind of bad luck installing python apps.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#92

Post by MartinCron »

maratd wrote: post #12

> PHP ... bad design PHP wasn't "designed" ... it evolved. Pieces were added, here and there, re-factored, deprecated, etc. etc. PHP is a natural language. It wasn't fabricated at some university, nor in the lab of some billion dollar company. It evolved. That is its strength. It is the most adaptable language around. It can be used for anything and it has been used for everything. And that is why it is the most popu…

If the clown who wrote that article had spent as much time programming, as he did writing that drivel...

You had some interesting points about pragmatism and emergent design, and then you had to go with this aggressive insulting bullshit. Come on, we can do better than that.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#93

Post by drivebyacct2 »

I regularly, (all over this thread), see people swear that PHP is great for beginners. Everything in this article seems to indicate the opposite. You have to trip over PHP's poor design while trying to learn to program.

Outside of the wide availability of PHP servers for cheap, what makes PHP so great for beginners? With Ruby, Python, Go, hell, even JSP for the "instant", in-HTML effect, I just don't see PHP as some gloriously "easy" language to use.

On top of it, there are hundreds of thousands of PHP tutorials all across the Internet that just have poor, poor, poor suggestions and design patterns that lead to people storing passwords unhashed, or unsalted. Sure, it's not unique to PHP, but it's really, really easy to get wrong in PHP and that's painful for a beginner and it's hard to progress and mature as a PHP developer without an existing code base to learn from.

tl;dr: I'm not convinced is as great as many here make it out to be. (To note, the first thing I sold was written in PHP in highschool. Since then I've used JSP/J2EE stack/python/ruby and now am infatuated with Go, so my opinion is not simply based on group-hate for PHP)

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#95

Post by daeken »

[deleted] wrote: post #38
mattvot wrote: post #30

I got into the web space through WordPress and naturally progressed into learning PHP. There are times that I wish I could work with another language just as well as I can in PHP. I've attempted to learn Ruby. I know C++/C#/Java/Objective C. Yet I still come back to PHP. I can't explain it. I like PHP. I understand PHP. There are nice people willing to help me with PHP. PHP does what I ask. It's not the greatest. It'…

[deleted]

> EDIT: note to self "-x points" = x many people with limited sense of humor or very old and don't get it.. /sigh..

HN is not a site where you just drop a meme image and walk away. Humor on the site is appreciated if it's contextually relevant and clever. This isn't Reddit.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#96

Post by _sh »

kmavm wrote: post #19

"(And strictly speaking, Facebook isn’t written in PHP; it’s written in a C++ macro language with a striking resemblance.)" I'm a Facebook engineer who works on the HipHop compiler and HipHop virtual machine. It's in PHP, absolutely full stop. It's amazing how much the fact that g++ is involved somewhere in the toolchain confuses people in this matter. C++ is just an intermediate representation; the source language r…

Does warts-and-all PHP include that eval wart, or is it more like most-warts-and-a-subset-of-all PHP? Not snarky, just curious if there was something I missed.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#97

Post by masklinn »

jacques_chester wrote: post #76
_delirium wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did so because in the late 1990s it was not possible to run multiple mod_perl applications on a single Apache process, but mod_php could do so. When it comes to single factors explaining its success in the 1990s, the one I've heard cited more often is that you could embed PHP into HTML documents with the kind of deal, and a lot of shared hosts enabled that by default, making it by far the easiest way to get se…

Plus the deployment model: "here's your FTP login".

Yep, trivial deployment model and trivial stack integration so every free host or ISP providing 20MB "web hosting" to users could give out PHP execution as well.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#100

Post by shousper »

daeken wrote: post #95
[deleted] wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> EDIT: note to self "-x points" = x many people with limited sense of humor or very old and don't get it.. /sigh.. HN is not a site where you just drop a meme image and walk away. Humor on the site is appreciated if it's contextually relevant and clever. This isn't Reddit.

It was a question, and mattvot answered it.
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