PHP: The Right Way • Hacker News Board

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#101

Post by gbog » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 1:40 AM UTC

billpatrianakos wrote: post #90

gbog wrote: post #78

PHP with these guidelines looks like JAVA to me, but without the relatively sane foundations. It is fun how much a very old moralist sentence by Confucius applies well to PHP. He said 其本亂而末治者否矣 which can be translated, in software language development context, as "Build a nice, reliable language on shitty definition? Bullshit!". (The word-by-word translation is "your - root - messy - and/but - leaves/result - governe…

We get it, man. PHP sucks, you're cool/smarter/better because you use something else, and you need to remind us all about it by jumping in every time the letters P-H-P are seen in sequence to let us all know how it sucks by retreading the same old lines used by the last fifty guys who said the same thing but to your credit you really tried to be clever about it. A good portion of why people like to mock PHP is due to…

I used PHP for five years professionally, I consider myself as well positioned as many to have an informed opinion about PHP weaknesses and strengths. My diagnostic is that PHP weaknesses are structural, and no amount of guidance can fix that. If facing the choice, one should not choose PHP over other solutions. (It happens also that I am working in Chinese tech sphere, where many startup choose PHP just because it is used by Facebook and Wikipedia, which is really sad.)

However, I appreciate very well the need for such a guide when you have no other choice. I did not read all of it, but it is certainly necessary to have strong coding conventions and a defined set of "must do/musn't do". I remember we had even built a code checker that was forbiding the use of many php functions and syntax, and had a set of wrappers around basic functionalities like string functions or date functions.

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#102

Post by phillmv » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:02 AM UTC

billpatrianakos wrote: post #90

gbog wrote: post #78

PHP with these guidelines looks like JAVA to me, but without the relatively sane foundations. It is fun how much a very old moralist sentence by Confucius applies well to PHP. He said 其本亂而末治者否矣 which can be translated, in software language development context, as "Build a nice, reliable language on shitty definition? Bullshit!". (The word-by-word translation is "your - root - messy - and/but - leaves/result - governe…

We get it, man. PHP sucks, you're cool/smarter/better because you use something else, and you need to remind us all about it by jumping in every time the letters P-H-P are seen in sequence to let us all know how it sucks by retreading the same old lines used by the last fifty guys who said the same thing but to your credit you really tried to be clever about it. A good portion of why people like to mock PHP is due to…

Well… Javascript does suck. No one in their right mind defends the language.

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#103

Post by abecedarius » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:04 AM UTC

gbog wrote: post #78

PHP with these guidelines looks like JAVA to me, but without the relatively sane foundations. It is fun how much a very old moralist sentence by Confucius applies well to PHP. He said 其本亂而末治者否矣 which can be translated, in software language development context, as "Build a nice, reliable language on shitty definition? Bullshit!". (The word-by-word translation is "your - root - messy - and/but - leaves/result - governe…

That quip would also be an argument against error-correcting codes. Whatever I think of PHP I'm not gonna look to Confucius for engineering advice. (Now Laozi on the other hand... :)

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#104

Post by gwern » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:16 AM UTC

abecedarius wrote: post #103

gbog wrote: post #78

PHP with these guidelines looks like JAVA to me, but without the relatively sane foundations. It is fun how much a very old moralist sentence by Confucius applies well to PHP. He said 其本亂而末治者否矣 which can be translated, in software language development context, as "Build a nice, reliable language on shitty definition? Bullshit!". (The word-by-word translation is "your - root - messy - and/but - leaves/result - governe…

That quip would also be an argument against error-correcting codes. Whatever I think of PHP I'm not gonna look to Confucius for engineering advice. (Now Laozi on the other hand... :)

As far as arguments about ECC, I always enjoyed the parody of a saying attributed to JWZ: 'Someone has a problem and they think, I know, I'll use error-correcting codes! Now they either have 0 or 2 problems.'

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#105

Post by mgkimsal » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:20 AM UTC

ObnoxiousJul wrote: post #79

Right way to write PHP indeed. Sometimes I wish PHP itself was written this way. Oh! The guide does not mention the case: if a class contains only one static method, please, use a function. It does not look as educated, but it's obviously a function. Not PHP specific, I admit.

It would depend on what else is in the class - descriptive class constants used by the one static method wouldn't be possible if it was 'just a function'.

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#106

Post by simonbrown » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:22 AM UTC

phillmv wrote: post #102

billpatrianakos wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get it, man. PHP sucks, you're cool/smarter/better because you use something else, and you need to remind us all about it by jumping in every time the letters P-H-P are seen in sequence to let us all know how it sucks by retreading the same old lines used by the last fifty guys who said the same thing but to your credit you really tried to be clever about it. A good portion of why people like to mock PHP is due to…

Well… Javascript does suck. No one in their right mind defends the language .

They do.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html

http://skilldrick.co.uk/2010/09/why-javascript-is-awesome/

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#107

Post by lotyrin » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:23 AM UTC

ObnoxiousJul wrote: post #79

Right way to write PHP indeed. Sometimes I wish PHP itself was written this way. Oh! The guide does not mention the case: if a class contains only one static method, please, use a function. It does not look as educated, but it's obviously a function. Not PHP specific, I admit.

Oh god yes. I ran into an extreme case of this recently. 200 something lines of class definition, class variables and internal private methods that end up chaining 5-deep, with a single public method.

Refactoring to a single function took it down to under 20 lines.

I wish I knew what motivated people to do things like this.

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#108

Post by simonbrown » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:29 AM UTC

eli wrote: post #89

Dylan16807 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the original post. "curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php" It's not just about trusting Composer, it's about trusting every point between you and their server. If I want to know that I am actually executing Composer I need to use a secure download method.

I don't disagree with you, but if you've got someone actively trying to exploit you sitting between you and the Internet, you've got bigger problems.

Someone trying to find an exploit is a bigger problem than giving them one?

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#109

Post by healsdata » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:29 AM UTC

socratic wrote: post #81

Are there any good books (or other resources) on modern PHP? I last used PHP back with PHP3 (and then went C++ => Java => Python => Python/JavaScript => Ruby => Python/R), but a bunch of code I want to read at work uses PHP (with Zend). I no longer remember most of what I learned about PHP3, though obviously the PHP syntax seems to be at least somewhat readable as a sort of amalgam of Perl and C++ syntax and idioms.…

"Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications" by Sebastian Bergmann (referenced in the original article) and Stefan Priebsch. It won't go in to things like "how do I use usort" but it touches on important things like testing.

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#110

Post by ChiperSoft » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 2:39 AM UTC

ObnoxiousJul wrote: post #79

Right way to write PHP indeed. Sometimes I wish PHP itself was written this way. Oh! The guide does not mention the case: if a class contains only one static method, please, use a function. It does not look as educated, but it's obviously a function. Not PHP specific, I admit.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but standalone functions cannot be namespaced or autoloaded. Static methods solve both of these problems. With late static binding there's no reason to avoid static methods any more.