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PHP: A fractal of bad design

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Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#101

Post by fruchtose »

vivekprakash wrote: post #68

I had a one-to-one talk with Rasmus Lerdorf a few weeks ago. This is one of the few things he said: " I wrote PHP as a hammer to do my stuff. Around 1993, the only way to write web apps was by hacking C and Perl. This was extremely painful, and you would have to do the same thing over and over again. So I started writing a tool which would make my work easier. " " I never thought while writing PHP that someday millio…

As far as I understand it, the real tragedy is that PHP as used at scale. PHP as Lerdorf intended it was the quick fix, the we-need-to-get-it-done-now fix. And then that fix grew and grew until the things that PHP fixed were eclipsed by the things in PHP that needed to be fixed--but PHP was already too big to be fixed; people were using PHP not just for fixes, but for everything, and to fix everything would break everything... And that's how we got here. Because nobody will understand your intention when your code is on the screen and the intention can only be inferred from someone who is not in the room with you.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#102

Post by eurleif »

>Why on Earth does the parser need to know about empty?

empty() doesn't issue a notice if the variable isn't set, like it would if it were an ordinary function. It's basically isset() with extra functionality. That makes it useful for checking form variables:

    if (!empty($_POST['foo'])) { ... }

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#103

Post by kmavm »

_sh wrote: post #96
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.

The HipHop compiler will optimize much, much more effectively if non-trivial eval() is disallowed, as it is in FB's production code. Obviously, since it's an ahead-of-time system, complex code in eval() will run slowly. The HipHop virtual machine is perfectly happy with eval().

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#104

Post by shuzchen »

Osmose wrote: post #42

I'm going to be unfair and quote just two words from the article: > empowered amateur PHP is a gateway drug to web development. And that's awesome. With almost every other popular web development language I've heard of[1], there's this grey area between "my app works on my local machine" and "my app works on the server" that is really hard to grok as a beginner. There's a reason entire businesses are built on the ide…

I find it odd how many people keep saying it's that simple to push PHP code to a box and get it working. Sure, if you've got crazy simple requirements it's generally a cinch. Once you do anything remotely non-trivial (want to read from a file? use some third party library, handle errors in a consistent manner) then you start hitting into issues with file permissions, PHP version differences, modules not compiled in by default, etc etc. I've been dealing with PHP for a long time, and getting a local dev setup to match the remote version (or getting code to work on both environments) is just a pain to do.

Also, PHP is not helpful in local development. I think there's a built-in runserver in the newest versions, but for all of history, to develop PHP you had to install (and set up) apache and all your required modules locally.

With python and Django, I use virtualenv+pip to get a consistent environment, manage.py runserver to test locally. I can pretty much start developing everywhere (my desktop, my VPS, my laptop, that same laptop after I reformat it and install some new distro to test) with 3 commands.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#105

Post by comex »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #93

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…

With PHP, creating a new "app" is a matter of sticking a .php file in a directory. There is no config file, directory structure, or server to babysit, and nothing to restart after modifications. Instead of using a complicated templating system, you just include HTML inline.

This is a horrible design for a large webapp, but even as an experienced programmer, sometimes I just want a quick hacky self-contained script, like the many, many .py files in a subdirectory of my home directory (but on the web, Python does not provide this convenience in commonly used setups). A beginner can similarly benefit from simplicity: even if Rails tutorial code is pretty, there is still a lot going on behind the scenes; sometimes, the smaller conceptual model required to really understand what's going on, the better.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#106

Post by randomdata »

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…

I find it to be an interesting philosophical question about what defines a language.

If you write code in Java, but compile it to native format (using gcj, for instance) instead of using the JVM, is it still Java? In doing so, you lose what is probably the language's biggest selling feature.

Or, perhaps less relevant now, but I remember the days where people would go on about how Ruby didn't support native threads. Except there were interpreters that did use native threads with the exact same Ruby code. Was Ruby code running under one of those other interpreters still a Ruby application?

PHP too comes with expectations about the environment, like how it integrates into the web server stack, which if not met, is it still PHP? I'm not really familiar with HipHop, but, for instance, if you have to compile your code before deployment, you're not meeting one very prominent expectation of PHP: The ability to edit the code in-place on the live server (best practices notwithstanding).

So, what does define a language? Is a language just the syntax? Standard library APIs? Standard library behaviour (see Ruby example)? Runtime environment? I'm not sure you will find a generally accepted answer.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#108

Post by shuzchen »

eevee wrote: post #83
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…

Whoa. Definitely don't run Python as CGI. Use WSGI, run your app as a devoted low-priv user, proxy to it. Then you have only one entry point; there IS no sandbox, and nothing to exploit.

I agree. Why not run the webapp as the user account the code belongs to. With virtualenv and pip, normal users can install modules into their own site-package in their home folder, and any runserver started as them will only have permission to access anything they have access to. The only thing that is possible to exploit is what they've allowed in their code, but that's pretty much the same issue you have with php.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#109

Post by drumdance »

shuzchen wrote: post #104
Osmose wrote: post #42

I'm going to be unfair and quote just two words from the article: > empowered amateur PHP is a gateway drug to web development. And that's awesome. With almost every other popular web development language I've heard of[1], there's this grey area between "my app works on my local machine" and "my app works on the server" that is really hard to grok as a beginner. There's a reason entire businesses are built on the ide…

I find it odd how many people keep saying it's that simple to push PHP code to a box and get it working. Sure, if you've got crazy simple requirements it's generally a cinch. Once you do anything remotely non-trivial (want to read from a file? use some third party library, handle errors in a consistent manner) then you start hitting into issues with file permissions, PHP version differences, modules not compiled in b…

I think you're mistaken to assume the beginner even has such a thing as a local development environment. When first learning PHP I wrote all my code on a $10/month web hosts, saving directly to the FTP server.

Only later did I install a local dev (now made very easy with MAMP), learn about version control, PEAR etc.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#110

Post by mechanical_fish »

sneak wrote: post #90
Osmose wrote: post #42

I'm going to be unfair and quote just two words from the article: > empowered amateur PHP is a gateway drug to web development. And that's awesome. With almost every other popular web development language I've heard of[1], there's this grey area between "my app works on my local machine" and "my app works on the server" that is really hard to grok as a beginner. There's a reason entire businesses are built on the ide…

I posit that one of our modern "Things You Can't Say" is that the widely-held belief that the world would somehow be better if every single average Joe learned to program just might be totally bogus. As was pointed out by djmdjm below, there are Real Consequences when amateur hour overflows into the real world. In many cases it simply would be better had many of these apps not been made by the unskilled - even if tha…

You can put up whatever barrier to entry you like. Invent a certificate for Haskell programmers with Ph.Ds. Require everyone who works on your website to have your certificate. Have fun.

But most of the world will tell you where to stick that certification and will cheerfully walk around your "barrier to entry". Then they will hack together a web page using whatever programmers and tools they can find, certified or not, because web pages are very important in the twenty-first century and even the lousiest, slowest, buggiest PHP site is often more valuable than a paper sign stuck on the wall, an entry in the Yellow Pages that nobody reads anymore, a bunch of people sending individual text messages to friends-of-friends, or a static web page from 1997 with a little animated GIF on it.

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