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PHP 8.4

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Re: PHP 8.4

#121

Post by giraffe_lady »

alt227 wrote: post #108
giraffe_lady wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

I agree. I think for largely cultural and timing reasons, and also its success, there are a lot more long-lived php codebases for this to play out in compared to most languages.

I also think possibly node is our generation's php, with it being so fast-changing and there not being a community consensus about framework. So every complex node project is, like pre-laravel php, essentially a totally unique ad-hoc framework composed of a mix of libraries. Ruby and python aren't better languages than php or node, and rails and django aren't perfect, but to a large extent those languages avoid this problem just because everyone is using the same solutions.

Re: PHP 8.4

#122

Post by cutler »

conradfr wrote: post #58
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…

Don't you get tired of managing getters/setters in your entities?

Entities, shrentities - it's all just data.

Re: PHP 8.4

#123

Post by klaussilveira »

cutler wrote: post #119
klaussilveira wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seriously? Since 5.3 PHP has worshiped at the alter of Java OOP to the extent that writing PHP code is now an exercise in pseudo-Java.

Yes, that is correct. And this release marks a point where the language is officially moving away from that.

Re: PHP 8.4

#125

Post by trevor-e »

The property access is looking a lot like Swift, particularly the `private(set)` part which I haven't seen in many other languages.

Re: PHP 8.4

#126

Post by eamann »

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'm just waiting for the official PHP Docker images to bump their updates ... which should be any time now.

Re: PHP 8.4

#127

Post by sneed_chucker »

dubcanada wrote: post #33
alternatex wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP fast? Compared to all popular web frameworks it's quite low in the pecking order when it comes to performance.

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.

Definitely not faster than Java if we're talking single thread performance.

Re: PHP 8.4

#128

Post by grey-area »

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…

This varies by domain of course, but on the web (PHP's domain), the language in greatest use nowadays by professional programmers is....Javascript.

Re: PHP 8.4

#129

Post by omnimus »

grey-area wrote: post #128
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…

This varies by domain of course, but on the web (PHP's domain), the language in greatest use nowadays by professional programmers is....Javascript.

Because its hard requirement. Its not the case at all on backend.

Re: PHP 8.4

#130

Post by littlestymaar »

I find it pretty fascinating that what used to be a beginner-friendly language, with limited capabilities but that is very easy to get started with, has now evolve to a bloated monster full of advanced features that you can't expect to know entirely, with a complex framework and tooling ecosystem to support it.

PHP lovers generally don't like acknowledge that, but the PHP we've learned back-end development two decades ago is no more and that it's now as beginner unfriendly as Java was when we picked it.

It's a pity because there's nothing as beginner-friendly anymore. I think the blame is on people calling themselves “PHP developers” who never bothered learning more advanced languages after PHP and instead pushed PHP to reach parity with those, at the expanse of losing its soul.

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