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In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

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Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#41

Post by 616c »

Joeboy wrote: post #25
mgkimsal wrote: post #3

"Jeff Atwood has stated publicly that one of his ulterior motives with the Discourse project is get people to stop using PHP and start using Ruby." This just won't ever happen. The people that wanted to drop PHP for something else (Ruby, etc) largely did so years ago. The hosting/running situation for PHP is just too basic and easy for people to get in to vs having to 'run a server' (Rails, etc). PHP is still the onl…

> PHP is still the only language that assumes HTML output by default. For me, that's not a feature, it's an oddity that I have to work around. I guess it's a feature if you're using PHP as the HTML template language it was designed to be, but I suspect that's a minority use case these days.

> For me, that's not a feature, it's an oddity that I have to work around.

Well, I would venture a guess that you should have looked up the language's name and its meaning, then the entire focus of PHP might not come as much of a surprise.

Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#42

Post by jonahx »

colinbartlett wrote: post #26
mgkimsal wrote: post #3

"Jeff Atwood has stated publicly that one of his ulterior motives with the Discourse project is get people to stop using PHP and start using Ruby." This just won't ever happen. The people that wanted to drop PHP for something else (Ruby, etc) largely did so years ago. The hosting/running situation for PHP is just too basic and easy for people to get in to vs having to 'run a server' (Rails, etc). PHP is still the onl…

I prefer rails specifically because the "hosting/running situation" for Rails is so FAR superior to that of PHP. $ git push heroku master ...done.

I don't really want to stand up for php, but this just isn't true.

"git push heroku master" comes at a steep price. PHP hosting is, in general, ubiquitous, cheap, and incredibly easy. You can get comparable pricing for ruby hosting, but you'll be doing some server setup yourself.

Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#43

Post by boomlinde »

philipp-de wrote: post #20
dasil003 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they fix it anyway? It was never really designed, it just evolved as a slow accretion of features using whatever syntax was convenient in the parser codebase over a couple of decades. The author makes a good point that people like me who ditched PHP in the mid-2000s should probably stop complaining about it since we don't really know the current state of affairs. The problem is when we have languages like R…

(can't reply to your reply so here goes) I'd argue that PHP came out of the gate with some pretty powerful properties, too. They hit a sweet spot of * Being there at the right time (none of the "good" languages in your book was around or usable for web dev at the time of PHP4 and PHP5 came out) * Being easy to learn - giving beginners quick rewards. * Being powerful enough to do quite a bit more than "simple web page…

"Being there at the right time" is pretty much the only redeeming quality it has, and it's not so much a quality of the language, is it?

"Easy to learn" is not the same as giving beginners quick rewards. Being easy to learn, in reality, would probably result in things like Wordpress not having more holes than a swiss cheese.

"Powerful enough" -- most web frameworks are. Saying that it didn't happen by accident of course depends on how you define accident. Personally I think the only thing PHP has got going for it is the timing and next point:

"Dead easy to deploy" again isn't a property of the language. Saying that "almost no language delivers this" about something that's really up to the service you're using to host your website isn't fair, in that it actually has nothing to do with the language.

I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with your closing statements, though.

Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#44

Post by davorb »

jonahx wrote: post #42
colinbartlett wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer rails specifically because the "hosting/running situation" for Rails is so FAR superior to that of PHP. $ git push heroku master ...done.

I don't really want to stand up for php, but this just isn't true. "git push heroku master" comes at a steep price. PHP hosting is, in general, ubiquitous, cheap, and incredibly easy. You can get comparable pricing for ruby hosting, but you'll be doing some server setup yourself.

> You can get comparable pricing for ruby hosting

Might I ask where?

Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#45

Post by jmcgough »

10098 wrote: post #32

New frameworks != improvement of the language. PHP was shit then and it's shit now. I earned my first money by writing things in that language and I'm very glad that I moved away from that particular technology and web development in general.

When is "then"? I'm a rubyist, but I worked with PHP for a year and was impressed with how far the language has come in the last decade. Before PHP5 (2004ish), the language wasn't really even object oriented. In the last few years, PHP has gotten garbage collection, namespacing, native JSON support and others.

I really dislike PHP as a language, but it's not fair to call it shit. The language is maturing.

Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#46

Post by jonahx »

davorb wrote: post #44
jonahx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really want to stand up for php, but this just isn't true. "git push heroku master" comes at a steep price. PHP hosting is, in general, ubiquitous, cheap, and incredibly easy. You can get comparable pricing for ruby hosting, but you'll be doing some server setup yourself.

> You can get comparable pricing for ruby hosting Might I ask where?

eg:

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing

Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#47

Post by eksith »

tux wrote: post #35

I don't see anything good about Disclosure project. All it takes is disabling javascript and nothing works :-)

It's not fair that you can't see anything good about Discourse just because of the JS requirement. That's just one handicap.

It has its good points and all of its current features can be implemented (and already has in other projects) with HTML fallback in PHP. But I feel the biggest problems Discourse is attempting to solve is sociological, not software based. Whether software can fix human nature is another topic altogether.

Full disclosure: I don't use Discourse and don't plan to any time soon. I still believe any site/forum worth it's salt should be available via wget so that rules out most web apps (I don't believe a forum should be a web app).

Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#49

Post by rbanffy »

616c wrote: post #41
Joeboy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PHP is still the only language that assumes HTML output by default. For me, that's not a feature, it's an oddity that I have to work around. I guess it's a feature if you're using PHP as the HTML template language it was designed to be, but I suspect that's a minority use case these days.

> For me, that's not a feature, it's an oddity that I have to work around. Well, I would venture a guess that you should have looked up the language's name and its meaning, then the entire focus of PHP might not come as much of a surprise.

"Personal Home Page"?

Re: In many ways PHP is just now starting to come into its own

#50

Post by orf »

DangerousPie wrote: post #15
mgkimsal wrote: post #3

"Jeff Atwood has stated publicly that one of his ulterior motives with the Discourse project is get people to stop using PHP and start using Ruby." This just won't ever happen. The people that wanted to drop PHP for something else (Ruby, etc) largely did so years ago. The hosting/running situation for PHP is just too basic and easy for people to get in to vs having to 'run a server' (Rails, etc). PHP is still the onl…

Exactly. I am still using PHP for pretty much all of my projects despite all of its shortcomings. The reason for this is just how easy it is to write simple scripts and deploy them. For most small hobby projects it is just not worth spending hours setting up the development environment required to create a Ruby/Flask/... project when you can achieve the same thing with a single PHP file. And when it comes to deploy i…

After you do it once you realize its not that hard to deploy. Nginx -> Gunicorn -> your app
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