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Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

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Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#121

Post by elehack »

I hope Jeff succeeds in promoting an alternative to the level of ubiquity of PHP. I think PHP is a generally awful language, eclipsed in sheer programming linguistic badness only by such systems as MUMPS (which, fortunately, I have never had the opportunity to work with). Fractal of bad? Check.

And it isn't just a bad programmer thing. PHP's bad habits encourage novice (or uncaring) programmers to pick up bad habits, especially if they are not particularly inclined to study how to use their tools well. Given a language where the obvious thing to do is right vs. one where it's wrong (see PHP But reading the comments here and on Jeff's post, it is humbling to remember that people are using it, every day, to build more and better software than I ever have. I may have a visceral dislike for the language, but good programmers are able to do good work even with a double-clawed hammer.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#122

Post by papsosouid »

RobAley wrote: post #107
papsosouid wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most "high" performance PHP doesn't use one of the usual-suspects in the framework world and can easily beat Rails (and usually plain ruby too). If you skip a framework on both languages, they end up as the two slowest languages. Hard to say if either is faster overall, but they are both awful. Using jruby provides a huge performance increase, and PHP really has nothing to compare with that.

To be honest I've not used jruby. It would be interesting to see how it compares to implementations PHP on the JVM such as IBM's WebSphere sMash, and Caucho's Quercus. Do you have any views on the performance of jruby vs hiphop'd PHP?

Hiphop doesn't really compete in the same space, as it only converts a subset of PHP into C++, and has very limited support for various PHP modules. I don't think any of the common PHP apps like wordpress, joomla, etc work under hiphop. Stuff like Quercus is the jruby of PHP, being an actual implementation of PHP rather than a source -> source translator. But I haven't seen any benchmarks showing it actually beating regular PHP. It does have a much better security record than the official PHP though, and is probably a worthwhile project on that grounds alone.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#124

Post by kmavm »

nicholassmith wrote: post #104
cletus wrote: post #48

I seriously groaned when I saw this post (title). I was expecting an elitist diatribe about PHP (because this is perennially popular amongst particular programmers) but that's not what this post is intended to be. Interestingly Jeff does take the usual potshots at PHP almost like he thinks he'll lose street cred if he doesn't but the basic message I agree with: if you want someone to stop doing something you consider…

Please don't use Facebook as an example, the fact they gave in and built HipHop to get it into C++ spoils it. Are they coding in PHP? Sure! Are they actually using it like it's meant to be used? Not quite!

Hey. I work on Facebook's PHP toolchain, HipHop, which these days includes a debugger, interpreter, JIT compiler, and the ahead-of-time compiler. The fact that the AoT compiler uses C++ as a target doesn't change the input language, which really is PHP. E.g., $i = 0; $a[$i] = $i++; makes a different array than $i = 0; $a[$i + 0] = $i++;. We have to get all the nooks and crannies right because we use significant open source packages in PHP.

The developer's usual routine is the same as someone using Zend; they write honest-to-goodness PHP and reload the page. There is no compilation involved; you instead are using the JIT (or until recently, an interpreter) that monitors the filesystem for changes and silently integrates them.

Facebook devs use PHP exactly as everybody else does; they just do so with a different toolchain.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#125

Post by eru »

ars wrote: post #114
gecko wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > default to HTML escaping on output > ??? Is that a joke? Don't do that! That's just as bad as magic quotes. Microsoft's Razor and Python's Django templates have both shown that HTML-escaping-by-default can be cleanly done in a way that is not magical and that is highly reliable. I'm not honestly sure what you're protesting here.

If I make a string: ' ' . $var . ' ' - does it know to encode the variable, and not the entire string? What if I assign that string in a variable, and then output it later? I'm not convinced this can be done well. Maybe if all you do is make some templates and fill them in you could do it. But I do a lot more than that, I output dynamically built html all the time. Just give people a very easy and shortly named funct…

Just needs a bit of type system magic. Don't use the same type for escaped and unespaced strings. (And don't use the same type for user generated input before and after it's scrubbed / escaped of any nastiness.)

Ask any Haskell weeny for details.

