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PHP 8.4

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Re: PHP 8.4

#101

Post by crowcroft »

stronglikedan wrote: post #87
inglor_cz wrote: post #2

I have a question to the PHP-in-production crowd: how long do you wait before migrating to higher version of PHP? Is the first release usually already fine, or is it better to wait for a few months and let someone else catch the early errors?

I wait until I need a new feature, or if there's a security issue. I still have PHP 5 apps in production.

Didn't PHP 5 stop getting security updates more six or seven years ago?

I guess depending on the app that might not really matter, but that seems like it could be an issue at some point.

Re: PHP 8.4

#103

Post by alt227 »

jayflux wrote: post #51
mg wrote: post #6

These 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…

>but does anyone realistically make websites or web apps that way?

You are correct in that a lot of PHP use now is larger frameworks with asset compilation and cache clearing etc, but even when developing on large systems like that it is nice to sometimes be able to just manually tweak a file and refresh.

For R&D and quick tests, just uploading a quick & dirty php file to the server is a very useful language feature to have IMO.

Re: PHP 8.4

#104

Post by giraffe_lady »

crowcroft wrote: post #101
stronglikedan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wait until I need a new feature, or if there's a security issue. I still have PHP 5 apps in production.

Didn't PHP 5 stop getting security updates more six or seven years ago? I guess depending on the app that might not really matter, but that seems like it could be an issue at some point.

There's an entire ecosystem of companies doing support and proprietary security patches and even framework-bearing polyfills for php 5. So much of the web runs on php 5 that is never ever going to be updated. It's a mini-industry unto itself.

The licensing is on the order of thousands or low tens of thousands per year. Worth it for a 40-person business that has a 20-year-old legacy codebase supporting a few million dollars a year revenue. It's not what we think of as a standard "tech" company but it describes an absolutely ridiculous number of businesses.

Re: PHP 8.4

#105

Post by inerte »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #99
cbg0 wrote: post #90

Glad 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…

> With predictable results.

People building and creating awesome new things? Increase in happiness and empowerment? More efficient processes and increase in productivity? New businesses being born? Wealth and value being added to society?

Re: PHP 8.4

#106

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

inerte wrote: post #105
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> With predictable results. People building and creating awesome new things? Increase in happiness and empowerment? More efficient processes and increase in productivity? New businesses being born? Wealth and value being added to society?

> More efficient processes and increase in productivity

I'd have to see the numbers on those ones.

But I am not a "gatekeeper" type, maybe you are confusing me for one. I'm a high school dropout with a GED, and have been staring up people's noses, all my life.

I just believe that any job we do, should be a good job.

Build on a sand foundation, and you'd better not go too high, or Bad Things Happen.

Re: PHP 8.4

#107

Post by sieabahlpark »

klaussilveira wrote: post #100
idoubtit wrote: post #22

I'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.

[dead]

Re: PHP 8.4

#108

Post by alt227 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #92
alt227 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Especially if you have a mix of "old" procedural and modern OO php

I guess thats a result of such wildly changing features in each version change. Each major version of PHP has brought in such drastic changes of concept and semantic that it is easy to start mixing them together and get confused looking code.

However I find this in a lot of other systems. Look at node.js, every release changes things so much that people regularly rewrite their entire code base multiple times to take advantages of the new features. Do a google search for guides on node programming a specific issue, and depending on how old it is it you will get wildly differnt approches and results. Popular and highly developed languages change often, and this will always cause issues between old and new.

Re: PHP 8.4

#109

Post by williamdclt »

kyleee wrote: post #94
nneonneo wrote: post #57

If 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)

"if not defined" doesn't help, if your own `array_find` doesn't have the same signature and semantics than the new global then you're screwed. You'd want the opposite: overwrite it if it already exists in the global scope (dunno if that's easy / how that'd work in PHP)
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