The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#2When was PHP good in the past? (Honest question; I don't use PHP.)
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#3When was PHP good in the past? (Honest question; I don't use PHP.)
Quite possibly never, but it was arguably the best web language in the early 2000s.
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#4When was PHP good in the past? (Honest question; I don't use PHP.)
Quite possibly never, but it was arguably the best web language in the early 2000s.
Perl fans would probably object strongly to that, but it is true that when PHP first caught on there really weren't any great choices.
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#5Time to beat this dead horse again!
PHP as a language isn't great, since it has been around the block in a volatile environment (the web) and shows lack of foresight in language design.
However, PHP is experiencing a renascence with modular components, frameworks and tools utilizing established design patterns, and an overall boost in contribution and collaboration in the open-source community, in large part thanks to Github.
PHP is not dead, and vibrant communities around Symfony and Doctrine are pushing it forward considerably.
In my opinion, large applications can and have been built primarily on PHP while leveraging other languages and tools for their strengths.
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#6Time to beat this dead horse again! PHP as a language isn't great, since it has been around the block in a volatile environment (the web) and shows lack of foresight in language design. However, PHP is experiencing a renascence with modular components, frameworks and tools utilizing established design patterns, and an overall boost in contribution and collaboration in the open-source community, in large part thanks t…
Very well put. I'm not a huge fan of php, but find this possibility of resurgence (particularly because I use the language for my day job) very interesting.
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite possibly never, but it was arguably the best web language in the early 2000s.
Perl fans would probably object strongly to that, but it is true that when PHP first caught on there really weren't any great choices.
The strong selling point of PHP for a long time was cheap hosting. Combine that with a fast learning curve and you're set.
Nowadays, it's not so clear cut price wise, but PHP took a strong advance in term of user base - look at the number of libraries, projects, and jobs (!) available in PHP, vs python or ruby.
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#8You shouldn't forget about PSR-0 / http://www.php-fig.org/
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#9Everyone probably knows this, but PHP's Smarty template engine (http://www.smarty.net) is really awesome.
I've yet to see a better one in any language - it has things like Unix-like pipe chaining of filters, user defined functions, and intelligent caching built in.
I reduced the number of lines in one codebase I worked on by 70% through use of Smarty.
Re: The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
#10While I've bashed PHP as much next guy, these are the facts:
-Take away PHP and the internet would break. The vast majority of websites are either written in PHP or have a PHP back end.
-The LAMP/LNMP stack is by far one of the most deployed web server configuration.
-PHP is extremely well documented and it's been around so long that it's easy to find solutions on the web.
PHP is the Model T of web languages: people love to laugh at it because it's old and ugly but it nearly single-handedly revolutionized the landscape. I for one applaud any efforts to revive and improve this language.