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25 Years of PHP

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Re: 25 Years of PHP

#131

Post by johannes1234321 »

danaris wrote: post #102
Karunamon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Function names are rather inconsistent. get: gettype get_class str: str_ireplace str_pad str_repeat str_replace str_shuffle str_split str_word_count strcasecmp strchr strcmp strcoll strcspn encode: base64_encode quoted_printable_encode session_encode rawurlencode urlencode gzencode php: php_uname php_sapi_name php_logo_guid phpinfo phpcredits phpversion htmlentites: htmlentities html_entity_decode to: stream_copy_to_…

I have heard—and I do not recall the source for this, so it may be incorrect—that when PHP was originally being written, the hashing algorithm for function calls used the length of the function name as its primary key. Thus, making each function name a slightly different length made the code run faster. Of course it would've been nice if, at any time in the past 20 years, they'd gone back and standardized those funct…

That reasoning is true to a third.

Length as hash was indeed a thing in PHP/FI 2.

Second third to the reason is that PHP often takes names from underlying C libraries. strlen is strlen since that's the C name etc.

Third third reasoning is that early PHPade it easy to contribute. You had a need and a patch - a few minute Slater it is in. Nowadays there is more of a debate and vote before things are added (in my personal opinion too much emphasize on voting, but, well that's how things go, some day the process will be relaxed again ... and strengthend ... and relaxed)

Cleaning this up isn't trivial. There eis sooooo much code written already. There are sooo many tutorials, books, articles, magazines, videos and muscle memory making a change hard, even ignoring that for many things there is no single truth about what is best.

From time to time some modules might see replacements with more streamlined APIs (i.e. Maybe someday one figures out what a good and practical Unicode aware string library might be, which might replace the classic string mess) but those are multi year things.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#133

Post by SergeAx »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #118
elric wrote: post #32

I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it. Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd gr…

> It has a very rich standard library Yet I still have to define startsWith() and endsWith() any time I touch PHP code... (More importantly, PHP is the one language I can never write from memory without referencing the manual for each and every function call because of how inconsistent it is. Eg Sometimes $haystack is the first parameter and sometimes it is $needle.)

There was an RFC for that, but it was voted out: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/2049

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#134

Post by donatj »

jonny383 wrote: post #6

PHP is damn fast now, no joke. And with all of the modern features it's actually not so bad to work in. I'm becoming increasingly puzzled every time I see PHP hate now, especially when I read tired comments like "just use rails". Laravel is arguably as good or even better than rails at this point, and PHP 7+ is definitely light years faster and lighter. One thing that still sucks is package management / composer.

This is honestly the first I’ve ever heard anyone complain about composer. Having experienced a number of other package managers, composer is by far my favorite. Like have you spent any time with npm? Composer is light years ahead in reliability and expectations matching reality.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#135

Post by nkozyra »

simias wrote: post #73
elric wrote: post #32

I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it. Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd gr…

Every time there's a story about PHP there's a comment like yours, and then in reply there's a comment like mine: Yes it's perfectly fine to use PHP if it's a productive environment for you. Of course it's possible to write good software with it. Of course a skilled developer will manage to do great things with sub-standard tools. Many extremely popular websites were and even still are powered by PHP, that's undeniab…

> This revisionist stance that there was never anything really wrong with PHP

This strikes me as a strawman. PHP spent years being a generally loathed language for reasons that at this point aren't really worth reiterating.

But, in an analog to Javascript, it has made progress, grown up and become a better language. One of the best? Like Javascript, no. But serviceable at worst.

I stopped earnest work in PHP ~ 5.7. I dabbled with HHVM, but eventually moved most backend/server code to Go and moved on with my life. But PHP 7+ has been a big step up, at least from my current vantage point.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#136

Post by nkozyra »

ragnese wrote: post #123
castis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is claiming that PHP is and/or was without fault. The sentiment is that we built things that worked despite them.

That's not being fair. There are many comments on HN of people saying exactly that PHP just isn't bad. The grandparent reply even says: >My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax.

The parent comment claimed that PHP's former sins were being absolved. The quote you are referencing is about the current state of PHP.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#137

Post by Karunamon »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #131
danaris wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard—and I do not recall the source for this, so it may be incorrect—that when PHP was originally being written, the hashing algorithm for function calls used the length of the function name as its primary key. Thus, making each function name a slightly different length made the code run faster. Of course it would've been nice if, at any time in the past 20 years, they'd gone back and standardized those funct…

That reasoning is true to a third. Length as hash was indeed a thing in PHP/FI 2. Second third to the reason is that PHP often takes names from underlying C libraries. strlen is strlen since that's the C name etc. Third third reasoning is that early PHPade it easy to contribute. You had a need and a patch - a few minute Slater it is in. Nowadays there is more of a debate and vote before things are added (in my person…

A good place to start would seem to be creating naive aliases to these functions to at least fix the consistency problem. There's a possibility of breaking some code out there if someone made their own, say, "str_cmp", but we're used to breaking changes between major revs, and these could be fixed with a grep -l | xargs sed.

After that's done, we can talk about deprecation warnings, and then finally outright removal.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#138

Post by nobleach »

ragnese wrote: post #114
elric wrote: post #32

I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it. Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd gr…

While I agree that PHP does have pros as well as cons, I find it disconcerting that I've read MANY assertions here on HN, that PHP detractors just haven't used it very much or are mostly complaining about things like bad standard library function names. I've used PHP in earnest. It and JavaScript are tied for worst programming languages I've used. JavaScript gets more of a "pass" from me because I'm just not a dynami…

Just like I tell people that buy cordless drills at Harbor Freight, "sometimes it IS the tool". Does that mean you can't build fast, meaningful, cool things with it? Of course you can. But, the deeper you get, the more problems you'll have to solve with weird esoteric knowledge. I'll agree with all of your points on horribly inconsistent and broken language features.

I get that people that have grown up with the language, or folks who have used it full time for years, don't see these blemishes as that big of a deal. But to newcomers, or folks from other languages, it's an affront. I hate to pile on an old, worn out issue but, as a language designer/implementer, the moment you start working on `mysql_real_escape_string()`, a huge warning bell should have gone off! I'm fine if people want to question my competence in writing code. It happens all the time on HN. I've been at it for 20 years... so some rando telling me that I don't know what I'm doing is pretty common. What we find in PHP though is quite a bit of tribal/tacit knowledge. And it's wrong to blame the user.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#139

Post by mekster »

doiwin wrote: post #52
elric wrote: post #32

I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it. Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd gr…

some of the function names make me want to stab people What would be an example? My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax What do you mean? Afaik there is no "annotation syntax" in PHP. Could it be that you confuse what certain frameworks and IDEs do with PHP, the language?

Stab?

So, all your work must be completely perfect and makes everyone happy?

It's easy to criticize but I don't get how people become so offensive with the wording.

Re: 25 Years of PHP

#140

Post by JAlexoid »

ragnese wrote: post #114
elric wrote: post #32

I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it. Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd gr…

While I agree that PHP does have pros as well as cons, I find it disconcerting that I've read MANY assertions here on HN, that PHP detractors just haven't used it very much or are mostly complaining about things like bad standard library function names. I've used PHP in earnest. It and JavaScript are tied for worst programming languages I've used. JavaScript gets more of a "pass" from me because I'm just not a dynami…

I've built a lot of servers... and PHP support isn't "out of the box". It's just such a low cost of investment, that admins install it without much of a fuss... Until you start asking for additional support.
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