For how many years will it get support, security and bug fixes?
PHP 8.4
91–100 of 337 posts
Re: PHP 8.4
#92I'm just a PHP programmer for work, but I worry about the orientation PHP has chosen. As French people say: better is the enemy of good (Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien). The two new language features bring a higher language complexity for dubious gains. I hope I won't have to work with these. Property hooks mean that some language magic will turn a property access into a call to methods. It implies that `$this->x` has…
I agree. PHP is such a simple language to follow but now with these property hooks, if you dont fully understand how they work then the code becomes unreadable due to the magic. Worse than that, it is possible to read it wrongly which is going to cause many nasty headaches for amateur developers of the future trying to debug PHP code.
I wrote php exclusively only for about two years early in my career but have had to come back to it periodically every once in a while. I find it one of the most difficult languages to be a visitor in. The way variable, array, and class semantics mix can make it hard to decipher the exact behavior of a chunk of code. Especially if you have a mix of "old" procedural and modern OO php, which the projects I work on do.
I'm not bringing this up as a particular criticism of the language, I think it's fine. It is also an experience I have with lisp, where it is fun and easy to write but hard to read when coming back to it after a while away. I just don't think php is a simple language, on several levels. The semantics that I mentioned, combined with the mixing of paradigms, and the large and inconsistent standard library. You can write simple php but it takes a lot of discipline.
Re: PHP 8.4
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure where you got that from. It’s equally if not faster then python, faster then Java, slower then compiled language, faster then ruby. Loses to NodeJS most of the time. But who cares, we are literally talking millisecond differences between them all. Throw a reverse proxy, DB into the mix and a few packages and they are all slow.
> faster then Java You sure about that? Not what I would have expected. Source?
My point was less about the leaderboards and more about it being pointless comparison. But I was looking at https://web-frameworks-benchmark.netlify.app/result?l=java,p... though I don't really know what people consider "best benchmark" for raw vs raw. Once you start throwing in apache/nginx/proxies/what ever it really starts to balance itself.
Re: PHP 8.4
#94If you want any evidence that terrible language design is alive and well in PHP, look no further than the new array_find function. Not only is it yet another global function in a namespace already chock full of random array helpers, it is extremely similar in both name and usage to array_search - a global function since PHP 4. Except, of course, that in typical PHP fashion, array_find’s argument order is ($array, $fi…
I had similar thoughts, but do appreciate the additional mb_ functions bringing multi byte support to some remaining functions.
Also people should be coding defensively with things like “if not defined” when implementing their own global helper functions (or avoid doing that at all)
Re: PHP 8.4
#95I'm just a PHP programmer for work, but I worry about the orientation PHP has chosen. As French people say: better is the enemy of good (Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien). The two new language features bring a higher language complexity for dubious gains. I hope I won't have to work with these. Property hooks mean that some language magic will turn a property access into a call to methods. It implies that `$this->x` has…
This feature has been in C# since about 2.0, and it's been an overall positive. It reduces boilerplate and inconsistencies in different programmers doing the boiler-plate differently. It also gives static analysis tools semantic information about the structure of your classes. It can group pairs of methods that deal with the encapsulation of fields.
I am also in favour of the change. I would argue though that because it's been in C# for so long, then yes it reduces inconsistencies across programmers/codebases, but introducing it to a language as mature as PHP is now though, might not have the same outcome.
Re: PHP 8.4
#96Are there any solid PHP WebSockets and WebRTC setups outside of Laravel?
Re: PHP 8.4
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feature has been in C# since about 2.0, and it's been an overall positive. It reduces boilerplate and inconsistencies in different programmers doing the boiler-plate differently. It also gives static analysis tools semantic information about the structure of your classes. It can group pairs of methods that deal with the encapsulation of fields.
I am also in favour of the change. I would argue though that because it's been in C# for so long, then yes it reduces inconsistencies across programmers/codebases, but introducing it to a language as mature as PHP is now though, might not have the same outcome.
I used it immediately in my C# code at the time. It was a breath of fresh air not to have code that looked like "enterprise" java.
Re: PHP 8.4
#98These days, I am super torn about what language to use for new web projects. PHP: - Easy to deploy: Upload files, done. - Easy to develop: Reload page, see changes. - Lots of HTTP tooling built in. - Fast. Python: - Great language. - Great code reuse system: Modules. - Nice framework: Django. - Less breaking changes in recent years.
> Easy to deploy: Upload files, done I know people love to say this, but does anyone realistically make websites or web apps that way? No, not really. Even with PHP there are frameworks, there is a package manager, there is version control, and there are deployment systems. Pretending that PHP developers are uploading a .php file to a shared hosting server (like in 2002) to suit the narrative feels disingenuous to me…
.. and as soon as you stop just uploading files (which, as you say, nobody does), a lot of the other advantages go away also. Laravel and Symphony both make PHP much slower. If you are going to have sane routing, you're probably going to need to tweak your websever to behave, well, less like a web server. There's a decent chance you'll need to clear a cache after you upload your changed files if you want to actually see those changes.
I actually like PHP a lot, and it's amazing how far it has come in the past 10 or so years, I just think way too many people assume you get the 2004-era PHP simplicity with all of the 2024-era PHP refinements, and you really don't. There's tradeoffs.
Re: PHP 8.4
#99Glad to see PHP still chugging along after all these years. It's the language I started with as a freelancer more than a decade ago and I still remember having books on my desk learning the proper way to do things, as you had to work around all the unsafe things the language would let you do and which unfortunately led to it getting a bad rep.
One of the issues with creating a language that is easy to use (PHP, BASIC, and many modern languages), is that people who aren't good at programming, will use it.
With predictable results.
The difference between languages like PHP and more modern languages, is that the more modern languages have more airbags, for the bad code. It's still bad code, but it won't do as much damage.
PHP is likely to be around for a long time: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...
Re: PHP 8.4
#100I'm just a PHP programmer for work, but I worry about the orientation PHP has chosen. As French people say: better is the enemy of good (Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien). The two new language features bring a higher language complexity for dubious gains. I hope I won't have to work with these. Property hooks mean that some language magic will turn a property access into a call to methods. It implies that `$this->x` has…
I feel the opposite: this brings simplicity and pragmatism back to PHP. Gone are the years of bowing to the verbosity of Java, sacrificing a dynamic powerful language at the altar of 1995's OOP paradigms.