Also in your example, you'd probably be better of, if your language knew about the HTML structure, e.g. something like P($var), instead of putting the tags in as strings.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#126

Post by kaiuhl »

ars wrote: post #114
gecko wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > default to HTML escaping on output > ??? Is that a joke? Don't do that! That's just as bad as magic quotes. Microsoft's Razor and Python's Django templates have both shown that HTML-escaping-by-default can be cleanly done in a way that is not magical and that is highly reliable. I'm not honestly sure what you're protesting here.

If I make a string: ' ' . $var . ' ' - does it know to encode the variable, and not the entire string? What if I assign that string in a variable, and then output it later? I'm not convinced this can be done well. Maybe if all you do is make some templates and fill them in you could do it. But I do a lot more than that, I output dynamically built html all the time. Just give people a very easy and shortly named funct…

The hopefully obvious answer to your question is to not generate markup in PHP (or any server-side language). These are the kinds of questions that Backbone, Spine, Ember, etc attempts to solve. You should look toward separating view concerns from your business logic and stop procedurally generating html in PHP.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#127

Post by chez17 »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #95
chez17 wrote: post #73

Ok, so here it goes. I haven't commented on this site for over a year. Full disclosure: I am an average programmer compared to many here. I come to this site to improve my self and read about what brilliant and amazing things you all do. Now you have a reference. I use PHP on a daily basis, have been for years. I am a freelance developer who has been able to carve out a living with a lot of hard work and a lot of luc…

What other languages besides PHP have you used? I think a lot of us dislike PHP because we're putting it in the context of better designed languages.

I've played around with Python and Ruby (more specifically rails), nothing serious though. I enjoy trying new things, but never found them worth delving into for my purposes. I 100% admit this a reflection on me and not those languages. I have nothing bad to say about them. I just didn't find anything in them that was worth switching.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#128

Post by fusiongyro »

scribu wrote: post #6
bobsy wrote: post #5

Sorry Jeff. The only thing broken with PHP is you (and other people like you). How much PHP do you use Jeff? Lets assume none. How is PHP hurting you? I mean seriously, how much contact do you even have with PHP? PHP is easy to learn, easy to make websites with. There are a tonne of paying jobs which require PHP. PHP runs a lot of websites. I am a PHP developer. I prefer Python but my PHP job pays me just fine. There…

Hey, at least he's not just ranting like everyone else; he's trying to bring forward a better alternative. I'm also a PHP dev and I think Python is the safest bet, since it has good support on all platforms already (including Windows).

So, a couple sentences admonishing the masses to write something better plus one oblique reference to him "trying like hell to make it happen" equals "trying to bring forward a better alternative"?

Show me the fucking code, Jeff.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#129

Post by chez17 »

Retric wrote: post #93
chez17 wrote: post #73

Ok, so here it goes. I haven't commented on this site for over a year. Full disclosure: I am an average programmer compared to many here. I come to this site to improve my self and read about what brilliant and amazing things you all do. Now you have a reference. I use PHP on a daily basis, have been for years. I am a freelance developer who has been able to carve out a living with a lot of hard work and a lot of luc…

The setup time issue is an advantage of PHP over many languages. But, I will let you in on a little secret, once you know how to do it 'setup' time is a drop in the bucket on all platforms. And in the rare case where it might otherwise be hard, people setup a shell environment they can use as the template on any project and it just works. That said, there are popular languages worse than PHP for most web development…

That was one point in favor of PHP, and it was a small one. I'm competent enough to set up any environment if the project required it. However, some hosting companies won't even let you do that. A client might have purchased a small package that won't even let you ssh in to do anything. That's a real life scenario that you have to consider. PHP works there.

Re: Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

#130

Post by optymizer »

agscala wrote: post #116
acoyfellow wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Finally, let's use his tool analogy. PHP is a double-clawed hammer. What if your job was to remove nails from wood all day?" Brilliant.

Not brilliant. You can use a regular hammer just fine to pull nails out of wood all day AND to nail the occasional one in should the need arise.

Pulling nails all day long with one side will quickly wear off that side - it won't be as sharp and you'll have to throw away the tool. Double claws will allow you to use the SAME tool twice as long (that's 99% of what you do, remember?), will avoid rotating the hammer 180 degrees in certain situations (constrained space, two nails - one on the left, one on the right) and you get to hammer an occasional (1%) nail with the side without changing tools.

I think the original analogy was indeed brilliant, given the context.

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