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PHP: A fractal of bad design

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Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#271

Post by haldean »

astrodust wrote: post #51
sedev wrote: post #13

Since my day job is PHP-centric and I was already aware that PHP is awful, this is theoretically helpful to me, but oh lord, it makes my liver hurt. If I could get away with it, I'd never again trust my credit card number to a system based on PHP, but I suspect that that's about as easy as never trusting your credit card to an ATM/point-of-sale machine based on Windows.

That PHP logo trick is going to make it easy to spot companies with a wobbly PHP stack. http://www.0php.com/php_easter_egg.php

I can't believe that this is a real thing. The fact that a (purportedly) serious language runtime designed for web applications would have this in it seems like a staggering breach of professionalism.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#272

Post by white_devil »

cletus wrote: post #264

If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery. A selection from the OP: > Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed. So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? > The language is full of global and implicit state. "Global" is one of those dogmatic points. Nothing is truly "global" in PHP. The "global" in PHP j…

Sooo.. You mainly use PHP yourself, then?

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#273

Post by sethg »

tedivm wrote: post #2

This is just another example of someone beating a dead horse (which has already been beaten) for page views. Next week we'll have another "bash php" post, and the week after that another. I wish people spent as much time creating new things as they did bitching. As well written as this article is, it contains absolutely nothing that hasn't been said ten thousand times already- in fact, most of this seems to be regurg…

People have been writing murder mysteries for the past hundred years, and some people are still writing murder mysteries, and some people write them in the hope of selling millions of copies. There’s nothing wrong, in itself, with writing about a topic that has been written about before.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#274

Post by obituary_latte »

cletus wrote: post #264

If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery. A selection from the OP: > Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed. So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? > The language is full of global and implicit state. "Global" is one of those dogmatic points. Nothing is truly "global" in PHP. The "global" in PHP j…

It seems that many people disregard the fact that PHP is a very accessible language to a programming newcomer. You can quickly and easily install LAMP or MAMP and in minutes have a working, dynamic web page (albeit local) along with a plethora of examples and tutorials. This is huge. This shows the newcomer that this mysterious code stuff is actually accessible; that they can create something that works. That's a nice intro to programming.

More programmers===better programs. How can this be a bad thing?

As far as the snobbery goes, to me it just seems like natural human behavior. People need to believe that their beliefs, their choices are the right ones. For some, the easiest way to do that--rather than being honestly objective or introspective--is to degrade what others do.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#275

Post by polyfractal »

KaeseEs wrote: post #192
mechanical_fish wrote: post #154

All those words, and yet the word template only appears once. And that's to assert that PHP has: …no template system. There’s PHP itself, but nothing that acts as a big interpolator rather than a program. As if that was a bug and not a feature. PHP succeeds because there is one PHP templating syntax and it is called "PHP" . PHP started life as a templating language, and that's where its soul lies. Which is important,…

PHP is not a good tool for quickly getting a minimum viable product. Despite its flaws it is a good weapon for fighting 'the last war' - that is to say, it makes it quick and easy to make what are essentially the CGI pages of 1996 - but if you're doing anything more complex than that (for instance interacting in any way with a database), and I would suggest that even relatively non-technical people looking to use com…

What? I find working with databases in PHP (using PDO) far more enjoyable and fast than, say, working in Python.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#276

Post by guccimane »

cletus wrote: post #264

If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery. A selection from the OP: > Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed. So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? > The language is full of global and implicit state. "Global" is one of those dogmatic points. Nothing is truly "global" in PHP. The "global" in PHP j…

> If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery.

