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PHP's Oddities

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Re: PHP's Oddities

#111

Post by chuckadams »

dalemhurley wrote: post #83
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All PHP needs is python's flexible and convenient manipulation of lists/dicts/objects. Plus dropping the end semi colon and it would riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip the fabric of spacetime.

The semi colon allows you to have lots of flexibility in how you present your code, that is if you still read code, I seem to be an oddity now.

I'd really like it if PHP switched to Perl's grammar rule where semicolon is a statement separator rather than a terminator. It already does this in a fashion within tags in that statements in those don't have to end with a semicolon. I think it just blindly inserts a semicolon, but that does work -- if PHP did that whenever it saw a `}` token, it should have the same effect.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#112

Post by chuckadams »

susam wrote: post #46
chamomeal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People absolutely have VERY strong opinions and voice them constantly. True of every language but especially php. Almost feel like it’s more acceptable to rant about php than to praise it

I attended a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf at a FOSS conference in 2006. It has been a long time, so I remember only a few things from the talk, but one thing I remember him talking about is how people love to complain about PHP, often on forums that are themselves written in PHP.

    #include
Rasmus also admits that he didn't really know what he was doing when he created PHP, and that it's a bit surprising that PHP has stayed as compatible as it has. I kind of respect him more for that than I once used to.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#113

Post by chuckadams »

krapp wrote: post #66
Pay08 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought that the core idea of PHP, the intermixing of code and HTML is an incredibly elegant solution to a very difficult problem. But at the same time, the language itself does suck (although I won't discount the improvements it has made). I would really love for there to be an entirely reimagined PHP from the ground up, and to hell with backwards compatibility or availability.

There was. It was called Hack[0]. Among other things it had XHP built in so you could write HTML natively (as opposed to concatenating strings) and define your own templates easily[0]. It even handled escaping. It really improved on a ton of PHP's flaws. Unfortunately newer versions of PHP killed it and it's dead now, and even more unfortunately while PHP absorbed a lot of features from Hack, native XML was not one o…

XHP was a modified PHP before Hack came about, but only Hack supports it now. XHP did have a longer reach though: JSX is its direct descendant.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#114

Post by Yokohiii »

chuckadams wrote: post #19

> This lax behaviour for property definitions makes writing code around them harder. Especially when you take into account that any object can have properties dynamically added to them: Doing so now raises a deprecation warning, unless you add #[AllowDynamicProperties], and PHP 9 will convert it to an error. I'm told this will simplify internals and unlock optimizations. Arrays are still fairly awful, but generics ma…

Not sure why a language that barely has a type system needs generics.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#115

Post by customguy »

Pay08 wrote: post #64
customguy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People seem to shy away from criticism. What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from? PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better . Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.

I've always thought that the core idea of PHP, the intermixing of code and HTML is an incredibly elegant solution to a very difficult problem. But at the same time, the language itself does suck (although I won't discount the improvements it has made). I would really love for there to be an entirely reimagined PHP from the ground up, and to hell with backwards compatibility or availability.

> I would really love for there to be an entirely reimagined PHP from the ground up, and to hell with backwards compatibility or availability.

I'm halfway onboard :) That is, personally I do like that PHP is kinda "boring", it's just a programming language that mostly looks like other curly brace languages that can basically do anything I ever need to do with strings out of the box. And I like that PHP, while also adopting more advanced programming concepts, stays nice with all the simple stuff. I like the stewardship, you might say, although I don't pay any attention to it. New PHP versions always either have things I don't understand, don't care about, or really like. The performance goes steadily into the correct direction, too.

I'm sure people who know more about programming and the version history will disagree about something, but for my "low-tech" usage, it's actually one of the few happy places of computing. Not happy as in exciting, more like working in a modeset garden, without stuff blowing up constantly, and salesmen posing as flowers.

But I still would love to see and try out "takes" on that, or on what other people like about it. At least to start with, I guess it would just need to be be somewhat painless to use with with Apache, NGINX, or come with a webserver built-in. Then people can use that locally and on servers they fully control, and if it's really good, and really good with resources, basically a painless additional thing to add, web hosts might adopt it etc.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#116

Post by develatio »

McGlockenshire wrote: post #82
develatio wrote: post #59

I feel like somebody needs to be reminded of “PHP: a fractal of bad design” :D https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

That article is approaching 15 years old and no longer reflects reality.

i think a very big chunk of it is still valid, despite being 15y old

Re: PHP's Oddities

#118

Post by pdpi »

flossly wrote: post #97
mfonda wrote: post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

Have you tried Kotlin? It's a less clunky Java. The syntax is IMHO Ruby-level charming (for an OO-first lang), but with types that are quite a bit stronger than Java. Java interop is quite smooth.

The comparison with Ruby is spot on.

I always thought that DSLs were the one thing Ruby did better than the competition, but Kotlin's combination of receiver lambdas plus syntactic sugar for calling higher-order functions make it an even better language to write DSLs in.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#119

Post by krapp »

somat wrote: post #109
mfonda wrote: post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

Maps should be a first class type in every language. I have this thing I want to do in C. Now my C is very weak so my plan was to do a prototype in python, keeping in mind the C ecosystem then sit down with my old copy of "The C Programming Language" and struggle through it. Doing it with no dicts was rough. I am normally the sort to avoid adding any libraries I don't have to but if anyone has any hints to simple has…

My suggestions, none of which are particularly simple but it's C, you get what you get with a language that doesn't even know what strings and arrays are:

0) use Lua with LuaJIT. It has very good C interop and native hashmaps. Downside - Lua has its own rough edges and LuaJIT is frozen at Lua 5.1 with some extensions for 5,2

1) SDL3 has a hashmap implementation with its properties API, and a general purpose hashmap that they're probably going to make public at some point maybe? Downside - overkill if you don't actually want to use the rest of the library.

2) https://github.com/tidwall/hashmap.c this seems to work fine and is the simplest hashmap implementation for C that I've seen. Downside - you still have to write a lot of boilerplate.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#120

Post by krapp »

chuckadams wrote: post #113
krapp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was. It was called Hack[0]. Among other things it had XHP built in so you could write HTML natively (as opposed to concatenating strings) and define your own templates easily[0]. It even handled escaping. It really improved on a ton of PHP's flaws. Unfortunately newer versions of PHP killed it and it's dead now, and even more unfortunately while PHP absorbed a lot of features from Hack, native XML was not one o…

XHP was a modified PHP before Hack came about, but only Hack supports it now. XHP did have a longer reach though: JSX is its direct descendant.

Making it an extension rather than default was a mistake on PHP's part. 99% of PHP is being run on shared servers and most people cant recompile it, and most of the rest just won't.

Having a language whose entire purpose is to be a templating language for HTML have no concept of what HTML is, is just ridiculous. You have to use a templating framework that rolls its own ad-hoc DSL and parser to manage context just to make PHP do what it should be able to do safely and sanely out of the box.

It doesn't matter now, since "web dev" is whatever JS vibe-coded nonsense Claude shits out and no one cares anymore, but ye gods it could have been so much better.

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