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PHP 8.5

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Re: PHP 8.5

#91

Post by ReptileMan »

One of the things I have noticed in languages is that after some iterative evolution the piled on features and syntaxis sugar make them look bizarre and hard to read. Probably the weight of backwards compatibility and that the initial paradigms have picked up the easy to understand real estate. And there are no good ways of getting out of the corner you have coded yourself in.

Probably because compile/interpret is one way street. There is no way to lets say view/transform a part of the code in functional or imperative depending on what you need to do with it.

Reading modern php or even worse mixed generations code base feels like another full time job on top of the regular one - coding with it.

Re: PHP 8.5

#92

Post by niek_pas »

holoduke wrote: post #34

Why is it that all these languages like PHP, but also typescript are becoming like impossible puzzles to read. I find these generics, types and other language features very often causing complex software architecture. I see so many collegues these days struggling in understanding codebases. You almost need a PHD brain to be a frontend web developer.

Can you share an example of what you're talking about in PHP 8.5? On the linked web page, the only code pattern that looks remotely complicated to me is the following:

    #[SkipDiscovery(static function (Container $container): bool {
        return ! $container->get(Application::class) instanceof ConsoleApplication;
    })]
    final class BlogPostEventHandlers
    { /\* … \*/ }

Re: PHP 8.5

#93

Post by pabs3 »

dgb23 wrote: post #84
pabs3 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an anti-pattern, since it suffers from shell meta-character injection (and argument injection). Since PHP has mkdir, you should use that instead. And pcntl_exec() is the correct API for running processes.

Typical users of this likely don't care the slightest about whether anyone considers it an anti-pattern, because you use those in order to write utility scripts. And those who care would use tooling to detect issues like that anyways.

Yeah, doing things wrong happens quite often. Especially for the meta-character injection issue. Personally I think language designers should deprecate and remove backticks and other shell-executing features from all languages.

Re: PHP 8.5

#94

Post by stefanfisk »

dgb23 wrote: post #81
kijin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is a reasonable choice if you care about writing something that will still work out of the box 10 years from now. But of course this assumes that you work with a team that can see a year ahead, let alone 10.

PHP has introduced breaking changes, deprecations etc. in a somewhat rapid fashion. PHP doesn't prioritize stability, but language features and cleanup. It's an impressive technical endeavor that has its merits, but comes with a tradeoff. Within the last 10 years, the language itself broke twice. And that's not counting the ecosystem on top of it. Common frameworks, libraries etc. tend to break relatively often as we…

Which specific deprecations and breaking changes are you referring to?

Re: PHP 8.5

#95

Post by yupyupyups »

Is PHP still unhelpful when it comes to writing secure code?

I remember when escaping SQL input data was "the correct way" to use your mysql database. Parametrization? Nah, just use mysql_escape_string or whatever it was called.

Re: PHP 8.5

#96

Post by stefanfisk »

holoduke wrote: post #34

Why is it that all these languages like PHP, but also typescript are becoming like impossible puzzles to read. I find these generics, types and other language features very often causing complex software architecture. I see so many collegues these days struggling in understanding codebases. You almost need a PHD brain to be a frontend web developer.

Which parts of PHP have become harder to read?

Re: PHP 8.5

#97

Post by philipwhiuk »

dotancohen wrote: post #10
f311a wrote: post #7

PHP becomes a complex language with each update. For what reason? Its application is still limited to the web, mostly.

I downvoted you before reading the fine article. I'm back to correct that. The new array_first() and array_last() functions are nice, everything else is either reimplantation of existing features or "features"which will make maintainability more difficult. The pipe operator is one such example. I don't need it - these nested methods are not really an issue in any codebase I've seen. The new syntax only works for unar…

I'm sort of on the opposite side. I'm unconvinced by extra functions for arrays in the global namespace and I'm happier about syntactic improvements and debugging improvements.

Re: PHP 8.5

#98

Post by woodrowbarlow »

darkamaul wrote: post #26

PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow. I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for…

but would you even be considering re-entry if it hadn't improved dramatically?

Re: PHP 8.5

#99

Post by khannn »

nusl wrote: post #9
calpaterson wrote: post #5

A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it. My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack ( https://www.bookstackapp.com/ ), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great. But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on we…

PHP is a very pleasant and straight-forward language to work with. I enjoyed my time working with it, though I did also see quite a lot of very poor code. I think the danger with PHP is more its ability to easily cause *very bad things*. This would partially be poor training (my University literally taught PHP with SQL-injectable examples), and I think the language itself making it very easy, such that less-experienc…

I miss doing drive-by SQL injection attacks against my classmate's string concatenations with bonus no input validation queries

Re: PHP 8.5

#100

Post by Octoth0rpe »

yupyupyups wrote: post #95

Is PHP still unhelpful when it comes to writing secure code? I remember when escaping SQL input data was "the correct way" to use your mysql database. Parametrization? Nah, just use mysql_escape_string or whatever it was called.

php has kept around a lot of functionality that can be misused, but PDO has had parameterization since forever and is the go to method if you want to connect to a database. Beyond that though, most PHP projects at this point are likely using a query builder/orm like eloquent.

So I guess it depends on what you mean by unhelpful. PHP as a language makes it pretty easy to do bad stuff. PHP as a community makes it easy to Do The Right Thing.

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