PHP the Wrong Way • Hacker News Board

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#121

Post by pavel_lishin » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 2:33 PM UTC

romaniv wrote: post #118

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

> The problem is, if I inherit an application created with a well-known framework, I'll have a much easier time figuring out what is what, and looking for answers when something goes awry. Unless they spend most of their code fighting the framework to accomplish their actual task. Which happens rather often. Not to mention that learning a new framework is not fundamentally different from learning some person's approa…

> Not to mention that learning a new framework is not fundamentally different from learning some person's approach to doing things.

I don't think this is true.

If you're learning a framework, you have the entire community - which has probably written blog posts, asked and answered StackOverflow questions, and likely has some members who can answer your question at odd hours.

If you're learning one person's approach, you have exactly one person you can ask about it: Greg. Who might quit, or go on paternity leave, or get hit by a bus. If you're lucky, you might also have some coworkers who understand parts of that system.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#122

Post by jrochkind1 » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 2:36 PM UTC

omginternets wrote: post #62

Is it me or is the author confused about the distinction between a library and a framework? To me, a framework implies inversion of control: you don't call the framework's code; the framework's code calls your code. Granted, he skirts the issue with phrases like "A framework is a system that helps you build software, but at the same time it forces you to work within the limitations and restrictions of the framework i…

> Is it me or is the author confused about the distinction between a library and a framework?

I don't think so. I agree with your distinction between a library and framework. I think he is talking about frameworks like he says, and his criticisms are indeed applicable to frameworks.

I think he accurately identifies some of the pitfalls of framework use, but there are pitfalls of non-framework use too, some identified in this thread, which can be just as bad or worse. With a good framework in skilled hands, I'd rather have the framework. Depending on what I'm doing.

For some things I might might use Sinatra for in ruby, I might just use straight PHP. Maybe. For things I'd use Rails for in ruby -- I'd use a framework in PHP too.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#123

Post by V-2 » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 2:37 PM UTC

MustardTiger wrote: post #112

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

I wonder why this mentality only exists with web devs. Everywhere else, someone writing software is considered normal, not some scary problem. Nobody sees any other kind of application written by a previous programmer and cries "oh no! I am entirely at the mercy of this previous programmer! If only they had used one of the dozen competing frameworks this tragedy could have been avoided.". It is just normal. Perhaps t…

"I wonder why this mentality only exists with web devs [...] Nobody sees any other kind of application [...]"

Your premise - on which you based a slightly convoluted ad hominem, implying lack of professional experience on my part - is false to start with. While I did have some PHP experience, I'm not really a web dev. I'm a mobile (Android) and desktop (Windows) developer. Having said that, with web applications you typically have more moving parts and layers to integrate than in case of a client app.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#124

Post by nix0n » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 2:37 PM UTC

MustardTiger wrote: post #112

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

I wonder why this mentality only exists with web devs. Everywhere else, someone writing software is considered normal, not some scary problem. Nobody sees any other kind of application written by a previous programmer and cries "oh no! I am entirely at the mercy of this previous programmer! If only they had used one of the dozen competing frameworks this tragedy could have been avoided.". It is just normal. Perhaps t…

I think some of it has to do with the languages involved. I find the type systems of C/C++/Java to be helpful in figuring out what a piece of code does, as compared to the type systems of Python/PHP/Ruby where it's more difficult to tell what a variable contains. Frameworks help solve this problem because you can infer what type of data you've got by looking at what method it's coming from and where it's being used.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#125

Post by gedrap » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 2:38 PM UTC

willishq wrote: post #102

hazbo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a fair point. I've seen this happen before and after a while, projects that have essentially turned into a poor framework, plus the application, can become somewhat of a pain to maintain. PHP has come a long way in the past few years and the amount of open source packages has become huge, especially since the adoption of composer. I think with that in mind, it is now easier to build and maintain PHP applicat…

I know what you mean, I once worked on a project which similar to what you describe, the problem in these instances is when the people involved in the creation of the project are no longer involved in the maintenance of the project so the project veers away from the implemented standards and becomes a smorgasbord of badly-integrated composer packages.

That's one of advantages of frameworks - applications using them are somewhat standardized. They have similar structure, you instantly know what's the typical way to save or fetch a database record, etc. Sometimes you can do a bit better by gluing libraries, etc together, sure. But it's rarely worth the trade off.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#126

Post by MrPatan » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 2:51 PM UTC

romaniv wrote: post #118

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

> The problem is, if I inherit an application created with a well-known framework, I'll have a much easier time figuring out what is what, and looking for answers when something goes awry. Unless they spend most of their code fighting the framework to accomplish their actual task. Which happens rather often. Not to mention that learning a new framework is not fundamentally different from learning some person's approa…

> Unless they spend most of their code fighting the framework to accomplish their actual task. Which happens rather often.

