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PHP's Oddities

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Re: PHP's Oddities

#131

Post by thayne »

esskay wrote: post #80
thayne wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is inaccurate about it? Maybe it is out of date now, but when I first read it about a decade ago, when I did a fair amount of PHP development, I had personally encountered most of the issues mentioned in there. I've heard that PHP has improved a lot since then, but I don't see how you could really fix all the inconsistencies, global state, and "oddities" without a lot of breaking changes and really making it int…

> What is inaccurate about it? It's been debunked so many times over the years, I'm afraid I don't have the energy or desire to do it again when it's really not needed if you're far out of the php ecosystem that it really won't make a difference. Suffice to say the PHP it is talking about is nothing at all like modern PHP.

Sure PHP has improved since that was written, but I'm pretty sure it was accurate when it was written. And I suspect that it was probably a contributing factor in some of PHP's improvements since then.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#132

Post by artyom »

nullbio wrote: post #117

The hate PHP gets is from people with 15 year old ideas of what PHP is. It's just bandwagon effect at this point.

I agree, as I was one of them. Rightfully so, because PHP 20 years ago was the prime example of a complete disaster. Not just occasionally, there were long years of incompatibility, missing implementations, incoherent errors, security issues, fragmentation, etc.

Paid my share of dealing with those problems with PHP 5 and 6 (after coming from PHP 4). I think it became a more sane ecosystem around very late 7.x to 8.

I won't touch PHP ever again, but I'm glad (no irony) that they finally were able to pull it off. There were some good ideas there, then they quickly became victims of their own success.

Nowadays, there's places (Amazon) where PHP is just forbidden at a company-wide level (not joking) because of their early, long-standing reputation of being a mess. Or places where they just gave up and re-implemented their own PHP (Meta). I don't see that changing any time soon.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#133

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

luke5441 wrote: post #103
spiderfarmer wrote: post #8

I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.

I think the biggest problem is that the main way to use it is as a HTTP response handler, whereas other languages are more general purpose. So when a developer wants to develop themselves outside of a HTTP response handler, they need to switch languages. Of couse it can be argued that PHP can be used outside this one way as well, but even e.g. https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html is using golang.

I've thrown together quick and dirty CLI scripts with PHP, just because it's the language I know best. It works fine.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#135

Post by hluska »

comex wrote: post #127
mh- wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, in 2006 it was still considered poor form to reply with a low-effort meme phrase instead of meaningfully criticizing his position with your own.

Depends entirely on the forum. I remember it being somewhat common for people to make forum posts consisting entirely of a joke image. However, they weren’t called memes at the time as the word had yet to be popularized.

It was not correct to interrupt a talk with a meme and it never has been.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#136

Post by user3939382 »

nasretdinov wrote: post #5

if("0") {} being equivalent to if(false) {} still gives me nightmares even though I've stopped using PHP for at least 6 years now :)

In what context are you doing if("0")? People always have these obscure type comparison complaints, not just for PHP, and all I can think is why would you write that?

Re: PHP's Oddities

#137

Post by krapp »

chuckadams wrote: post #125
krapp wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was never any kind of official extension, it was an outright fork of PHP (it changed the grammar) and FB never really attempted to push it to core, or really engage with PHP's core dev process in any way. PHP came about in the era of server-side includes, and expecting it to have grokked the DOM structure out of the box is just hindsight. Anyway, I don't even think about server-side rendering anymore, and for the…

> PHP came about in the era of server-side includes, and expecting it to have grokked the DOM structure out of the box is just hindsight.

Obviously not from the beginning. But by the time template frameworks like Twig came around it should have been possible. If it can be done at runtime it's possible to build into the language proper. And I'm specifically talking about the time when PHP 7 started taking other features from Hack.

I'm not grinding an axe here, i'm just stating an opinion.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#138

Post by guskel »

PHP 8.3.6:

$ php -r 'var_dump("01234" == "1234");' bool(true)

$ php -r 'var_dump("09223372036854775808" == "9223372036854775808");' bool(false)

Re: PHP's Oddities

#139

Post by FDETalkDotCom »

PHP is bananas kinds of awesome.

Yesterday, Cursor coughed up https://fdedictionary.com for me in PHP. You know what, it is like a dozen files and works awesome, no daemon needed, basically just a web server, some PHP files, and one SQLite file.

Today, Claude Code, the major hotness, made changes to a (different) toy app with less complexity, in node.js and you know what, it has ~49,000 files. And uses a 3rd party SaaS to host the db, and another 3rd party SaaS to do auth, and yet another 3rd party SaaS to import a repo and do deployments and hosting.

Simplicity has a place for some things. I love PHP+SQLite for tiny apps, and LLMs/agents are awesome at it.

I forgot, ChatGPT one-shotted the PHP app and Cursor put the finishing touches on. What a world. Long live PHP, is the point. Arrays and all.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#140

Post by egeozcan »

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…

> If you really do need the first element, you can use array_first

That probably needs an array_second too, doesn't it? Maybe array_second_from_last as well?

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