If there's one thing that annoys me on programmer forums in general, it's that pointing out PHP's giant flaws is conflated with snobbery. Design matters, and that is not the same thing as saying it's impossible to build anything good with PHP.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#277

Post by mechanical_fish »

KaeseEs wrote: post #192
mechanical_fish wrote: post #154

All those words, and yet the word template only appears once. And that's to assert that PHP has: …no template system. There’s PHP itself, but nothing that acts as a big interpolator rather than a program. As if that was a bug and not a feature. PHP succeeds because there is one PHP templating syntax and it is called "PHP" . PHP started life as a templating language, and that's where its soul lies. Which is important,…

PHP is not a good tool for quickly getting a minimum viable product. Despite its flaws it is a good weapon for fighting 'the last war' - that is to say, it makes it quick and easy to make what are essentially the CGI pages of 1996 - but if you're doing anything more complex than that (for instance interacting in any way with a database), and I would suggest that even relatively non-technical people looking to use com…

An important thing to remember about PHP is that it really isn't stuck in 1996: When we say PHP you need to think WordPress, or Drupal, or CakePHP or Symfony, since that's what one actually uses nowadays. Novices are steered away from code that pipes SQL injections directly to the database, and toward one of these frameworks, which does the heavy lifting for you so that you don't need to reinvent the wheel.

For years I consoled myself by calling myself a "Drupal developer". I'm not a PHP developer; if I weren't using Drupal I wouldn't touch the language with a ten-foot pole.

But I agree that basic PHP is optimized for the style of web development that dates back to 1996: Server-side rendering of HTML templates. (More powerful PHP - the underpinnings of the PHP frameworks, the stuff one gets in the latest versions like objects and namespaces and closures - basically turns the language into the equivalent of every other scripting language, though obviously much more inconsistent; there's no great reason to choose any of that over Python or Ruby except that it degrades gracefully to PHP, which may actually be very important, but only so long as what you're building looks superficially like a server-side-rendered HTML template from 1996.)

One reason why I'm spilling 10,000 words on PHP is that I've been working with it for five years now, but I'm having trouble getting excited by its future. It has a long future, because 1996-style web sites are not going anywhere: WordPress.com has a zillion users and Drupal is taking over the enterprise and, well, Facebook. But one eventually gets tired of living in 1996. And PHP is useless for client-side-rendered "HTML 5" views, or mobile app client development, and its advantages as a templating language become moot if your server-side code is just an API coughing out JSON objects RESTfully. No newb can figure out that stuff today - even wizards can't agree on the proper semantics of REST, for example - and if ever we do develop a framework for designing RESTful APIs that's as easy for novice programmers to pick up as PHP is for 1996-style templating, I'm betting that framework won't be built in PHP.

But maybe I'm wrong. Hence, deep thought.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#278

Post by astrodust »

haldean wrote: post #271
astrodust wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That PHP logo trick is going to make it easy to spot companies with a wobbly PHP stack. http://www.0php.com/php_easter_egg.php

I can't believe that this is a real thing. The fact that a (purportedly) serious language runtime designed for web applications would have this in it seems like a staggering breach of professionalism.

In my opinion using PHP is a staggering breach of professionalism.

Would you visit a dentist that used tools as bad as PHP? "Hey, it's not about the tools," they'd scream while you're running away.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#279

Post by zackzackzack »

white_devil wrote: post #272
cletus wrote: post #264

If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery. A selection from the OP: > Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed. So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? > The language is full of global and implicit state. "Global" is one of those dogmatic points. Nothing is truly "global" in PHP. The "global" in PHP j…

Sooo.. You mainly use PHP yourself, then?

Read his profile and you will see Java, Python, and C and he works at Google.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#280

Post by BCM43 »

obituary_latte wrote: post #274
cletus wrote: post #264

If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery. A selection from the OP: > Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed. So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? > The language is full of global and implicit state. "Global" is one of those dogmatic points. Nothing is truly "global" in PHP. The "global" in PHP j…

It seems that many people disregard the fact that PHP is a very accessible language to a programming newcomer. You can quickly and easily install LAMP or MAMP and in minutes have a working, dynamic web page (albeit local) along with a plethora of examples and tutorials. This is huge. This shows the newcomer that this mysterious code stuff is actually accessible; that they can create something that works. That's a nic…

More programmers===better programs. How can this be a bad thing?

I'm not sure this is true. Going with the articles example, that's like saying "the more people who know how to use a hammer, the better houses we will have".

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