You can't make things foolproof. Fools are very clever.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#127

Post by squeaky-clean » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

MustardTiger wrote: post #112

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

I wonder why this mentality only exists with web devs. Everywhere else, someone writing software is considered normal, not some scary problem. Nobody sees any other kind of application written by a previous programmer and cries "oh no! I am entirely at the mercy of this previous programmer! If only they had used one of the dozen competing frameworks this tragedy could have been avoided.". It is just normal. Perhaps t…

Because 99% of web dev code is the same stuff and 99% of the time it doesn't need to be rewritten. You don't need your own implementation of URL rules, user authentication and roles, testing suites, database driver or ORM, request parsing, csrf protection, session handling....

I can buy a book on Django/Flask/Symfony/Spring/Express. I can't buy a book about your homebrew 30k LOC "non-framework" which does all the same things plus an additional customized CRUD layer.

> Nobody sees any other kind of application written by a previous programmer and cries "oh no! I am entirely at the mercy of this previous programmer! If only they had used one of the dozen competing frameworks this tragedy could have been avoided."

If a large majority of the code you've been given to maintain could instead be handled by well known, well documented project with thousands of eyes fixing bugs and adding features, you would probably say the same thing.

Imagine inheriting a java codebase of a simple POS system with a UI. Except instead of using Swing or AWT or I don't know what else, the entire UI is custom written in OpenGL. And instead of using any of the standard sorting or ArrayList implementation, they write their own, which are similar, but not identical (and often have 0 tests).

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#128

Post by Glyptodon » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

MustardTiger wrote: post #112

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

I wonder why this mentality only exists with web devs. Everywhere else, someone writing software is considered normal, not some scary problem. Nobody sees any other kind of application written by a previous programmer and cries "oh no! I am entirely at the mercy of this previous programmer! If only they had used one of the dozen competing frameworks this tragedy could have been avoided.". It is just normal. Perhaps t…

I think you're right that the propensity of non-technical organizations to try and hire unqualified people at below market rates leads to a particular problem in web development.

But I think people programming other types of software have structure that comes from elsewhere. For example, if you write plain Android or iOS apps, in may ways there's a kind of standard app architecture that's just used and taken for granted. Sure, it can be muddled, but only so much for the most part. And the same is largely true for desktop applications, too, when they're built with IDEs that impose structure or even things like Unity.

The thing that's extra weird about this is that most web apps have to reinvent the wheel in ways that desktop software doesn't.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#129

Post by romaniv » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #121

romaniv wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is, if I inherit an application created with a well-known framework, I'll have a much easier time figuring out what is what, and looking for answers when something goes awry. Unless they spend most of their code fighting the framework to accomplish their actual task. Which happens rather often. Not to mention that learning a new framework is not fundamentally different from learning some person's approa…

> Not to mention that learning a new framework is not fundamentally different from learning some person's approach to doing things. I don't think this is true. If you're learning a framework, you have the entire community - which has probably written blog posts, asked and answered StackOverflow questions, and likely has some members who can answer your question at odd hours. If you're learning one person's approach,…

>If you're learning a framework, you have the entire community - which has probably written blog posts, asked and answered StackOverflow questions, and likely has some members who can answer your question at odd hours.

You're assuming that learning the framework will make understanding actual workload code completely effortless. In non-trivial applications this is never the case. You still have to understand... stuff like this, for example:

http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2010/04/custom-aspnet-mvc-mod...

When someone writes code from scratch the quality of the code depends on their ability. When someone uses a framework the quality of the code depends on their ability, the quality of the framework and fitness of the framework for a particular problem.

If the developer is not very experienced but sufficiently disciplined, and the framework is well-designed and fits the chosen task well, than yes, you end up with better code. If any of those conditions fail, the code is usually just as bad or worse than vanilla.

Re: PHP the Wrong Way

#130

Post by sangnoir » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 3:03 PM UTC

romaniv wrote: post #118

V-2 wrote: post #107

Why learn frameworks when you can build everything from scratch and become a true carpenter ( "building software using general purpose frameworks doesn’t make you a coder or a programmer any more than putting together a pre-built house makes you a carpenter" ). "These people [framework creators] seems to be infatuated by the though of having other people follow their “way of doing things”, becoming some kind of PHP c…

> The problem is, if I inherit an application created with a well-known framework, I'll have a much easier time figuring out what is what, and looking for answers when something goes awry. Unless they spend most of their code fighting the framework to accomplish their actual task. Which happens rather often. Not to mention that learning a new framework is not fundamentally different from learning some person's approa…

> Unless they spend most of their code fighting the framework to accomplish their actual task. Which happens rather often

I think this is just confirmation bias - you won't notice all the times you are not fighting the framework, but you do when you are.

> Not to mention that learning a new framework is not fundamentally different from learning some person's approach to doing things

Only if "some person" is real fastidious with documentation, StackOverflow answers and tutorials. You aonly have to learn Laravel[1], but catching up with Greg/Peter/Jane/Paula's framework at every new job will get old fast.

> Remember Struts, anyone? PHP Nuke? Would you rather maintain something that used either of those over something that was written in vanilla Java/PHP?

Those projects were fantastic for their time. Let me put it this way - I would rather maintain something that used those projects and not some custom solution written by a nameless developer in the same era. At least PHP Nuke had (I'm hoping) a clear migration path to PHP v4 and v5 and you won't have to do it manually.

1. Or any other framework