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High Quality PHP

acquia.com

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Re: High Quality PHP

#31

Post by ThomPete »

shekmalhen wrote: post #30
ThomPete wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wanna know why PHP is so popular and why many people chooses it? Because it's so easy to get started using. Compare that to almost any other language out there that is a nightmare to set up. At the end of the day the code if it works it works and PHP just simply works. Not for everything but for most things.

The same thing could have been said about visual basic... one of the worse language ever made.

Yup!

Yet it helped millions achieve their goals. :)

Re: High Quality PHP

#32

Post by spellboots »

ThomPete wrote: post #28
evilduck wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument makes no sense. You're conflating people and behavior with tools. Bad tools make it easier to do a bad job in any field of work. Novices with good tools will still do a bad job. This is a weak justification for promoting bad tools.

Bad tools? In what alternative universe is PHP a bad tool? It is one of the easiest to get started with, most documented, best supported and flexible tools out there for 90% of the things you see on the internet today.

Obligatory http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

I spent many years doing PHP. I am very glad that those years are behind me. Even if you allow for it being easy to setup - which is debatable - setup only happens once and is not very hard in any language. If you find it hard to install a programming language by following instructions, you are an amateur pretty much by definition.

Re: High Quality PHP

#33

Post by beberlei »

Author here. I wrote this article as a guestblogger for Acquia, which is the company behind Drupal. I don't work at Acquia.

The article obviously uses Drupal as an example, PHPBB and Wordpress as comparison because they are all in the off-the-shelf, customizable category of PHP applications.

Both Drupal and phpBB (contrast to Wordpress) have massively modernized their code bases in the last years and improved the quality of their code. Coming from their original level, this is obviously a huge undertaking and still far away from being "high quality code" as an absolute measure. However their efforts in this space are remarkable.

Given that they have so huge installed code-basis that they have to take backwards compatibility seriously (which is also something that contributes to quality of software), explaining why it takes so long to improve the quality of truly old legacy software.

Compare this with many companies that use PHP, that still don't know what automated testing and quality assurance is. The article tries to highlight how PHP open source software use tools for quality assurance, what tools exist and that you should use them in your PHP projects.

Re: High Quality PHP

#34

Post by sixthloginorso »

ThomPete wrote: post #28
evilduck wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument makes no sense. You're conflating people and behavior with tools. Bad tools make it easier to do a bad job in any field of work. Novices with good tools will still do a bad job. This is a weak justification for promoting bad tools.

Bad tools? In what alternative universe is PHP a bad tool? It is one of the easiest to get started with, most documented, best supported and flexible tools out there for 90% of the things you see on the internet today.

In a Universe where consistency, soundness, orthogonal API design, modularity and evidence that the developers gave some thought to their language is expected. I would like to believe that this is such a Universe.

I mean, many of the endless list of functions imported into the default namespace were named so that their hashing distribution worked well with strlen for a hash. How much work went into working around the fact that just about the worst hashing function that you can come up with in three seconds was used?

And we can enumerate such blunders all day here. There are many better languages with good tooling, and guess what, they're free. I wouldn't use PHP if I can avoid it, and there's ample chance to avoid it nowadays.

Re: High Quality PHP

#35

Post by beberlei »

nkuttler wrote: post #2

I'm speechless that "phpBB, Drupal, Wordpress" are supposed to be the "great" examples of "high quality PHP".

I mention Wordpress only as great example of "getting this done" approach of PHP. Never did i mention it as example of "high quality PHP code".

phpBB and Drupal have their problems, but they both improved their code-base alot, moving from legacy PHP software to software that is much more maintainable. The road to "high quality software" is long, but throwing software out of the window instead of slowly improving it is not the right solution either.

Both projects have high numbers of unit-tests and can guarantee backwards compatibility and regression free releases in a much better way than most of the software out there in any company, written in any language.

Re: High Quality PHP

#37

Post by ThomPete »

spellboots wrote: post #32
ThomPete wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad tools? In what alternative universe is PHP a bad tool? It is one of the easiest to get started with, most documented, best supported and flexible tools out there for 90% of the things you see on the internet today.

Obligatory http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... I spent many years doing PHP. I am very glad that those years are behind me. Even if you allow for it being easy to setup - which is debatable - setup only happens once and is not very hard in any language. If you find it hard to install a programming language by following instructions, you are an amateur pretty much by definition.

And how do you think most people get started? As pros?

Again php is great for 90% of the things that is done on the internet today and its popular exactly because it's not claiming to be more than it is and easy to get started with.

No other language not even python especially not ruby does that as well. And then we haven't even talked about how easy it is to use php with javasrcipt, html and css.

Re: High Quality PHP

#38

Post by mekoka »

ThomPete wrote: post #29
UK-AL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. But why make it worse by choosing a bad language. Surely you have good practice and a language that makes it easier.

You wanna know why PHP is so popular and why many people chooses it? Because it's so easy to get started using. Compare that to almost any other language out there that is a nightmare to set up. At the end of the day the code if it works it works and PHP just simply works. Not for everything but for most things.

Yes PHP is deceptive in that it saves you about 2 hours of your life right at the setup, compared to other languages. You end up paying them in spades over the next 5 years you'll be using it. I should know.

Re: High Quality PHP

#39

Post by usamec »

ThomPete wrote: post #29
UK-AL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. But why make it worse by choosing a bad language. Surely you have good practice and a language that makes it easier.

You wanna know why PHP is so popular and why many people chooses it? Because it's so easy to get started using. Compare that to almost any other language out there that is a nightmare to set up. At the end of the day the code if it works it works and PHP just simply works. Not for everything but for most things.

I think that setting up apache+php is much harder than copy&pasting few basic lines of flask code a running simple python program.

Re: High Quality PHP

#40

Post by ThomPete »

sixthloginorso wrote: post #34
ThomPete wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad tools? In what alternative universe is PHP a bad tool? It is one of the easiest to get started with, most documented, best supported and flexible tools out there for 90% of the things you see on the internet today.

In a Universe where consistency, soundness, orthogonal API design, modularity and evidence that the developers gave some thought to their language is expected. I would like to believe that this is such a Universe. I mean, many of the endless list of functions imported into the default namespace were named so that their hashing distribution worked well with strlen for a hash. How much work went into working around the…

You are in the wrong universe mate.

And you are missing the point. It's not just about the language it's about all the other things around the language.

How easy it is to find a webhotel and get started, how easy it integrates with HTML, JavaScript, CSS.

Of course it's ugly, but who besides a bunch of snobs and people who actually can't use it really cares? Who should care?

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